Painting

I love to paint and I decided for Spring Break that I would paint the kitchen, the only room left in my house that i haven't painted. (though I have to redo all 3 bedrooms, ugh). Here is a before and tomorrow I will post an after :)

Update on plumbing

If you remember my plumbing post we had some troubles with our plumbing. I went out of town for 6 days with the kids and in that time, the blockage just got worse. Stu ended up calling a plumber once sewage started coming out of that pipe, sick! I didn't know that the sewage was coming out, so once I came home and helped cap the end of the pipe...


I saw the bucket, lucky for you, I didn't get a picture of the full bucket. You can thank me with money donations, lol. Anyway, I got mad that it was left for me so Stu got a submersible pump and pumped all the liquid out he could and then he took the "solids" outside. Also lucky for you, they froze so it looks just like muddy water. But we all know what it really is, lol.


I put on my "gloves" and wrapped up the bucket then took it out to the garbage can. It was garbage day the next day so I took the garbage out to the street just in case the bucket thawed, we wouldn't have to worry about spillage taking the garbage out later. I know, I'm brilliant sometimes ;).


And another shot of me wrapping up the bucket, just because.

A new profession for me?

For some reason, there is an open pipe in the crawl space under my house, it was attached to a sink the previous owners installed in the garage, but now it's just hanging out down there. I just ignored it because it was out of the way and causing no problems. Until a couple of days ago....

Now it looks like this when I do laundry....




And this was my attempt at fixing the problem...


And this is what happens when you just make the problem worse...
(that's a towel soaking up the flood in the laundry room from that pipe backing up and shooting out the drain, better than a toilet overflowing I guess ;) )


Jealous? I thought so :P

(I just tried drano to see if that's enough, stay tuned.....)

Edited to add....FAIL



I guess we get to stimulate the economy by hiring a plumber :P

I haven't been running.

I took a couple extra days off of running, I seemed to have found something else to keep me busy instead....

Gross stains that keep coming back.

A good picture showing the before and after, on the left is the floor that was just covered by carpet and on the right is the floor I refinished last year.

The floor is in pretty good shape, I will refinish it though.

Just another view.

Yeah, I also did more work on the yard too, it's raining today so I wont be taking any pictures just yet. Patience, my child, patience.

Remember my before shot?

Of my hardwood floors as I was refinishing them? No, well here is a refresher....


And here they are, all finished :).

I'm very happy with the results. I really dread doing the bedroom floors though, this was really hard work. I did most of the sanding by hand, with the little rubber block thing and it sucked. I'm thinking we'll have to get a nice big sander to do the other floors if we decided to refinish them too :).

A tip

Because I haven't taken any pictures of my newly refinished hardwood entry/hall, I decided to pacify you with a valuable tip I learned in the process.

If you get polyurethane or stain on your hands and they are sticky yet soap does not help, try the germ-X, that stuff with it's high alcohol contents, works wonders! I was desperate trying to get the sticky, icky off and decided to give it a try, works great!

Plus, it kills any germs you may have ;)

I'll try to post pics soon and maybe start talking about my kids again or even, *gasp* start running again ;).

Before and after :)

I had hoped to be farther along in some of my "surprise" projects, but such is life. I'll show you pictures anyway, because it still looks good :).

Before of the fireplace....


During...

And after...




I absolutely love the fireplace, it is my favorite part of my house by far! My dad is a tile setter and tiled this for me the weekend he and my mom came up to help us move. My mom painted the door thing for me and I love it too!

And now on to my entryway and hallway, it's still a work in progress, but I'm getting there!

Before...
And during....



I already started sanding it at this point, so the floor looks pretty beat up, but it's in great shape and will look fabulous once it's finished, if it gets finished ;).

I'm still unpacking, organizing, sorting and all of that fun stuff, hopefully some day I'll feel settled, we'll see how long that takes, lol.

A surprise!

You will have to be patient and wait for it, but we made a few changes on our list of remodels for our home. It's hard not to tackle new projects when you have great minds gathered together with no TV, lol. My parents and my sister and brother-in-law have been staying at the new place the last two nights, so we discussed future plans and most of them were met with "let's do that today" or "tomorrow we can do ...."

I will post pictures of the changes soon. I'm sure some will be surprised that we tackled the projects right now. I know I have been thinking "but we move tomorrow, should we really be doing this now?" hehe.

And thanks to everyone for the support and enthusiasm, I appreciate it very much :)

The rest of the house.

The boys room, I like the contrast of the two colors, two walls are the blue color and two are the beige color.


We let the boys put their hand prints in their closet and left the closet the rooms original blue color. I also put the date we put their hand prints in their, so we can see how they grow :).

This is my bedroom, the color is a bit more green than it looks in the pic, I really like it. It's calming to me, I will probably go with some "beach" theme in here, not overboard, but just a little something so it looks like this color was intentional and not the $5 mistint paint, hehe.

The Laundry room and 1/2 bath, I wanted something bright for this area, it's strangely close to the same color as my bedroom, lol.
And here is L's room, she wanted tons of color so we compromised and made a bouncing ball theme, the circles travel up and down the walls around the room. She loves it, as do I.
We also let L do as she wished with her closet, she also added the date she painted her room too.
A better view of the "balls"

I didn't add a picture of the full bath because it's small and really hard to take a picture of, it's a sage green in there, it will look perfect with the shower curtain I made.

A few pictures.

I just realized that I only took pictures of two rooms, doh! So I guess tomorrow when I go pick up the Rug Doctor, I'll take some more pics :).

First up is the living room with the old paint on the right-side wall and my older sister on the right (though we are currently the same age, ha) and my "little" cousin, that is 6 inches taller than me, on the left. They are painting over the dirty, icky fireplace brick. The "brown" is really a purple color, but it's ok, it's better than before.




Now you can see the room with the walls painted "Ivory" and "cloves" I love. Love. The orange color, though it does have a tiny bit of brown in it that isn't showing up in the pics, it's more "pumpkin pie" than "orange" as it looks here.

Next is the kitchen, which we did nothing to, except make a big fat mess in :)



Here is my sister cleaning up after herself, which was hard to do with all those paint supplies and snacks around.
And the last view of the kitchen, the paint really is yellow, it doesn't fade to white, not sure why it looks like it does. And I'm pretty sure I'll be removing those sunflowers, just a bit too many flowers for my tastes.

I only added the kitchen pictures because I forgot to put them up on my post with all the house pics and it's the only other room I took pictures of, lol.

Oh and I found another picture of the living room, this view is from the other end with my back against the fireplace. I'm trying to show that the front door is now "redbrick" which is actually almost the exact "orange" of the fireplace wall, lol. I apparently can only pick a few random shades of certain colors as you'll see when I post more pics later. (We were going to get a new door right away, but after sanding it and painting it, we'll probably wait a bit, it looks pretty good now).

We are officialy homeowners :)

Last friday at 3:oo p.m., we got the call that the house was officially ours :). After dancing around for a minute, my sister and I jumped in her car and took off over there to get working on the paining. We planned on painting 6 rooms in the house in two-three days, yikes. (pictures to come soon). We arrive and the homeowner is still there packing and moving, sigh. But two rooms were empty so we decided to take those two over and maybe that would put a fire under his butt and get him moving, totally worked too ;).

He did say that we didn't put the dishwasher in the contract so he planned on taking it, but the contract did have a a/c unit in it and he didn't have one, it was a family members, so if we wanted to keep the dishwasher we needed to say never mind to the a/c unit. We happily agreed since we are lucky enough to get my sisters a/c until instead, ha. I didn't feel like arguing with him, I just wanted him out of my house. He then asked if we wanted to keep the carpet or if we planned on replacing it. I said that we will replace it eventually but not now and he said "okay, I guess it can stay" um, who are you? weirdo.

We painted and painted and painted our little hearts out and it is now complete. A few minor touch ups and a little finishing then I wont have to paint for quite awhile :). We already started moving too, though we don't plan on bringing the furniture over until Saturday when we have a uHaul and some helpers.

As you can imagine, I have a very busy week ahead of me, but I'll post some pictures as soon as I can. This week also starts the kids online school, which I need to finish choosing the curriculum for and I'm still working part-time from home, so we'll see how often I get on here :).

Shameless post :)

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me :)

I think this year I'll be getting the most spoiled for my birthday, lol. I get a new house, my mom and my sister will be coming up to help me paint (Sabra, you are more than welcome to join us ;) ) and I'm getting over the flu I've had the last couple of days, woot!

Less than a week until closing, let's hope the money transfers quickly so we can get the keys the next day and start painting and painting!!

Pictures!

The home inspection was yesterday so I took some pictures of the house :)

First is the living room, I didn't get a close up of the paint, but it's a pretty cool technique, looks like they used rags. I just don't like the colors or that they put it on every single wall! (also, the paint is really darker in person, so keep that in mind).



The sideways laundry room and half bath :)

The hallway leading to the other bathroom and the bedrooms, more paint, oh and you can see it a little closer on the left.

L's future room, I took pictures of all the walls but figured you got the gist of it here ;). Yes, it does cover the whole ceiling too.

Master bedroom, same paint texture technique as the living room, just in blues. (This paint is also darker in person). A pretty good sized room though, they have a lot of furniture in there so I just showed the one corner.
The boys bedroom, I'm thinking of leaving one wall this color and painting the other three, or maybe leaving the bottom half of the wall this color, not sure yet. Any ideas?

Remember that news I told you to stay tuned for?

Well, I can now say what it is.

We are under contract to purchase our first home!!! Woohooo :)

It is a 3 bd, 1.5 ba, 1200 sq ft house. Our closing date is August 9th and then I plan on painting several rooms, luckily my sister volunteered to come help, yay. The sellers love texture and color and pattern, not so much my favorite thing for walls.

One regret though, the smallest bedroom, the one L will take over, would be perfect for a baby, it has a Winne The Pooh mural painted on all the walls and ceiling, it looks fantastic, but not ideal for a 10, going on 16 year old girl ;). So we'll be covering it up. I'll be sure to take some pics first, because they really did a good job with it.

Happy dancin' at our house!