Winter wonderland

Most of the stucco work currently in progress is nearly finished - just in time to protect the house from the snow! Backyard is now covered in a sparkling 2 feet of snow. And the city doesn't actually plow streets, at least not any around here, luckily the buses make a bit of a path...i guess we're stuck waiting for it to melt...

Updates

Showing the kitchen at near completion...has been in this state for months and probably will remain nearly finished for months to come, always too much to do! The smallest bedroom is also almost finished, and is the first room with baseboard, amazing how exciting that is to me! And the living/dining rooms are coming along, partial electric is in and some insulation is up. Hope to drywall soon.

Backyard Fence

The new fence really changes the feel to the backyard and I love it! Managed to plant a fig tree and two arborvitae this weekend.

Base kitchen cabinets

After returning from a great trip to the UK we are back to work. We've purchased and put together the remaining ikea cabinets. The doors for the upper cabinets and the handles have all been installed. We've also decided upon and purchased our tile for the countertop and backsplash. Now we need to get all the bottom cabinets aligned perfectly and figure out the plumbing for the sink so we can start tiling.

Under cabinet lights

John hard-wired (while I held in place) our lights for the kitchen cabinets. Wiring lights has become a fairly simple job for us now. We put up basic fluorescent lights - it puts out more than enough light, and we will have trim along the bottom so they will never be seen.

medicine cabinet

We finally installed our bathroom medicine cabinet. This was really a trial run for the ikea cabinets as it is also from ikea. The trickiest part is hanging the doors, partly because the screws are cheap and bend easily so you only get a few chances to make adjustments before the screws start to weaken.

The Kitchen Cabinets

Our wall cabinets are up!! I must say I am very impressed with our work today. We had to shim the cabinets quite a bit at the end (farthest from the corner) but our end cover panel fits perfectly so it's just fine. We still have one more cabinet to attach next to the corner cabinet. It's a small open shelf cabinet and we haven't decided how to best attach it to the corner as it doesn't come with the open holes the other cabinets come with. We still have to attach the doors and put in the shelves, but the hard part is done.

Master Bedroom

We've painted the master bedroom - a nice light purple. The closets are also painted and the bar is hung. We're currently working on re-doing a few spackle lines on the ceiling. It was looking great until we hooked the light back up, and at night when the light is on it casts very unfriendly shadows. Once that's fixed we'll hang the closet doors and start the trim.

Kitchen Flooring

Our kitchen almost has a new floor! We borrowed a nailer from the local tool library (a great $ saver) and have started to lay down the floor. Once we decided upon a pattern it went down fairly fast. We have a few more rows to nail in this week, then we'll be getting ready for the cabinets, sink & stove. Also notice the new paint! The black corner in a few of the photos is our new frig (take 2, live & learn!). After the 1st needed the service guy to come out twice only to leave us with hot air blowing we decided to return it and buy new. We opted to have the frig delivered to save the hassle & we were able to get it in black to match our stove. Now we are very pleased.

Master Bedroom Floor Finished!

Floors have been refinished!! Pictures were taken right after applying the poly so they are still wet. The floor came out a bit darker than we expected, even though it was a clear gloss poly, but it looks good. We cheated a bit with the wood filler and bought the cheap uncolored filler and decided not to go through the effort of staining it. It looks fine and we're happy but it would also look great if it had been a perfect match.

Kitchen

We have slowed down a bit on the house work over past month as it was burning us out. We've gotten back into the swing a bit though. We had to re-level our kitchen floor, partly because it may not have been perfectly level to begin with and there was a major leak in our water lines after they were installed. We were able to level the floor with thin sheets of plywood and a lot of large shims. We have the 1st coat of primer on the walls and the ceiling is painted. John also entirely re-wired our kitchen light (ebay purchase), and to my amazement it worked and there are no extra pieces that I know of. The master bedroom floors are coming along. We've filled in all the cracks and holes throughout and now it needs the final sanding passes then we will poly.

Master Bedroom Floors

This past weekend we spent an entire day and half preparing the master bedroom floor for sanding. This is quite a lengthly process including pulling up staples from the carpeting we removed and random nails, setting all nails below the surface, removing the old paint that is in some places at least 3 thick layers. We managed to begin sanding sunday afternoon, but the general exhaustion prevented us from finishing the 1st layer of sanding. But the floor is starting to look pretty good.

Soundproofing

John purchased soundproofing foam which we added around the bathroom and between the bedroom walls before we finished drywalling these rooms. So far the verdict is that it's a slight help. Although with only two of us in the house it isn't really a problem.

Master Bedroom Closets

A couple weeks ago I framed the master bedroom closets. Later John and I finished putting up the drywall in the master bedroom. The spackling process has begun and will be finished for this room in another day or two.

Drywall continued

This weekend we continued to put up drywall, and my family was here helping all day Saturday! We have the middle bedroom celing and about half the room dryalled.

More drywall

Last weekend John and I hung drywall on the master bedroom ceiling and part of the walls. The ceilings require a lot of prep time shimming as they are not very level.

Watch our kitchen become a room!

As you can see we have made progress in our kitchen with the drywall! We also now have electric completely wired in the master bedroom - and it's only Saturday. I've also spent a lot of time this past week patching brick along the stairwell wall (not pictured).