5,6 Adding to the Mix

So like I promised last post, this week has been very busy, but also very productive.  Shout out to Travis's parents for watching the kids this weekend.  First lets talk about us adding to the mix. (get it 5,6 adding to the mix) We have new additions to the Eborn family!  Our first somewhat-"farm animals." Say hello to Easton's cat Princess Leia.

He loves Star Wars, so it seemed fitting. She definitely is curious, and was my painting buddy most of the day. Ashlyn picked a boy cat and named him Boots. She always asks me if she can watch D D Da Dora, so of course that seems right. We should have called him Swiper, because he is sneaky and we never see him, thus no picture :(.  I am not an inside-the-house animal person, so these cats have a great home in the barn.


Before I start, I know a lot of people have been confused on the layout of the house. So, I drew up a somewhat amateur layout for everyone of the first floor. It reminds me of going to lunch with my Dad when I was younger. We would sit down at Mom's Cafe to have lunch, and he would take those peachy colored place mats and draw me a "rough" sketch of how he wanted something done that day for work. So here is my "rough" sketch.

Our drywall expert, Dwight, from Blue Water Construction, came this week to help us out. If you remember we knocked a walkway through into this room.

This is the before.

...and this is the after! Travis framed it out and we were able to paint most of the walls downstairs.

 

 

 This is the before pic of the downstairs bathroom. (It's a little fuzzy, sorry.)  It was pretty ghetto.

 

And this is the "after" minus the fixtures of course. I love new sheetrock! It makes things look so clean. We took the tub out of this bathroom, mostly because you would have to walk across the living rooms to take a bath. AWKWARD!

This is what I did most of the morning Saturday to prepare for floor staining.  There is still a lot more painting to do.  Ceilings are the worst!

On Monday we started sanding the floors. This is definitely a "back breaking" process. 

Travis ran the upright drum sander and I drew the short straw and had to run the smaller orbital sander.

 

 

I was getting frustrated sanding down the stairs, and thought that painting them might be a good option, but Travis said that would look tacky and "unoriginal."  So, he took over that process and did a great job using a mixture of different tools and paint strippers to get that stuff off and out of the little cracks.  By the way, don't ever get paint stripper on your skin.  Travis's niece Sydney was helping us and got a bunch of it on her legs.  Needless to say it was hilarious watching her reaction as she ran to find the nearest faucet.

After a days worth of work, they ended up sanding down really nicely, but then came our mistake!!!

 

 
We sanded and sanded and then picked a nice light stain. I told Travis nothing with red. I don't like red floors. So we decided on a stain and Travis went to pick it up. When he came back he said that Home Depot didn't have the exact stain but they had something close. So we started putting it on, and... way too DARK!!!  Those Minwax swatches on the stain can are totally misleading.

I wanted to cry. It was about one in the morning when we finished and they looked horrible! You probably are wondering why we kept going? Me too. I think we thought it didn't look as bad as it really was. When I came home I got on the internet and searched for solutions. I found that if you take mineral spirits and rub it on it will take out a lot of the color. So we went out there today, rubbed a little on and also sanded it some more. Hopefully we have a solution.

 

This is what we came up with. The middle board is the one we experimented with. (it's hard to see in the picture) Tomorrow I am planning on sanding all the floors completely with a 50 grit to get it almost down to the original wood and then stain it again with the stain we first decided on, the one that has no red in it. Cross your fingers! I'll let you know how it comes out.

3, 4 Let's talk floor!

This week I have actually enjoyed working at the 'ol farm house. I was able to paint the kitchen the almond paste color I talked about. Sorry, I was unable to find the picture I took to post, but it ended up looking really good. The old owners of the house left some paint behind

and I thought I would give it a go.

 

It's called Horizon Gray by Benjamin Moore. I wanted to use gray somewhere, so I tried it out and I love it! Once I did a test strip I just wanted to keep going. At least  to get rid of the ugly blue, but Travis made me refocus on the tile. Which brings me to another happy thought.

 

 The master bathroom! Now, I don't care for tiling floors. I have tiled over 16 apartment floors in the last 4 years and it stinks! Especially when there is no design, just square boring tile. But, I was excited to start in the bathroom on my first corner tub. I love the difference that tile makes. Travis surprised me with his tile choice. It ended up looking really good with the existing colors. Once the sheetrock is finished this week, a little paint, vanity, toilet, and some more tile, the master bath will be done! YAY!

 

I was also able to finish the tiling in the upstairs bathroom.  The trim piece was from an apartment bathroom countertop, but ended up blending well with the current colors.

 



 

This bathroom is almost finished also.  The previous owners started remodeling, but everything didn't make sense. We ended up knocking down the wall into the old master bath to make things bigger and more spacious. This will be nice, considering there where 5 bedrooms upstairs but no full bathroom, and now there is. The only downfall is that the vanity is so small! I have to find an oval mirror also to fit above it because the light switch is in the way and can't reasonably be moved.  Electrical is a little tricky in old lath and plaster homes.

 

Now let's talk floors! This week the sheet rockers will cover all the walls, making a HUGE difference.  We've decided to carpet the upstairs bedrooms (could be a mistake) but this will save us a lot of time. We only have 2 1/2 weeks to complete most of the job and move in.

 

 

In this upstairs room, that we will be using for an office, we will cover the floor with a new wood flooring that I was able to find for $1.00 a sq ft !!!

 

 

 This is the living room off of the entry.  We have taken out the multiple layers of flooring on the main floor to make everything level, so your not stepping up or down to go in each room. This is what was under everything.

 

 

I want them to look like this, or something close to this.  They are pine, so they are softer and more likely to dent. I am unsure how to go about this look. If any of you have suggestions let me know.  I have heard that you should use an orbital sander for sanding, and tung oil, not polyurethane for the finish. I'm not sure what color of stain I should use? I'm also wondering if I should even sand at all? Let me know what you think.

 

1, 2, There is a lot to do!

     It's been a little while since the last update, so I apologize for the super long post. We have been mostly tearing things out, but now comes the fun part, we are starting to put things back together. 

In order to get a nice finish on the walls all of the wallpaper needed to be scrapped off for the sheet rockers to start. Any wallpaper that is to stubborn to come off must be KILZ'ed (a special primer that will make sure the wallpaper does not come up while mudding the walls). It kind of reminded me of peeling a sunburn. If you get a good spot it comes of pretty fast, but if you get a wrong spot you're there FOREVER peeling it.

Some of the walls were caving in so we had to break into them and see what was causing the problem. Of course, cement was the problem, they used it for insulation. ARGH! We had to haul buckets of cement out of the walls in order for this room to be ready for sheet rock. Luckily, Travis came up with a handy cement shoot out of 8" sprinkler pipe from the window to the bottom floor to dispose of all the cement rather quickly. :)

 This is the downstairs bathroom before it was gutted.

 

And now there is nothing. I am glad the sheet rockers are going to drywall right on top of that ugly green tile, because it is a beast to take off. We still are trying to find the shower head that popped off and landed in the toilet drain. I can hear my Dad now, "Why didn't you cover the toilet drain?" After I fish my hand down there to find it I am sure I will remember next time.

 

 

Yes this is a hole in the floor/ceiling. Before I tell the story of how this got here, I would just like to say that one of my favorite parts of all the remodels that we have done is that I get to work with my husband. Now that doesn't mean that we work side by side all the time, because I am afraid, well that just wouldn't work. We'd kill each other, but it sure is fun to laugh at our dumb mistakes.

 

So Travis asked me to help him install the drain line for the upstairs bathroom, and as we were working, he was on the other side of the wall asking if I was able to get the pipe all the way into the joint. I told him I was unsure if it went in. He was getting a little irritated and asked, "Can't you tell if it went in!" I said, "No I don't know for sure, why don't you come check!" So in frustration he got up a little to fast lost his footing and stepped through the floor/ceiling to the kitchen. We were able, after we figured out that the pipe went into the joint, to set down and have a good laugh at how heated we both got in the moment. Good times!

 

This is the bathroom that we are adding to the master bedroom.  The one they originally put in wouldn't fit a vanity and a toilet. They didn't measure right. This is Travis' first corner tub installation and I think it looks pretty good. We are going to put the vanity to the left of the tub and the toilet behind the door so you don't see it when you walk in. 

In the picture below we cut through the wall of the half bathroom into the old master bathroom so that the rooms upstairs would have a place to shower/tub.

 

So now for some of the fun part.

 

I was able to start tiling on Monday and I finished up the kitchen floor and laundry room today. It wasn't my favorite tile, but I was able to talk Home Depot down to $.60 a sq ft, so I had to use it, being that it was such a good deal. It ended up turning out better than I thought.

 

 

Now I just need to decide what color I want to paint the kitchen. If you have any suggestions let me know. The tile has a little yellow, gray, and brown in it. I love the gray walls everyone is doing so I might do a gray with a brown undertone??? or maybe almond paste.

Almond Paste

Spanish Olive

 

 

Silver Fox

 

Let me know what you think.

 

These next couple weeks things should be moving fairly quickly for the 'ol farm house. We need to move out of our house before the 2nd of July, and we are hoping to move straight into the farm house. There is a lot to do, but I am optimistic that we can get it done!