4 day Blitz

I am TIRED.

Scott took a couple days off work so we could hit the project list hard and I am wiped out. Really, too tired to even blog but I thought I could share a few pictures.

Gutted kitchen and removed existing tile. The only cabinets we left were the ones around the stove vent because we figured we'll just paint around those instead of disconnecting the vent. Someday the kitchen will be completely remodeled, but for now it is getting just a minor face lift with new flooring, paint, and clean up.

Installing the entry tile. It was purchased from Lowe's and is a high definition printed porcelain. It has a border of small square tiles that runs around all sides except the stairs.

Moved the bed and bookshelves into our youngest daughter's room. Still need to buy curtains, blinds, bedding, etc. for her. We also put together bookshelves for the other daughter's room and both girls spent time this weekend trying to put away the stuff they packed up months ago when we listed our house.

We painted 3 closests (pantry, linen, and master bedroom) and installed hardware in the pantry and master bedroom closets. I want to pick up a couple more baskets and we'll add some sort of shoe storage on the wall you can't see on the right. I will start loading these up once the flooring is done.

The hardwood in the living room! I love it!!! It is a Rapid Loc Vintage Hickory. Sort of an engineered hardwood (hardwood top over substrate). It has a lot of character and the color is perfect. This entire room is done now. Next come the hall and the kitchen.

Almost as if to welcome us into the new home- the first flower of spring arrived yesterday. I think yellow crocus must mean happiness and luck live here. I'm sure of it. :)

Upstairs, west bedroom

This bedroom is almost a mirror image of the east bedroom, with the exception of the closet. The other closet is a standard closet with a 5' opening. This room's closet is a triangular walk in closet located near the dormer instead of on the opposite wall. Because of the closet configuration, it is slightly larger.

Back in January, our oldest daughter received new bedding for her birthday. We bought a lot of accessories too, all in hot pink/black/white with zebra and leopard prints mixed in. It is a diva room! She wanted to keep that diva feel here and use as much as possible from her previous room. Her bed size will change from full to queen so we'll wait to see how the comforter fits, if it is too narrow we'll invest in a solid hot pink blanket or light comforter underneath that will extend down below her full sized comforter.

With the color scheme in mind, I asked her to think about a paint color that wouldn't compete, but serve as a neutral back drop to all of her bold colors and accessories. She chose Behr's Feather Gray for the walls and then borrowed the same Scented Valentine pink for her dormer as we used on the walls in her sister's room.

Hey, you can see the ozone generator in this image!

One thing that she did request was a graffiti wall. We discussed different options and then settled on creating a giant chalk board for her room.

We did this by purchasing a 4' x 8' piece of fiber board from Home Depot and painting it with chalk board paint. We decided to make it a magnetic board so we primed it with Rustoleum's Black Flat Magnetic Primer. One of my husband's co-workers had just completed a small project using Rustoleum's Chalk Board Paint and she gave us what was left so we didn't have to buy that.

The super smooth surface of the fiber board was perfect for this project. We screwed it to the wall then filled the screw holes with caulk. Once that dried we primed it with three thin coats of the magnetic primer. If you ever attempt to use this product let me suggest having it mixed at the paint counter before you leave. It is almost impossible to get completely blended at home, you'll be stirring for a good 15 minutes as the magnetic portion of the product settles to the bottom and is very heavy. To make the magnetic effect very strong, I think this would require more than three coats- at least five- but we used all that the can held and at $20 a quart I was not buying more. Once this had fully dried I painted it with two coats of chalkboard paint, again using all that remained in the can. It has a nice finish on it and will hold small magnets. I doubt it could hold anything heavier than a piece of paper, though, so it does have its limitations.

Once it was dry we used door trim to create a frame, nailing it directly to the wall. We caulked the nail holes and mitered corners and hit it with a final coat of white semi gloss. The frame makes the entire board look polished and it will be the perfect place for my daughter to do her graffiti. I'll try to remember to get a finished pic with the trim for you.

I told the girls we had to wait until H1 was sold before we'd be buying any accessories for H2. Then I saw this hot pink lamp for $10 at Walmart and knew it would be perfect so I ignored my own words and picked it up anyway.

Things left to do:
Had to replace a couple pieces of floor trim but got distracted with other projects so that needs to be finished. Also, the closet could really stand to be painted better. Its odd angles make it hard to get the corners but our sloppiness shows. Even though it is just a kids' closet, the time to make it right is now. I'm also painting the bed that will go in this room a distressed black. That has been started but not yet finished.

Upstairs, east bedroom

We started in the bedroom on the east side of the house for no better reason than when their dad asked the girls to come down and help on that particular day, only one of them did. The bedroom she wanted to be hers was the one where we started.

The carpet had been ripped up, but there were staples all over the floor. The tack board around the perimeter and floor trim needed to be pulled up as well. We saved the trim to reuse so all the nails had to be pulled from it. The blinds on the windows were cheap vinyl blinds that the cats had ruined (they had ruined every set of blinds in the house except one bathroom). The cats had also damaged the door jambs of all the doors upstairs too. This particular bedroom was very bad. We weren't sure if the doors would need to be replaced or if they could be repaired with wood filler. Since we happened to have some filler on hand, we tried that first. It required patience and letting several layers build up, but it worked and we discovered we'd be able to salvage all of the interior doors.

There was still a subtle odor from the cats so we wanted to be sure to use a primer with a vapor barrier. We did a fair amount of research and discovered that Zinsser oil-based primer seemed to be a favorite among the flippers on the internet boards. Since they steered me in the right direction with the ozone generator I was very happy to embrace the love and go with the popular primer.

Until we opened the can, anyway. Wow, them's some fumes! I couldn't hack it. Several times I started feeling light headed and dizzy and when I bent over one time I thought I was going to face plant into the floor. I bailed on the priming and sat outside for the rest of the night trying to make the world stop spinning. Ok, so by rest of the night I mean about an hour, but it was long enough for me to decide that we could not use that same primer throughout the entire house. Not to mention that cleaning up oil-based paint is a royal pain PITA. We opted for a latex primer after that for all of the walls and only used the oil-based primer on the floors to seal in any remaining cat odor.

We let the girls pick out their paint colors with minimal direction. My youngest loves green, all shades of green, and I fully expected her room to be green and purple with touches of yellow and pink in the accessories. To help the girls get a vision for their room, I took them to the how-to book section at Home Depot and flipped through a book on kids' rooms. I was so surprised when she picked out a room that was pink with orange and yellow. She also liked one that was purple, so we decided to paint the walls pink, the dormer walls purple, and then paint a desk and dresser in green.

The only difficult part of painting the upstairs rooms was the 9' ceilings. I simply can't reach, even on a small step stool. This meant much of the painting fell on my husband's shoulders. Sorry, guy!

After we painted ceilings and walls, we installed the flooring that the girls picked out. It is a laminate from Home Depot that was mid-range in quality but only $1.30 a square foot. We found that Big Lots seemed to have better quality underlayment for a cheaper price so we opted for that. The flooring went down pretty quickly, with just a few complex cuts. Most of it could be done with the powered miter box (great Father's Day gift, btw). A few boards required being ripped down on the table saw which was a hassle since that meant trekking up the hill to H1 to cut them and hope the measurements were right the first time.

The things that remained in this room: floor trim- it was given a fresh coat of paint and we needed to add shoe molding (not pictured) due to the change from carpet to laminate; windows- Pella windows that were factory finished in white, one of the better choices we made when we built the house; mirrored closet doors- if it ain't broke don't fix it; light fixtures- the girls like them so they are adequate for now. I wouldn't mind switching them out for fans but they say no for now.

I would like to see a shelf built around most of the room where the wall meets the angled portion of the ceiling for all my daughter's stuffed animals. I'd also like to see some trim on the ceiling. There is a rectangular area around the light fixture which is somewhat sunken. It is the result of amateur mudding when we built the house and I think decorative molding would enhance the room as well as disguise the flaw. It isn't a big deal, though, probably not noticeable to most people, and definitely a project that can wait.

Still needs to be done:
window hardware, painted furniture, decor, final cleaning once the dust in the rest of the house has settled.