Another week in the books!

Wow, what a week! After our Memorial weekend madness, mom and I had to head back down to Atlanta for her to go to Physical Therapy and Keith stayed behind to take delivery of our new carpet. Yay! It was fun to come back and have some nice new lighter colored carpet to sink our feet into. It looks great and we are very pleased with it. To give you a little reminder of what the carpet looked like before, here’s a pic from the day we moved in.

And now you can see our “after” picture! We chose a textured carpet with a subtle pattern in a lighter neutral.

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But honestly, I was a lot more excited about our front door which also got installed this week. It makes a dramatic difference to the exterior of the house. You can now see the killer view when you pull up in front of the house. I am so pleased with it! After all of my hard work sanding and putting polyurethane on it last week, it was nice to finally see it up. I still need to clean the edges where the poly either bled through or I was messy, but it looks absolutely amazing!

Okay, well, maybe that view isn’t so “killer” since it’s got all of our construction equipment which you get to look at, but you get my drift! 😉 Here’s another picture of it after Keith put on the trim around it.

We went with a programmable lock, which will be a lot easier than using a lockbox. Here are a few more pictures for you to see the progression of the front door this week.

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One other thing I should mention about the door is we changed the direction it opened. The old door opened to the left which was somewhat awkward as it opened right next to the hall entrance to the guest bathroom. We intentionally bought our new door to open to the right which is where the long stretch of the hallway is. That brought up one issue which was the light switches. Since Keith couldn’t switch them to the other side of the wall, he had to figure out a way to move them to just past the door. Along with our handyman (who does the drywall work for us, thank goodness), we decided the easiest way to do this was to cut out a 4′ section of the drywall and pull the wiring down a few feet. It wasn’t the most graceful solution but it worked and this is what happened!

Thankfully Keith has excellent electrician skills and was able to use them for this. One other electrical bit of work he did while we were gone was to hang the new light fixture over our kitchen table. My sweet friend Anna gave us this light fixture she had bought and couldn’t use, so thanks Anna! We love it! We do need to shorten it a little bit but I think it looks amazing.

Once mom and I arrived back up after PT on Thursday, I got to work on the interior solid wood doors. I had figured out the best way to paint them last week but simply ran out of time. This weekend I was able to wrap up 4 doors and have now figured out how to paint them relatively quickly. Which is a good thing when you don’t have a door on the bathroom. Just sayin! The finished doors look amazing and I’m really proud of the work we did on them!

In between all of the coats of paint on the doors, I worked with Keith to finally dress up the long entrance hall which greets you from the front door. I had mentioned in my first blog that we wanted to add some board and batten to give the long narrow hall some interest. Last week we drew it out with pencil on the walls and agreed to how high and how far apart we wanted the boards. This weekend we brought that to life and milled, painted and put up all of that trim. That’s fairly time consuming but the result was so worth it. Once the trim was up, I was back to caulking until my fingers bled! Then it was time to tape and paint.

We do still have to switch out the electrical outlets and switches and put up the trim around the ceiling and paint, but we’re close with the hall now. And here’s a look at the (almost) finished product.

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When we wrapped that up, we had a fun surprise visit from the Robinsons from whom we bought the house! It was so great to see them and see their reactions to all of the changes we’ve made in the past 10 weeks. We had a great visit and hope to see them again really soon. They have bought a house “in town” in Highlands so they’re not too far away. After they left we did a little more trim around the entrances to the bedrooms (we had done the trim inside the room but not outside) and then called it a day and headed back to Atlanta. When we go back up later this week we’ll wrap up the trim along the bedroom walls and in the hall, paint the ceilings and then get to working on our fireplace. I’ll tell you a lot more about that next week but here’s a sneak peek at the prep work being done for our new fireplace!

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Have a good week!