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 :)

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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.