Getting ready for some demo!

Happy Sunday everyone! It’s been a busy week for us. As I mentioned last weekend, my mom, sister and brother-in-law came up last weekend. We did some work at the mountain house but also managed to have a little fun. My brother-in-law took some AMAZING drone videos of the house and property. If you feel like seeing our little slice of paradise from a birds eye view, take a look at these videos. Thanks Jeff!

We headed back down to Atlanta for the better portion of the week so my mom could have a surgery which will hopefully give her use of her left shoulder again. So please pray it worked! We won’t know for about five months but the surgery went well and she did great. They left yesterday to go back to Baton Rouge, but before they left we also got some house things done. My sister loves Ikea so I went over there with her and mom on Friday and managed to get a super helpful Ikea person in their kitchen department who “reserved” the cabinet door fronts and drawers which weren’t available for me to order online a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even know that was possible so it made me super happy that I don’t have to keep checking inventory. They’ll call me when it’s all ready. Woo hoo! Ikea for the win!

One other thing my sister did for me while I was home was paint over a canvas I had ordered. Long story short, I had used this app called Waterlogue to take pictures and make them look like watercolors. It worked really well on most of the pictures, but one picture of our view here came out super pixellized (that’s not a word but I hope you know what I mean). It looked horrible until she painted over it with acrylics and it looks amazing now! Susan is quite talented, isn’t she?

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Here’s one of the other Waterlogue canvases I had ordered and we hung over our bed in the master up here.

I also did a little “hunting and gathering” while I was in Atlanta. I love Facebook Marketplace and several exchanges I’m on, and I am constantly looking for a deal. I found two pendants for over our island, which I can’t show you because we wrapped them in bubble wrap. But we’ll have them up in a few weeks! I also found a really pretty rustic looking mirror which is now up in the guest room and looks terrific.

Little by little our walls are finally getting some art and such on them!

Keith and I came back up yesterday morning and managed to unpack the car right before the skies opened. While Keith began working on electrical and venting for the island, I trimmed out the stairs. You’ll remember that we put the new treads and risers on a couple of weeks ago. We had caulked and painted the risers, and I had stained and sealed some cove molding, but we hadn’t gotten around to putting up the molding. That is finally done.

It’s nothing too exciting but at least it’s done. I’ve also painted the stair railing but we haven’t gotten it up yet. It’s on our list of to-do’s, but isn’t a super high priority.

Now back to that island. Keith has installed two outlets for the sides of the island and one for the microwave and range. He’s also installed the fan for the downdraft. One of the reasons we were so excited to find our slightly used JennAir range was because it had a downdraft. Since we are putting it in our island, we didn’t want a hood for it and this solves that problem! We have our gas company coming out tomorrow to hook up the gas for it, so hopefully it will be fully functional tomorrow and we will be ready for demo. I’ve already started putting some things in the island for the weeks we are without a full kitchen.

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One dilemma we’ve had about the kitchen demo was what to do about a sink to wash dishes while we’re without a dishwasher or a real sink. We don’t have a bathtub and don’t really want to attempt to wash dishes and cookware in a bathroom sink. We will eventually build out the basement and when we run plumbing for it, Keith wants a utility sink for the garage. We went on and bought the sink and will hook it up to a garden hose on our deck for the time being. It should be super classy looking! 😉

I feel like I’m babbling here, but we got a lot done this weekend and are getting ready for the big kitchen project. Today I spent the better portion of the day painting our porch/deck boards. We love our handyman but it’s taking them longer to get the house painted than we wanted, so I am helping out by painting the easy portion of it. The first coat has to go on with a paintbrush so it’s a slow process, but I made a fair amount of progress today. I got all of the front and the better portion of the side done. I wanted to go further but just ran out of steam at the end of the day. I am so happy to get rid of the barn red and replace it with a lighter and brighter gray.

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While I was outside painting away, Keith was finally able to put the blower and decorative front on our fireplace. We finally got the pieces from the guy we bought it from three months ago. I wouldn’t recommend buying anything from him, given that we essentially had to threaten disputing the charges with Amex since he hadn’t given us everything we paid for. That got him off his butt and we now have a beautiful and FINISHED fireplace! It has a remote control, a blower which puts out great heat and it looks great.

That’s about it for us, folks! We are planning on Demo Day being next Saturday. Our plan is to make a time-lapse video of it. We’ll see if we’re successful with that or not, and if we are you know where you’ll see it. That’s right! On next week’s edition of “At Home with the Heffrons”!

Have a wonderful week.