Buttoning a few things up

This week’s blog is going to be a little lighter on pictures as we worked on a lot of little things but nothing as dramatic as the past few weeks. We worked hard to button a lot of things up so we can be ready to start the fireplace work next week. I’ll get to that in a minute.

In the midst of doing all of the work at the house yesterday, we attended three (count ’em three) virtual events! My sweet friend Robin from work had her Bat Mitzvah on Zoom and I couldn’t be prouder of her. Then my brother-in-law Jeff retired from the Air Force and there was a Facebook Live for us to watch the beautiful ceremony. And last but not least there was a virtual Gala for the Illinois Leukemia and Lymphoma Society MWOY (Man/Woman of the Year) where my friend Clio won Woman of the Year for raising over $169,000 for LLS!

Now, back to our progress, which we are both pretty pleased with. I’ve been able to paint 6 of the 9 doors. The other three are hung with door knobs, etc. but just need me to paint them. It takes a day for me to do two (I have two sets of sawhorses set up), as I have to do two coats on each side and also allow for drying time. Yesterday we got up, took down the two bedroom doors and I painted them. Then lucky Keith got to hang them about 9 p.m. last night. Good fun for him! Apparently I did a lot of painting yesterday, since I have a blister on my thumb from holding the paintbrush!

While I was painting the doors, Keith started putting up more trim on the bedroom walls. I joked that if you could put blinders on, you might actually think we’re done with the house, since those walls are wrapped up now. In between coats of paint on the doors, I came up and caulked all of that trim and eventually painted it all. Keith painted the ceilings in the hall and the guest bathroom, which we hadn’t gotten to last week.

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During the week Keith had also switched out our electrical switches for rocker switches and our outlets for nice clean white flat outlets. It’s amazing how such a little project makes such a big difference. I can’t stand the look of bandaid colored switches.

When we arrived back to the house this week, it felt like Christmas. Some more of our accent furniture had arrived. Yay! We assembled our new coffee table, lamps, etc. We are happy with everything and you can almost believe it’s not a construction site still!

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That is, you can almost believe it’s not a construction site until you look behind our swivel chairs and see a shop vac, a compound miter saw, etc. Hah!

Some of the pictures above didn’t come out so well, so here are stock photos of our coffee table, end tables and lamps.

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One other thing we wrapped up today was our master bedroom. I had ordered curtains but we hadn’t yet put them up. A thanks to our friend Anna who had some curtain rods which she couldn’t use, so we were able to use them to hang our curtains. It’s nice to get some color up. I do still need to get an extra long bedskirt if I can ever remember to order one. And we need art! Lots of art throughout the house! All in due time….

Now, let’s talk about our fireplace. We ordered a direct vent gas fireplace a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been delayed but should arrive this week. We built out the frame for it last week but can’t really do much else until we can set it in place. After a lot of discussion prior to us buying the house, we decided direct vent was the best option. It will only require use to cut a small hole in the side of the house, rather than build a chimney which is expensive and would be difficult to make happen. It will also generate a lot of heat as it will have a blower. It will be gas (propane) and will have your normal gas logs. Because it’s direct vent it will have a glass front to it, but it will be real flames and it will be super easy to just turn on and off. Here’s a picture of what the logs and box will look like.

We will build out the mantle to fit with the vibe of our house. We will be attempting to tile the surround ourselves, which may be an interesting endeavor! We have picked a 1″ x 2″ tumbled travertine tile which will hopefully be easy to install. And here’s a picture of our inspiration fireplace. The blogger who had this inspiration actually has plans you can buy, so we did go on and buy them to save ourselves some time when it comes to the cut list, materials needed, etc.

Thankfully Keith is very comfortable with running electric to allow for us to hang a TV and for the electric igniter for the fireplace. He’ll also run the venting and gas (not as hard as it sounds as the gas comes into the house directly under where the new fireplace will go). Hopefully we’ll make some good progress on this next weekend and I’ll be able to share with you some of the process. While Keith is working on that, I will be painting two more doors and working on our oak treads which we will be installing in our stairwell down to the basement. Right no the treads are builder grade pine in poor condition, so they need to be replaced. And once those two projects are wrapped up, we’ll be hitting Ikea and starting to buy some cabinets! Woot Woot!

Have a great week!