Finished Bathroom

While we’d finished the renovation part of the bathroom upstairs, it still didn’t look very user friendly.
Read: I wouldn’t want to take a shower there.

So I fixed that and we have one room that feels like a real room (no strings or anything!)

 

A room! A real room!

 

 

Thomas doesn’t get the idea of having a container for Q-Tips other than the one you buy them in, but he’s learning.

I got the shower curtain(s) and hangers in New Orleans while I lived on Palmyra – so Pavel might even recognize it!

Painting, painting, painting

wow.
There’s been a lot of painting going on.

We’ve painted just about every wall on the second floor now (and door, window, molding, ceiling. . .)

Here are some shots from that process. . .

Our first doggie visit!

This has come in handy!

Toe molding, and about a hundred rusty old nails. fun.

This room is crazy hot to work in.

I promise, I’ve been working my butt off

Pretty, huh?

There are some shots of our Test Kitchen there.
The kitchen that’s upstairs will eventually be our master bathroom, with the larger kitchen downstairs being our real kitchen.
For now, though, we’re only working on getting the upstairs liveable. Thomas will move in this week, and start working on the first floor.
I get to pick out all the wall colors, and I’ve picked a great yellow for the kitchen. But I wasn’t sure I’d love it once a whole room was painted with it. So I figured, we need to paint the upstairs kitchen for now anyway, why not test out the Lemon Soufflé? If we hate it, we’ll be tearing the whole room out in a few months, so what’s the big deal?

We love it though. It’s soooo pretty and happy.

Umm, you named your house? Butters?

Well, yeah!

Loads of folks name their cars, boats, planes, plants, iPods, it’s just a thing. Humans anthropomorphize just about everything in their daily lives; it how we relate. And a house, particularly one we’re spending so much time making truly our own, certainly deserves to be treated as one of the family.
Plus, there’s the practical reason. Kelli asked that I name the house to avoid confusion; I’d say Thomas and I are going over to our house – “which ‘our house’ do you mean?”. 

Ok, so that’s the why name a house.
Why on earth Butters?
There’s this show called South Park. You may have heard of it? Quite sweet and wholesome; never offensive, really kinda dull.
umm
Ok, so if you haven’t seen the show, you probably don’t want to – but we do love it, and have for years.
Again, Kelli gets major credit here. We were discussing the need for a name while shopping at work (we both work at the same WFM – yes, we’re adorable), and then we started throwing out random names.
Ralph was thrown into the ring (yes, that Ralph) as were George and maybe even a Bob or some such name. Then Kelli suggested Butters. It had been a long day and we were both rather punchy.
But, well, I love Butters, so does Kelli and so does Thomas.
I immediately fell for it, but wasn’t so sure that Thomas would, though I kinda thought so.
Turns out I know the man I love and bought a house with! Handy, that.
But, Butters is awesome. He’s sweet, silly, naive, and totally adorable.
Ok, I’m having some trouble finding good clips of Butters – if anyone can find a good one, please let me know. Here’s a link to his Wikipedia entry though.

So, yep, we named our house Butters. I’d write a bit more right now, but we’re moving some of Thomas’ stuff in today, I need to put another coat of paint on a door, and we have a birthday party for Thomas’ grandmother this afternoon. Busy day – again!

Unearthing a Wood Floor

 

Last weekend we sanded our little hearts out, refinishing the floors on the second floor.

On Monday, we had sanded the guest bedroom floor, using only a belt sander and an orbital sander. Who knew that would suck so much? Ok, anyone who’s ever sanded down a floor, or a door for that matter.

Thomas and the orbital sander in the guest bedroom (to be)

Half and Half Floor – with a bit of sanding disk

Taking a break from the guest bedroom sanding

Thomas cutting out the bad wood

Putting in the new boards – see the shims?!

Before

Little Buddy – our drum sander for the day

working away at the glue – grrr.

Dave, the shop vac and the drum sander (Little Buddy)

Thomas and the belt sander

My friend the orbital sander

knot of power

A well-deserved break on our front porch

Pretty, huh?

My homemade kneepads

Look what we did! I can’t believe what we did!!!

But, once we’d done that room, and saw how pretty the floor was, we talked about it and decided to go ahead and do the rest of the wood. Thomas has been fairly set on having hard wood up there anyway, and this was a good bit cheaper than getting a new one and laying it atop the existing floor.

And what a time that old floor’s had.
The house was built in 1940, and since then, this floor has had two coats of gray-ish blue paint (well, two kinds – about four coats) and some green shag carpet.
The kicker was that someone decided that gluing carpet to a wood floor was a fine idea. Ok, I still can’t figure why anyone would paint a wood floor either, but it may have had something to do with the aforementioned glue.

We had to replace some boards that had had some previous water damage (really, I helped! Mostly by vacuuming and then placing shims beneath the new planks, but still. . .)

So, Friday our awesome friend Dave came over and helped us sand away. We rented a drum sander (which looked like a cousin of the old Electrolux that my best friend Sus had in college) and got really, really dirty.

We almost finished Friday, but decided to call it a night rather than hurt ourselves. The next morning (and afternoon) Thomas and I finished up the corners, Thomas went over the entire floor with a really fine grade of sandpaper, we cleaned and cleaned (and cleaned) and then put a coat of polyurethane on the floor. Stinky, but that part went pretty fast – much faster than wiping down walls, then floors, then floors again. ..
But look what we did!!

Thomas’ mom came over the next morning and helped him put another coat of poly on the floor (I was at work). I can’t wait to see it close up now that it’s dry.
Kelli and I peeked in this afternoon, but it’s still curing.

The Guest Bathroom

We were only going to paint the walls of the upstairs, but Thomas couldn’t stand the floor in the guest bathroom and that sort of started a snowball rolling. . .

It was a pretty awful floor, I’ll give him that. And it looks beautiful now. (it was so awful, I didn’t really get a great overview picture of the before – oops)

 

The Before Picture

Thomas with his Durock

He knew that nail gun would come in handy

Thomas putting in trim (I painted)

Bye bye broken, nasty medicine cabinet

pretty floor, huh? And I even cut some tile!

 

(SEE?! I told you I’d figure more of this out – and this is only my second post!)

 

There are more pictures of the bathroom to come – I think I’ll make each room/project a category of it’s own so they’ll be easy to watch progress.

We need to hang my awesome mirror that I bought in New Orleans, umm, 8 years ago and have NEVER hung. Yep, I’m a leaner.

and Thomas has already installed the new light he found on super clearance at our new second (third?) home, Home Depot. It looks very nice, though we will eventually need to scoot it over so it’s actually centered. piffle.

Butter’s First Photo Shoot

I’ve been trying to get this blog going since we bought Butters, but this morning’s really the first chance I’ve had to work on it! We’ve been too busy working on Butters, then passing out from exhaustion, to really get started. So, I’m going to start from the beginning.
This is my first blog, and it’ll be obvious, I’m sure! Sorry for any weirdness; hopefully I’ll get better as I post more.
I have been shooting every day – have my old Nikon over there in it’s Pelican case (which will hopefully keep at least some of the dust out) – so there will be plenty of pics to show.
So here we go. . . 

No, we don't know what the cement circle's all about.

 Thomas and I bought Butters on June 25, 2008. Kelli and I picked up the keys the next day, and Butters was rather exhaustively photographed. I was going home the next day for my friend Shelly’s wedding and wanted to have pics to show my mom and dad. (click on that link for some more shots of their wedding)

 

Their last dance of the night

 

Here are some more of Butters’ first shoot:

Here's the view from the side

Here's the Front Porch