Memorial Weekend Madness!

I hope everyone has had a restful Memorial Day weekend. I can’t say ours has been restful but I can say it’s been productive! We are finally getting things a little more organized and a little more homey, in spite of the fact that we’re still living in a construction zone. We had two couches and two chairs delivered a week and a half ago and it has made life a LOT more comfortable to be up here. We still have an Amazon box as an end table, a round ottoman that normally sits under my baby grand in Atlanta as our ottoman, etc. I’ve got a coffee table and end tables on order so those should arrive in the next couple of weeks and make it a little more cohesive looking. Here’s a peek at our den now. Note the lovely backdrop of the tool chest and the compound miter saw, but hey, this is a huge improvement, trust me!

• 

• 

• 

Now on to the progress that has been made since I last blogged. First, let’s take a peek at the flooring. Remember that we basically gutted the middle of the house, removing a brick fireplace, pantry and laundry closet. That left a LOT of missing flooring. But thanks to Kevin, our handyman extraordinaire, you can’t even tell that we took anything out! Just to remind you, this is what it looked like just a few weeks ago.

And now look how great the floors look!

• 

• 

• 

• 

We had my aunt and uncle, our first visitors, up here this weekend, which was fun. My uncle earned his keep by helping Keith finish hanging the interior doors! You may remember that the first door took us a very long time to hang and Keith was probably ready to kill me for not buying pre-hung! Well, Keith (with some help from me) hung 2 doors on Friday and he and my uncle hung 6 on Saturday. They were in full beast mode and killed it! There are still a couple of door knobs to go in, but they’re on doors that I started painting. Take a look at how great the (unpainted) doors look!

I have started the process of painting the interior doors. It’s been a bit of trial and error to get the right way to paint them, but I think I’ve figured it out and they will look great when they’re all done!

You may have noticed our ceiling trim in the picture of the two doors above. We played around with different options for our ceiling trim. We didn’t really want to do traditional crown molding, since it didn’t really fit with our vibe. We are really pleased with what we came up with! I hope you like it as well.

• 

• 

Back to doors. One of the things I spent considerable time on this weekend was our new front door. It is a gorgeous mahogany door, and we toyed with staining it. But it looked so pretty we decided to just put polyurethane on it. It was a lot of elbow grease to sand, poly, sand, poly, sand, poly! But it looks great. This isn’t a great picture of it, because of the glare, but you’ll get to see it up and in place on my next blog and I can’t wait!

• 

• 

This isn’t such an exciting thing for you as the reader, but one thing we also accomplished this weekend was getting all of the construction materials off the floor and onto our rolling shelves which had been sitting in pieces in our basement. It is now easier to find everything and a lot easier to keep the floors cleaned!

Last but not least, I was able to finally start working on my desk again. Because I’ve needed it to work my day job when we’re up here, I hadn’t had a chance to get back to painting it. I’ve been working on it in its primed state for the past two months and I finally had time to work on it. After sanding it, I started using my fancy paint sprayer which SHOULD have done a great job on it. Instead, it kind of looks like orange peel. Keith & I have played with the settings, read the instructions repeatedly, and we just can’t get it to work well. So, I may end up back with my little hand sprayer you hook up to the air compressor. You can see that I set up a spraying station in our unfinished basement.

Now let’s talk a little bit about what’s coming up this week and next weekend. We have ordered a direct vent fireplace for the den which should arrive tomorrow. We’re very excited to get this framed up and built out. We’ve picked out the style, tile, etc. and it will be fun to get this project started. We’re also getting new carpet in the bedrooms tomorrow. And we’ve mapped out the board and batten design for the front hall. And of course there’s still plenty more trim work to be done. Oh, and let’s not forget that the new front door will finally get installed! It’s still super busy here but we’re having fun and that’s what matters! Until next week…..