Hello Summer!

We have been enjoying the cool summer mornings and even the afternoons, but this house can get hot at night! We can not wait until we have HVAC. A few of our windows are missing the screens and we are not going to replace them until after we paint the exterior of the house. So we either stay hot or get a few bug bites :)

Progress wise, we are doing great! The work is done inside our side of the house, except for what Erin and I need to finish ourselves (paint some more and tile). We had some door jams fixed this last week, so there are no more gaps above the doors and they all close properly. I didn't really notice how bad some of them were but am appreciating how great they are now.

This last week, my sister had her surgery so I spent some time with her while Erin began ripping up the floor in our dining room. I also reupholstered our dining room chairs. The set was given to us by a good family friend whose mother passed away. It is the perfect size table for us and it has a built in leaf, but the cushions were very out-dated and not really in style, so I gave it an update and made them more shabby chic! We also hustled and got the back bedroom completely finished! YEAH! We removed all of the old paint on the window frame by using a heat gun, BEST THING EVER! It's like a little blow dryer that gets extremely hot and the paint just bubbles up and you scrape it off. Why did we just now find out about this!!?? The only down part is how hot the room itself gets, so I pretty much had Erin doing all of that hehe.

From this

To this!

It's going to be a little library/den for Erin. He can have one room right?? :)

This is a before picture of the chair cushions. And these are the during/after. I also really liked doing this and can't wait to do some more projects!

I also started painting our bathroom, so I can finally have a mirror in there!

The back unit is going to become 2 bedrooms so they are framing and going to town!

Here are some random pictures of Erin and I at Amy's Cal Poly graduation and our camping trip last week.

Busy bees

It has been a while since I've blogged and we have been busy! The house is coming along. I really haven't been doing too much work but there is work getting done. This last week we had electrical work done and wall finishers come tape and mud and texture some walls. The microwave was installed and a cabinet added above it. We found some rotting in one of the basement walls, so that is a change order and another thing to add to the list of repairs. But all in all, there isn't that much left to do. They installed the baseboard and trim in the  2 bedrooms and put up the shelves and hanger racks in the closets finally. They have started framing the back unit as well and getting that going!

Big things left: paint the kitchen, paint the bathroom, finish painting and re-touching the 2 bedroom window and door frames that were put back up, along with the trim and baseboards, tile the entry way and tile our kitchen. I think we will be done with the inside after that!!

Lately we have been seeing a lot of friends! I got to see my good friend Brittany briefly last weekend, then Erin and I went on a camping trip to Mendocino this last week, came home late Friday night, went to Vacaville all day on Saturday and saw my good friend Rachel and then Sunday was church and father's day. Life is getting back to normal for us.

 

This is the view from our campground. We stayed just outside Fort Bragg.

This week I am hoping to be more productive on the house. There is also a salvage store around here in Sacramento that has things specifically from old homes that have been torn down, like doors, hardware, windows, ect. So I really want to check that place out. We are missing a few really old/cool brass door hing pins, we need to replace some interior doors, and we could use some other cool old stuff I'm sure :) I am also keeping my eye on antiques and cool pieces we could use in the house. I would like to find some thing similar to a butcher's block to go in the kitchen and I want to find a tall narrow hutch/china cabinet to go in the dining area as well. These might take me a while to find but there are lots of antique shops around here that I need to visit, just don't tell my husband.

New carpet smell :)

Today we had the last two bedrooms' carpet installed. It's a good smell :) We still have to finish putting back up the window frames and door frames and paint them too. Then pick out some baseboard for 1 bedroom. The house has most of the original baseboards that are really tall, about 7 inches or so but they are redwood, so when we took them off to drywall, some of them didn't make it off in one piece :(.

Sometime soon, we are having the electrician come designate a circuit for the microwave and do some more work around the kitchen area. The ceiling in the dining room has drywall up, but still needs tape, mud and texture. The bathroom still has to be textured and then I can paint it and then put up my mirror, towel racks, ect. I have been living here with no mirror for nearly a month!

I started stripping another door a few weeks ago, and it is almost done! What a time consuming project. I really enjoy it though, seeing the transformation is rewarding. We were able to salvage some kitchen cabinets from the back unit that we are tearing up and put them in our kitchen. I need to paint them still and find a small cabinet to go over the microwave. We took off the doors to the cabinets because the hinges are coated in paint. So naturally like everything else, I started stripping them. 3 hours later I was over it, and decided to just get new hinges, which is why there are no doors to the cabinets in the picture.
 Before:

 After:

Here is the door I am working on

Here is our garden, I think it is growing! Even with the cloudy weather

This last weekend was Erin's mom's birthday on Saturday and his dad's on Sunday. For Jeannie's b-day dinner, we went to Cafe Marika, a homestyle Hungarian restaurant in midtown and it was delicious. I had chicken paprikash.

Then for Erin's dad's b-day, we got him a dog! We helped him finally pick out a dog and it's so friendly.

Just for fun, this is the current condition of the back unit that we are tearing out/remodeling. Unfortunately I do not have a real before picture because they started working on it so fast! But this is the crazy state of being it is in now

And finally, the rooms with the new carpet!

June!

Paint, paint, and more paint. The 2 bedrooms are finally ready for us. So, this last week, with help from my girl Candice and Erin, we painted the back bedroom, the front bedroom, and the new kitchen wall. We primed them all first too. And of course had to paint the ceilings, which is hard work. They need some molding put up, carpet and baseboards and then I'll be ready to move into them!

The rest of our carpet is being installed this next Tuesday! Erin has been getting the front entryway ready for tiling. We got some plywood down, hardi-backer over that and then we will tile. We had some trouble with our bathroom tile because our subfloor is not sturdy enough and will have to be re-done. So we are taking all the pre-cautions and experimenting with the entry.

This last weekend we had Erin's cousin staying with us and it was great! He helped us out working around the house and Erin finally parted with his mercedes and gifted it to Josh. They did some tree trimming and stuff. I also did a lot of cooking, which I loved! We had quiche, juevos rancheros, and egg sandwiches for breakfasts, and tri-tip, chicken parmasean and dessert! It was a good excuse to cook a lot.



Here is some of the progress we've made:

 We found a secret window above our backdoor! We are trying to remove the paint and scrape it off so that we can have light again. It's been painted over and over, like every other surface in our house :)

We also found this seriously old letter from behind our cabinets. The postmark on the envelope is from 1955. The stamp was also 4 cents! It's like a love letter or something, it's between a man and woman. There is one page from each person saying that they want to see each other soon and they were going to meet at the Sacramento hotel that used to be on K street! It's so cute, I'm not even making this up

Here are the guys on the roof cutting some trees back from the house.

And this is what a hungry man eats after working all day, working on the house and after he already had dinner. Erin is crazy. It's milk with pieces of bread soaking in it, sick!