Alice is blue.

In the Palm House today, we celebrate two latest and greatest achievements...one is blue and the other a toilet!

You'll notice that to get to the point where we could install a toilet inside the house, we had to first, finish the bathroom tiled floor, and second, finish painting the wall behind the toilet. Yeah! This means that Andy was free to take on the next major bathroom challenge...tiling the bath surround...

We're doing classic craftsman bungalow style subway tile, offset like brick, and we'll add in a glass tile detail at the top (the same glass as is in the floor of the bathroom). Projected date of completion? Oh, 4 more days or so.

So what have we been doing since the last post? A whole lot of painting. While the painting party was invaluable, we couldn't imagine how long this took. Every day we plod towards the finish line. The day that we can move in. Painting the front room, the living room, blue was a huge indicator that we're really really close. Here's a pic of the first coat.

Trust me, it looks really good in real life. Though the color is dark, it's offset on three of the four walls by a large window or the opening to the room. And, the upper section and ceiling is white (as is the molding).

While we were hard at work today, Pili and Alice watched over us. Pili curled up in a little ball, and Alice decided to play with paint. If you look closely, you can see a patch of blue on her side. At one point today, I looked behind me to see little Alice looking up at me with her sweet little face, as she sat on the ground and leaned up against the freshly painted blue wall. Oh silly dog.

In other news, Dad nearly completed putting together our IKEA kitchen cabinets. Tomorrow we'll start hanging them. Appliances are right around the corner. Kitchen, here we come!

On a personal note, I'm entering my 34th week of pregnancy!

Painting Party!

We are reeling from an awesome whirlwind weekend of painting and bathroom tiling. We had SO MUCH help from our friends and family and it gave us a big boost. It's amazing how much work it takes to paint a house. Prepping, priming, patching, taping, cutting, first coats, touch-ups, second coats...initially it seems pretty simple. Just dip a paint brush into paint. But these guys re-acquainted themselves with the complexities of many different types of paint (semi-gloss, eggshell, high-gloss), and with many different colors. We had to stage it just right, and choreograph the coats of primer and paint to dry in such a way, in such a time, to maximize our friends' help.

Here's a little tribute to all our helpers:

Thanks, Sarah Isabel, Jen, Shawn, Ryan, Adam, Larry, Melinda, Melanie and Dedula!

We'll still be painting for a few more days if anyone feels like popping in and picking up a paintbrush.

Drywall? Check! Floors? Check!

Here is a quick catch-up from the past week's worth of work. We completed so much, and here's the lowdown...

The drywall guys finished up their work:

I suppose it only looks impressive if you saw the previous house pictures and notice not that there are no holes, and the walls are in shape. This was a natural step before painting. But before painting, we had to refinish the floors. Why, you ask? We wanted to finish the floors so that there was no activity to generate a tremendous amount of dust that would settle on the new paint if we had painted before. So, I hope you took a good look at what the floors did look like, because here are pics of the floors being refinished. We saved and refinished the original oak floor in the living and dining rooms, and laid new oak flooring in the kitchen and bedrooms.

You can see the difference in this picture between the old dark stain, and the gorgeous light oak underneath it. For many reasons it wasn't practical to stain and seal the newly refinished floor this light, but we really appreciated it when we saw its natural beauty revealed.

This final picture shows you the stain that we chose for the floors - it's a medium coffee brown stain. It looks amazing because it shows the natural variations in the floor.

All this work was to prepare for the painting party! Andy and Jessica spent two days priming and protecting the floors so that the friendly crews could come in and just start painting (as seen by a previous post - Andy priming). We worked for four days straight, and we estimate three more days of work. Here we go!

Drywall, floors, paint, oh my!

In addition to the Lumber Liquidators fiasco, we've run into some other *ahem* professionals that have offered up less-than-professional services.

The long and short of it is that we spent last week working with a drywall guy that seemed a bit pathological. At first, Andy was convinced that his say-one-thing-do-another mode of operating was a result of a language barrier. Leave it to Andy to give the drywall guy the benefit of the doubt. So, we switched to spanish to try to eliminate any communication barriers and Jessica stepped in to mediate conversations. Nope, language wasn't the problem. It was him. Thank goodness we were able to get him out of the house before he did any damage. But we sure didn't feel good writing him a check.

With the drywall dudes out of the picture, and the drywall patched and ready for paint, we threw on some paint samples to see what would work in the house. Most looked good, but there was one that stood out above the rest. Apparently, Larry felt similarly about the color that we tried out for the bathroom when I walked into the room to find this:

And yes, the color definitely looks like poop. Needless to say, it didn't make the final cut.

We spent all day on Friday priming the walls to prepare for our painting party this upcoming weekend.

This morning, the flooring guys are in our house working like whirling dervishes. They are buffing and refinishing the original oak floor, preserving the parquet details and patching the holes (such as the place where the fireplace lived). They'll also lay the new flooring in the bedrooms and kitchen. We could've laid the floor ourselves, but at this point we're happy to delegate some tasks, especially since it'll take them a fraction of the time and they're already in the house.

We'll spend Thursday/Friday getting ready to host a painting party for any friends that want to come and help. With a successful weekend, we can start putting our house back together next week!