Renovating

{ Wednesday, February 04, 2009 }
As it turns out, the sweetie and I didn't think we already had enough going on in the way of life events this year, so we're moving. Not just moving because the place we're going to needs quite a bit of work, so we're renovating and then moving. We're planning to replace the carpeting with wood flooring and paint pretty much every surface in the house. The previous tenants moved out last Saturday, so we spent that day gathering supplies and then started bright and early Sunday morning.

One of my coworkers does construction in his spare time (lucky us!), so he came over with a helper and the two of them did an excellent job ripping up layers and layers of linoleum in the kitchen. It was actually kind of fun to see the floors get more and more hideous as we went back in time to the 70's. The sweetie and I spent some time prepping the walls for paint and then the sweetie got to work priming upstairs. Out of respect for our bean's still developing brain cells, I am staying as far away from the paint as I can, so I spent Sunday ripping up carpet in the living room. I really enjoyed this part--there's something very satisfying in hearing that rrrripping noise and watching the floors transform from ugly stained carpet to bare wood. The not-so-fun part? Removing all those hundreds of tiny little staples and tack strips. Then, I took down all the baseboards so sweetie can prime and paint them.

Monday night, I headed back over to the new place and ripped up carpet in the master bedroom. I'm hoping to have all the carpet out before the weekend so I'm out of the house while the painting is going on. Let's see, what else? Sweetie worked on priming the downstairs Tuesday and then we spent Wednesday morning before work carrying 50 boxes of wood into the house from the curb. I know some people like to go to the gym for a workout in the morning, but we prefer carrying large boxes of heavy materials!

Tonight we get a much needed break, as its our first childbirth class, then back to work! There's so much painting to be done and I feel awful that I can't help, but I don't want little bean "breathing" any of those VOCs, so sweetie has all of it to do. Once I'm done with the carpet, I'll switch to shopping for supplies and packing up at the old place.

They always say that when you start a project like this, you inevitably uncover more projects that need to be done. So far, we've been fairly lucky in that we've only uncovered some water damage that we kind expected to find (we knew there had been a leak last fall). Unfortunately, it looks like the waterproofing around the two sliding doors is the culprit which might mean replacing those doors altogether. Totally unexpected and unwelcome expense, but I hope that ends up being the worst of it.

I guess I should knock on some wood or something, eh?

2 comments:

weese said...

and so it begins.
(the renovating...which by they way...never ends)

Val said...

sounds like quite the home improvement project, but you guys seem up to it!