Quarantining and Renovating!

When we decided to buy the place in early January, we had heard of the Coronavirus but like all Americans somehow thought we were impervious to it. We all now realize how short-sighted we were with that. One could argue that this would be the WORST time to buy a second home, but we’re both thinking it’s the BEST time to have something to do! We’ve got Mom (my proof-reader, cook and organizer) with us until the virus slows down. We’ve made the decision to spend our quarantine up in the mountains rather than in Atlanta where we think we’ve got a bigger likelihood of being exposed. We are headed “down mountain” (oh my, do I sound like a hillbilly yet?) later today to go back to our Atlanta house and pick up the necessities (like our Peloton bike so we don’t get fat from mom’s good cooking) and everything else we can grab to stay up here for the near future. We definitely won’t be bored up here!

I’m thrilled that so many of our friends want to follow along on our journey with us. You’ll learn how Keith can seriously do ANYTHING he puts his mind to! You’ll also learn that I’m design and he’s production and I’m his production assistant. I won’t claim to know how to do electrical or plumbing, but I am beside him to help him do a lot of things. I have decent carpentry skills but nothing like him. We do play off of each other’s ideas very well and we can usually find a solution to any problem.

Enough about all that…let’s get on with what we’ve done over the past few days. I mentioned in my first blog post that our master bathroom was one of the rooms we were going to tackle. It’s far from done, but we have made good progress in that Keith wrapped up our new (to us) vanity which I found on Facebook Marketplace for $150 all in. I think it looks terrific. I’ve ordered mirrors which I hope show up (not quite sure about getting packages up here), a new shower door, towel rods, lighting, etc. Hopefully we’ll have a completely finished project to show you in the next two weeks or so.

To remind you, here’s a picture of “before” for the bathroom vanity.

And here’s the during and the after. Mind you, that husband of mine had to re-do the plumbing from one sink to two. No easy task, I promise.

Now, on to what else was accomplished this weekend. Keith moved the laundry from a laundry closet which will be demoed soon to our master closet. The master closet is 5’x8′ approximately and big enough to house a washer/dryer combo. We went back and forth on this subject for a while when we decided to demo the middle of the house where the laundry did reside. Finally after a conversation with my friend Debbie where she told me they had put a combo unit in their closet, I convinced Keith it was a good idea. And it was! This won’t shock you to hear that my thrifty nature kicked in again and I found us a fairly new used washer/dryer combo on Facebook Marketplace for $400. (a fun small world story here – when I went to message the person selling it I realized we had two friends in common on Facebook – turns out she’s friends with my sweet cousin Ellen and we were all at Ellen’s wedding in Charleston in July!)

Back to the point. In just a few hours, Keith moved plumbing to our master closet, and put in the new electrical for the dryer. He then disconnected the old washer and dryer and we (yes, I helped with this) moved the old washer and dryer out of the house, over the yard, down the very steep driveway and into the garage. We are keeping them as one day we may want to put more laundry down in the basement. He then connected up our new unit and I’ve already done three loads of laundry in it. Woo hoo! We do still need to put up the drywall behind it but didn’t have all of the right supplies. We’ll probably have our handyman help with that. Here are a few pictures…

There was one project this weekend that was (mostly) mine. That was putting in a new retractable screen door for the front door. The old screen door slammed shut on you and made a horrible noise. This one doesn’t hide the door and is pretty cool how it works. I didn’t find this used, but rather ordered it from Home Depot. Here are a few pics.

Last but not least, we moved the gate that was by the front steps over to the back side of the house since we are going to expand the steps and front area. Chloe, our adorable miniature dachshund has gotten quite bold and gone exploring a little too much for my liking. Rather than build a new gate, we simply took off the existing one and repurposed it to the side of the house. The only cost here was a 2×4 and 4×4 post. When the house is repainted it will look better but for now, we don’t really care as long as Chloe can’t go adventuring quite so much.

That’s it for now folks! Because I haven’t yet figured out how to make the post not look weird if I share it on social media, I’m going to put another picture of the view to wrap up this post! I hope you enjoyed! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to put them here or on Facebook.