Apparently November is National Blog Posting Month, so I am going to attempt to write a blog post for every day in November (stick with me... no promises). This is an extra long post to make up for missing 2 days.
I have been attempting to put a big post up about the renovations we've been working on in our house, but I can't seen to get the pictures to upload correctly. So, since most of the 2 people who read this blog are also my friends on Facebook, I'll let the pictures on there speak for themselves, and here's the description of what we did:
Pre-renovation set-up
If you've been in our house, you know we have 2 bedrooms downstairs (the back room has a sliding door out to a 3-season porch, and no interior door, so it's kind of a den; we put a door on the other room, so it's a real bedroom), and technically 2 bedrooms upstairs. You would walk past a lovely array of tan shag carpet on the walls of the staircase, to come to a room at the top of the stairs. A good-sized room with a big closet, but you had to walk through it to get to the 2nd room. The second room had old carpet and weird paneling on the walls, but was otherwise useful. There is also a 3/4 bath up there. When we first moved in, Skip and I were sleeping in the back bedroom downstairs, while Preston was in the front room, the one with a door. After a few months of our ridiculous schedules making it impossible for us to sleep, we moved just our beds upstairs. Ours in the big room, and Preston's crib in the other "room." It worked okay, but every time one of us walked past P, we'd risk waking him up. Not to mention all of our stuff was still downstairs (clothes).
Plan of attack, steps completed so far:
1.) Remove carpet from walls. This was easy. Unfortunately, it allowed us to notice ants were in the walls. Jim and Andy went to town and opened a hole in the wall, only to have hundreds of gigantic carpenter ants fall out (*shudder*). Orkin has since been involved, and the ant problem is gone. We still, however, have a gigantic hole in the wall. At least it's now insulated and vapor-barriered, ready for drywall...
2.) Cut wall at top of stairs down to 1/2 wall. After removing the door and frame from the top of the stairs, this was relatively easy. It now is sort-of a loft space at the top of the stairs, and will allow a lot more light into the upstairs hallway.
3.) Make a hallway and new bedroom walls. We cut out basically all of the existing walls in the walk-through room, and now have framed a hallway, and pushed back where the old walls were so they are more into the attic. The room will be small, but plenty functional for 2 little kiddos. We also rebuilt the closet, which was a necessity to be able to consider it a bedroom.
4.) Pull the weird paneling off the walls in our bedroom, and build a new closet. This was surprisingly easy, since the paneling was very weakly secured to the framing. We have since re-insulated the open space, and put up a vapor barrier. The huge closet is also framed and ready to go. It will be great to have so much storage space in a style/age of house that usually doesn't. Our room will be a little smaller, but still plenty big for all of our stuff.
5.) Drywall everything. This is sort of at a standstill. We're getting professionals to come in, but have been back and forth with pricing. The hope is to have this done within 2 weeks... ha, stay tuned on that one!
6.) New flooring. Thanks to Charlie and Mary, we have really nice new Pergo flooring and quality wood subfloor ready to go as soon as the drywall gets in. We will do that ourselves.
7.) Put in windows. We currently have vapor barrier and plywood nailed up over the gaping holes that were and will be windows. The new windows are waiting in the porch to be put in. My dad says we will be upgrading 5 generations worth of windows with the new ones, compared to the ancient ones that were there before (and by ancient, I don't mean orginal to the house, like most of our downstairs windows are. The upstairs ones were just old, leaky (when they wanted to open) and ugly).
Hey, after all this is done, maybe we can actually get to moving our stuff back up there and living there, just in time to have our lives thrown around some more with the arrival of a new baby!
Speaking of baby, I'm 19 weeks along today! Everything has been progressing wonderfully, albeit a bit faster than things did with Preston. I've been feeling well. I have my 2nd trimester anatomy ultrasound next week, so we are looking forward to seeing the baby again. We'll stay on "team green" again with this one, waiting until March to find out if it's a boy or girl!
Preston is 2. Holy cow! These past 2 years have absolutely flown by, but in the best possible way. We had a few people over for a low-key birthday celebration last weekend, which went well. Elmo was the theme, and Preston loved it. What a laid-back guy he is. He is just spitting out words left and right these days, so we have to be very careful about what we say around him! (Ex: Skip, and his sarcastic potty mouth, said last night "What's up, bitches?!" only to hear 5 seconds later: "Up bishes!" Oops...) Other than that, I think potty training is in the mix now, since it's like wrestling an alligator trying to change that little dude's diapers. He seriously doesn't have an ounce of fat on him! He was 23.5 lbs and 33 inches at his dr. appointment last week, which is still pretty tiny. But back on the charts, so we're happy! Everything else with him is wonderful!
