Moving Saturday! SATURDAY! SATURDAY!

Tomorrow we will be moving in. I will be extremely busy from the start of the day til about the middle. If you want to hear my extremely stern voice call so you can laugh tomorrow would be the day to do it, but please laugh after you hang up with me. I don't do the stern voice on purpose, it is a completely subconscious/survival response to my surroundings. I hope that everyone is doing well. Sunday I will be so much happier being unpacked, and having everything cleaned up. Hopefully either on Tuesday or Wednesday we will be completely done with Spinnaker Cove.

Bathroom During and After

Master Bedroom

I can't find any pics of the before, but here's the after.

Kitchen Before and After

Before and After of the Kitchen

Before and After of the Livingroom

Slate floors

I haven't posted in a while, but we are almost done with the first floor. This picture was taken last week and I will hopefully post some more tomorrow of how clean everything looks and also do before/after side by side pics. And this Saturday we are moving. YAY! Spinnaker Cove is by far the worst apartment complex for the money spent. If I wanted to see cops every night, leaks in my apartment every other week, and their staff leaving my front door unlocked when I wasn't here: I should be paying a lot less. Anyhoo, here are the pics:
The countertops are now clean of all trash, and the bathroom is now a lighter burnt sienna color. Today I put in quarter round in the bathroom and kitchen, and grouted along the door frames. It looks amazing. The pic of the bathroom also is not the greatest, it is now sealed and very shiny.

Final Stages: Kitchen and bathroom remodel

Ok, after everything that has been done to the house we are on the last two rooms downstairs.  Today I installed all the new cabinets in the kitchen.  Tomorrow I will be going and getting the new laminates to cover them.  And in the ensuing weeks I will be putting in tile floor from the bathroom to the kitchen, shellacing the cabinets, a little bit of wall touch up, and closing up the old 1/2 wall and running all new plumbing to the cabinets, but this is the easy stuff.  All of it I have done similar work as this a million times before; all of it is immediately gratifying; and no one gives me the look of a dog that just heard an unfamiliar sound as when I tell them about closing in the crawlspace/jacking up the house/running new electrical lines/etc etc.

Also in the kitchen there will be installed a front load stackable washer and dryer which will be mounted in between these utility cabinets.

I am sorry to everyone that I love that I haven't gotten to see or talk to in a really long time; and I am sure that all of you are mature enough to understand; and that is why I love you guys so much.  I hope that everyone is doing well.  The madness is almost over.

Built in's are mostly done.

Ok, I haven't posted in the longest time.  So here's what I've gotten done that I won't take pictures of.  For the last week I've been working on the basement.  I put in a dehumidifier, put down 6 mil plastic all around the basement floor and tarred it to the foundation leaving a 3" gap between the plastic and the joists for termite inspections.  It took me thirty hours to complete and part of my soul, but it was worth it for me when my mom came into the house and couldn't smell any mold.  I completely understand why companies charge five grand or more to do what I did for four hundred bucks and thirty hours.  But here's some pics of something that took me five hours to do and took absolutely no effort on my part.  And a part that you can't see of them is that on the bottom shelf of each cabinet is an outlet.

All I have to do to them now is put on a trim piece to cover up the screws and cuts of plywood, and then paint with white gloss.  Tomorrow is that and quarter round in the rest of the house. I hope that everyone is doing well.

nearly finished hardwood. Stain doesnt take away the age, but it sure adds some charm!!

You can see your reflection :) Now we have to stay off of it for 2 weeks for it to cure

Painted bathroom cabinets with hardware

Painted kitchen cabinets with hardware...but I am pretty sure we are going to be pulling out all the cabinets and moving them anyway to make the kitchen space a little more usable. My mom just bought a new house and wants stainless appliances...so she is donating her nearly new white kitchen appliances to us!! I am so excited! (The current appliances are pretty bad)

Thats it for today. Its been a long day!!

Tessa

3 more pics

Well I am sure you are getting tired of seeing pictures of corners, walls, and the back of Mike's head, but unfortunately these are the capabilities of my camera phone, and the light we have to work with right now. Tonight while I was at work Mike sanded the wood floors down with an industrial sander and put a coat of stain on them. Ill have pics of that up shortly, but here are the three I have for you tonight :)



Our new kitchen color. Once again it does not translate well in pictures, but it is "Malt" which is a taupe with maybe a hint of pink or purple. I dont know. It seems to tie the dining room and hall colors together.

Mike is starting to build cabinets on either side of the wall jutting (aka old blocked-in fireplace) in the living room

Here is our dining room color. It is my fav color so far :)

So clean you could eat off the floor

The carpet has got to go
A nearly finished hallway

The wood floors are gonna need some work. Hopefully in the next week or so. We are currently taking out the 23094856023974 staples that are in the floor. They will have tons of character when complete, Im sure.

A very blue room!

Taking the popcorn off of the ceiling has been a mess but the flat ceilings look GREAT! There were layers upon layers of paint and wall paper on the ceilings.

A painted bathroom. This looks much more neon green than it actually is. Im actually not sure why even included this picture.....but oh well. Its very cute, and very bright.

This is a blocked up fireplace in our freshly painted living room. Not quite sure why its blocked up, but we're not really in the market to find out right now. Mike is going to build some shelves in on either side.

This room is now a tan color (Ill put up pictures soon) I am so glad the dirty orange is gone that I just dont know what to do with myself.

Im painting this ugly brown mirror white for the bathroom...it looks very nice and will match the cabinets now!

Well those are the most recent pictures. Im a little mad, because we finished painting the dining room and it looks fabulous, but I forgot to take a picture. More soon.

Tessa

Home Improvements are fun when it is 30 degrees!

Well, long time no updates. We have been so busy! Busy and cold. The heating unit for the house bit the dust, so to speak. We have spent several days just trying to get the darn thing to work. Finally we brought in some space heaters today so we could get SOMETHING done. The air in the house was definately *brisk*. At any rate, I'll let Michael fill you in on the details, but I have some new pics to post.

Tessa


Priming away the brown walls

A VERY VERY blue room. A little bluer than I thought it would be.....but we're keeping it--and I like it more every time I look at it! The only non-earth-tone we've chosen.

Priming away the pea-soup green walls. Getting ready for light and pretty "Green Shimmer"!!

My fiance patching :)

Become a follower because we are awesome.

Everyone needs to become a "follower" of this blog. Immediately. Only our moms have signed up. No one loves us except for our moms.

A few days of being sick in bed has made me restless

On Saturday and Sunday, Tessa and I busted our humps a little on the house. We have started with fixing the walls. Mainly just patching the walls where little cracks have come up in an 80 year old house that has been vacant for close to a year. Tessa has sanded down all the trim in the house. I have got the ceiling scrapped but not finished in the family/living room. I still need to sand it to get any evidence of popcorn texture off. A few friends came over as well and we showed them around.

Demetrius, who was also our real estate agent, was daring enough to walk on stilts.

Monday and Tuesday, I was sick in bed. I couldn't do anything either day. I really probably should have stayed in bed again today, but as the saying goes, "you can rest when your dead." Today Tessa and I did a few more things to the house. Tessa finished sanding the trim. She cleaned the fridge, it needed it pretty badly. And helped me skim coat a few more spots on the walls. While she was working on those things, I started in on some masonry work.

There had been a window there that any crackhead could bust in and be able to break in to our house.

Here it is all finished. I have to go match the paint, and no one will be the wiser to my not doing a 2" mortar joint like the original was.

I patched in one more opening as well, but it was no where close to as big as this.

Hopefully in a few months, we will be able to close in the other openings to make the crawlspace/basement an unvented crawlspace. But we will need to do a few more things. But the rewards are worth it. Well, I hope that everyone is doing well. Hopefully, I will be doing even better tomorrow. One other huge thing is at Lowe's they had wood floor stain for 8 bucks a gallon, which is usually about double that. Whooo!

Michael

WOOOOO!!!! (A post from Tessa)

WOOOO!! I am so pumped! I was out in Franklin this morning and swung by the Habitat for Humanity "Re-store." Boy am I excited! I made friends with one of the workers there who will be bringing me some Kilz Primer tomorrow and bought some glass lamp shades, a gallon of paint in the blue color I like for the bedroom, and some spray paint to refinish the bathroom mirror for $9! They have neat knobs and blinds and a new dishwasher for $40! Also tiles, 5 gallon buckets of trim paint for cheap, and tons of other stuff! (I get the bargain hunting gene from my Grandpa who is Polish of course). I am also very happy that the money from buying supplies and items from this store go back to the Habitat for Humanity charity, so hopefully we will try to get all we can there. And BTW if you've been to the Habitat stores in Nashville, the Williamson Cty. store is SO much better--I highly suggest it. I guess you could say I'm getting the home improvement bug!

Tessa

A lil update

Did only about a quarter of what I wanted to do today. But oh well. Will Tessa and I will get more stuff done tomorrow. I installed all the new door hardware. I started patching up the walls. I tried using real plaster but with there being a water based paint on the walls, it stripped the paint off and didn't stick all that well. So I went back to Home Depot and got sheetrock mud and was able to make the walls look good. I'll need to get some more to finish it. I installed a motion sensor light on the back of the house. I sanded down all the trim in a bedroom for it to be ready to paint. And when Tessa got home from work we decided that it is going to be a lot easier to sand down the floors than to use paint stripper.

If you guys have any suggestions let me know.

Today's News

Well we have a few things to report about the house today:

1. All the utilities are on in the house. Yay!
2. Paint is chosen for each room. Yay!
3. Tessa checked the structural integrity of the electric pole near the start of the driveway with the rear end of her car. Un-yay.

Tomorrow, I'm going to start on a few things (these are not in any particular order):

1. Replace the exterior door handles and locks.
2. Strip a foot by foot section of the floor and see how much of a pain it is going to be to do the entire downstairs.
3. Sand down the interior door frames, doors, window frames and anything else that has drips in the last paint job.
4. Patch walls where hairline cracks have started since neither heat nor air has been on in the house for over a year.
5. Brick in the vents that are in the foundation to make the crawlspace unvented to improve air quality and control humidity.
6. Buy a dehumidifier and put it in the crawlspace.

The other thing that I don't think anyone has noticed is that truly the upstairs has 2 bedrooms, and that we and everyone else that was involved with the house has mistakenly called the Carrie Bradshaw closet a closet, but it truly is a bedroom. So Tessa and I have a 4 bedroom, 1 bath house. Awesome. Well, I hope that everyone is doing well.

Here's some info for the out-of-towners

I found some links if you are interested to learn a little more about East Nashville. http://www.planofnashville.com/PDF_downloads/4_East_Nashville.pdf, http://www.rediscovereast.org/ has a place to donate a tree to make East Nashville look nicer.