Memorial Day Weekend

Since the last time I've posted Joey has put a couple more coats of joint compound on the ceiling and the wall. The initial area of the wall he started on is now ready to be primed! It is finally nice and smooth and looks like a normal wall. I'll post a picture after it's been primed, but here he is finishing it up:

The ceiling still needs a coat or two, but it is getting close.

We did find another spot on the ceiling and one on the wall that also need fixed, so he put the first coat on those spots today. Here is what he did on the wall...

Step 1: Have a patch of wall that is damaged. Like so.

Step 2: Cover with fiber glass mesh tape.

Step 3: Apply joint compound. Repeat until smooth, allowing for 24 hours between coats.

Step 4, as I learned today, is to NOT stick your figure in the middle of the joint compound that your husband just finished smoothing out. Oops.

 I said the other day that Megan pulled a bunch of cabinets and drawers out and removed all the hardware. I really meant she pulled a ton off... seriously....

That is 6 drawers and around 8 or so doors. Megan is a rockstar.

One of the backs of the drawers was originally made out of a tomato carton. I think that this is awesome.

All of the drawers had liner in them. So, I pulled it out of all of them (to be replaced or painted later, or both until I make up my mind). I went ahead and primed the drawers today because Joey had time to sand most of the doors and drawers! I also primed the edges of all of the doors that were sanded today. Yay teamwork!

I also had time to get a bit more priming done on the walls in the kitchen. I started priming the trim as well. I left this board untouched for now, because Joey's height was marked on here when he was 7, 8, 9, and 10 years old. It's too cute to cover up until I've at least transferred it to paper. But, all of the other trim around this door is now primed and ready for paint!

I'll make a post soon about some of the treasures I found while going to garage sales and antique stores this weekend. I found some great stuff that will go great in the kitchen when it's finished! 

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend!

Assorted Doings

Today was a fairly random workday. Not many pictures to show, but here's what was done!

1. Joey did another layer of joint compound on the ceiling and wall.
2. Megan pulled the rest of the cabinets off and removed the hinges and handles. She also took most of the drawers out and removed the hardware on them too.
3. I did a couple more coats of Vermont Cream on all of the cabinet doors that I've been working on. 
4. I filled a few old nail holes.
5. I removed the baby gate hardware off of two door frames.

Now for a couple of pictures! This is the reason why I want to paint the ceiling in the kitchen so badly! Just a coat of white paint will brighten up that room so much!

So, without further ado, the "before" pictures of the ceiling!

The "after" pictures will be up in a few days. Each layer of the joint compound takes 24 hours to dry before the next layer. It still needs at least two more layers to fix the damage, so it'll be at least three days before I can begin painting the ceiling.

Corner Cabinet Before and After

I have my very first completed before and after project! I put the very last coat of paint on the corner cabinet today. I only had had a little bit of time to work today, but I'm glad to have finished my first project!

Before- Sea foam green, brown, and off-white

After- The beautiful Vermont Cream!

Real Paint and Beginning the Ceiling

I haven't updated in awhile, but I have been working! Not much of it has been interesting enough to take pictures of though! I don't want to put pictures up of the real paint that I'm putting on until all the coats are finished. I don't want to bore anyone with multiple pictures of basically the same thing.

This is the closest match that I could find to the white I'm using. It's called Vermont Cream and it's perfect! It's hard to see on here, but it's the best I can do for now!

And these are the other two colors we're using in the house:

For the bedroom, living room, and bathroom.

This is called Spring Hill.

For the kitchen, study, and hallway.

And this one is Yacht Harbor.

Here's a list of what has been done that does not yet have pictorial proof:

1. Coats of paint on all the cabinet doors that have been sanded. (Some cabinet doors are still unsanded and some are still attached with the hinges.)
2. Coats of paint on the corner cabinet shelf.

 And here is what has been going on in pictures!

My sweet peas are popping up! No sign of my wildflowers yet, but I'm pretty excited about the sweet peas.

The strawberries died a tragic death in a mowing related accident, but we did get some sugar baby melons and zucchinis planted today.

I forgot to take a "before" picture of the ceiling, but here is a during picture! The ceiling was not flat and we needed to redo the joint on the dry wall. Here is the mess Joey made while doing the first coat of joint compound!

And here is Joey (finally doing some work!) As you can see, the ceiling is a delightful (not) shade of gray. We have to fix this joint problem before we can paint it, but I've purchased the paint and I should be able to paint it this week after the joint compound dries and the other layers have been applied and dried!

The first coat of joint compound is up and working on drying! We'll do the next coat tomorrow!

 Here is the before picture of this wall. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it after I primed it, but use your imagination! You can't see all the damage on this wall from this picture, but Joey is working on patching all that up too!

This is right next to the stove. The same thing was happening here... the joint in the drywall was separating. I haven't primed behind the stove yet, but to the left of the stove to the door is all primed!

Right next to the light switch there was a hole in the wall. Joey patched this up too! The first coat is on, but it still needs several coats and some sanding.

This is the long awaited picture of the kitchen without the dated scalloped hanging above the sink! Yay modernization! It looks so much better in here without the scallops!

This doesn't technically have anything to do with the house, but I will be hanging it up in the house when we move in! It's a rose I made out of book pages. I'm making a wreath out of a couple hundred of these. It's going to be beautiful!












Some people have asked me if I'm really doing all of this work... the answer is yes, pretty much! I have time during the day while Joey is at work so until today I've been doing almost everything myself. My brother helped take cabinet doors down and remove some hardware and Megan helped me prime the cabinet doors, the corner cabinet, and a wall. Other than that though, it's all been me! Luckily Joey is done with school for the summer now and can help me in the evenings and on weekends again!
Thanks to everyone who has helped so far! It's been greatly appreciated!

First Color Change!

Ok, so the color change is really just primer... no paint yet, but it's still a change! Also, if you look above this post you should see a new tab called "List of Future Improvements" it lists (by room) most of the things we're going to do to make the house into our first real home!

Cabinet doors after being sanded down.

Cabinet doors with primer! This is almost what they will look like when they're done. They will be a creamy white. And we're thinking brushed nickel or silver handles.

Megan being helpful.

Megan showing off one of the walls in the kitchen before we attacked it with our paint rollers. The light in the kitchen is really dim right now, but the wall is a pale green. It's really not a bad color (minus the paint splotches)  but it's too dark with all the dark wood trim and cabinets. And I want it to be blue. So there.

How exciting. A white wall. It only has primer on it, but it's progress! The next step will be awhile. I want to paint the ceiling before I paint the walls so that I don't have to worry about drips. And, this is the only wall in the kitchen that has primer so far, so that needs to be finished first too.

These are shelves that were set into a corner of the kitchen. I love them, so we're going to paint them to match the future kitchen. They were the same pale green as the walls. These will end up being the same creamy white as the trim and cabinets so that it will help brighten that dark kitchen up!

Still not very exciting, but it does represent progress which is something that I am very excited about. And, since this has white primer on it, it's a pretty good representation of what it will look like later. It'll just have a slightly different color and be painted with better quality than you need for primer.

 This is probably the best thing that happened all day yesterday! Megan took down the horribly dated scalloped edge of the cabinets! You'll have to wait to see what it looks like now though, a cloud came by and it got to be too dark to take another picture. But, let me tell you... it looks enormously better just with that one little change!

Sanding Down the Cabinets

Ahh, cabinets. I spent some time with Goof Off, an electric sander, and cabinet doors yesterday. I worked on degreasing them and then sanding them down so that they will be ready to paint soon. I spent about 3 and a half hours on that project and got 8 small doors and 2 big doors ready to go. But, as you can see... I have a lot of work ahead of me! It got to be too hot yesterday afternoon (the high was 94, in May, for heaven's sake!) to keep going so I went ahead and wrapped up the project for today. Depending on the rain I'll be back to sanding tomorrow! And hopefully we can begin priming tomorrow as well! I'm looking forward to it!

Garden update: I haven't killed anything yet! I don't have any new pictures because it really doesn't look different yet, but everything is still alive. Which is a small miracle for me. All of the seeds I planted take awhile to germinate and sprout, so I'll let you know when I do if they come up! (Keep your fingers crossed!)

More Gardening!

Weeds! There are four large trees in the front yard, but only 2 of them have these handy little mini-gardens around them. And they were both entirely covered in weeds when I got to them. This is after I had pulled about half of the weeds (and a small tree) out. Our plan is to eventually replace the old wood planks around them with a pretty stone border and to add a border to the other two trees as well.

This is the other tree after I got all the weeds out and planted some impatiens around it. I actually took half of the impatiens out from the front of the house to plant these. But, I planted something even better in the front!
The smaller tree doesn't have the impatiens around it. But I did plant Wildflower seeds around both trees. I can't wait until those come up! I hope that the acidity of the soil doesn't kill them! (These are both Black Walnut Trees and are notorious for killing flowers.)

As I mentioned before, I pulled out half of the impatiens from in front of the front porch. I planted Day Lilies behind the remaining Impatiens!

Day Lilies! Hopefully mine will be as pretty.

 Here you can see the Day iLilies a bit better, it's hard to see the tiny Impatiens from this distance.

And yes, we plan on painting at our earliest possible convenience! The paint is old and peeling off and could use some TLC.

Hopefully this is easy enough to see! I made a little chart showing what is planted and where it is planted. If you can't read the names then here is a guide:
Purple: Azaleas
Blue: Sweet Peas
Orange: Day Lilies
Red: Impatiens
Pink: Unknown Bulb

Cabinets

I did quite a bit of work yesterday. I moved boxes out of one of the bedrooms, so now it's only about half as full as it was. That's progress.
I also spent quite awhile on the cabinets yesterday. The end goal is painting them this creamy white color that will (eventually) match all of the doors and trim in the rest of the house.

This is what the cabinet doors looked like. Boring. I should have taken an up close picture of the handles, because they are straight from the 50's. But, now they are gone forever!

Here are most of the removed cabinet doors. And now you get your first glimpse of the current linoleum in the kitchen! That is one of the first things that will go. It will be replaced with new vinyl tile that is oh so pretty!

These are some of the hinges we took off. I'm pretty sure I have carpal tunnel after taking all of those screws out! Each door had 4 screws holding it onto the cabinet and 9 to 10 screws holding the hinges and handle on.

And here are part of the cabinets sans doors, just as a reference point.

New Beginnings

Ta-Da! Our new home! We can't move in entirely until mid- July due to our existing lease, but we're excited to begin renovations until we move in! I'm not going to post pictures of the inside of the house until it's been cleared out, but here is the front!

It's a two bedroom, one bathroom house with a good sized kitchen/ dining room and living room. It also has a creepy basement that I won't spend much time in at all! I'll let my dear hubby make his man cave down there and I'll leave him be.


We've had two real work days so far! The first consisted of changing the locks and clearing a few things out. The second was much more visually appealing as we were able to begin planting flowers! The little red ones (impatiens, we think) we planted in the flower box on our porch and along the front of the porch should spread out and take over that whole area (fingers crossed!)

We planted 50 of them and they do look sparse for now, but hopefully it won't take too long to have them fill in a bit.

This is the only thing we've planted in the back yard so far. Two little strawberry plants! I can't wait for them to grow up all big and strong! For those of you in my area, Ace Hardware is having a sale on strawberry plants right now... 2 plants for $3. I may need to invest in some more...

This is not the best picture, but these are two azaleas! I should try and take a better picture, but they are a gorgeous shade of purple. They're a little weather beaten after the storms last week, but they'll be beautiful again soon!
We're going to plant other flowers around those azaleas. We don't currently have any other starter plants, but we have oodles of seeds. We have alyssum, moss roses, petunias, wildflowers, sweet peas, and one other type that I can't remember right now.

I'm excited to see how everything looks in the coming weeks!