This weekend's tasks

Thom got a snowday yesterday and fixed the pesky fan in the downstairs bathroom (which we lovingly call the "Harry Potter bathroom" as it is not only under the stairs but also unbelievably small). I plan to finish the second coat of paint in our bedroom tomorrow and maybe straighten up the basement a bit. I've been trying to take it a bit more easy as the snow shoveling and ice chipping of the past few days has pretty much taken all of my energy. We'll be glad when spring arrives.

Otherwise, we're excited for our first party - a housewarming party - on Saturday. We're expecting about 30 people, including our realtor - I'm excited for her to see what we've done already!

Bathroom finished

I finished the upstairs bathroom yesterday and was glad to be done. I think that the smallest room painted so far was also the toughest and took the longest. I think, however, it is the most dramatic difference we've seen so far. Anyway, the paint color looks great with the existing tile that's in there. We'll still look forward to doing a more dramatic overhaul this summer or next summer but for now it's a marked improvement over the girly '70's wallpaper.

Kitchen After

I realized I never put up a picture of what the kitchen looks like post-new paint. Here you are!

Bathroom: 1/3 done

Well, I spent a good part of today prepping the bathroom for paint. You can see the before shot here. I also spent a good 90 minutes or so prying off the metal frame that once held on tacky shower doors and then scraping off the caulking. So, anyway, priming is done, ceiling is painted (which I strongly disliked doing), and tomorrow I'll put the other two coats on of the beautiful blue we picked out. 

I also spent part of the night putting weather stripping caulk around the windows hoping that would help. Honestly, I don't see that it did but we'll see.

We also get our refrigerator delivered tomorrow - they had originally delivered one with the doors on the wrong side. So I think we'll be close to settling in. We also have our first dinner guests tomorrow night so we'll look forward to having some people over (it's also a good excuse to turn up the heat!)

It's probably time to rest for a while

I think I may have finally hit the wall. I am pretty tired and I wake up feeling tired in the morning. We got all the moving finally done yesterday and cleaned out the condo so that's all done (on a related note, we went to get Thom's golf clubs out of the shed in the back and found that the local chipmunks had used the box and parts of his bag to build themselves a nice little hangout back there). I think all the packing, the lifting, the climbing of stairs, etc. have just taken their toll on me. I pulled down the rest of the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom yesterday and will paint it this weekend but that may be it for a while.

On a good note, we got the washing machine finally installed yesterday and that seems to work well. I was unhappy to find out that we have to buy special detergent for front loading washers though. Who knew?

I did it!

I know this may not seem like much to most of you DIYers but I feel I have made my first step into serious home repair: I replaced our showerhead! Woot woot! Yes, it was devastatingly easy but I have never done any sort of plumbing repair before and I feel much more competent and able to do more from this point onward.

The other wonderful news is that our friend Paul (serious DIYer and owner of several flips) came by and fixed our main water shutoff valve issue as well as our washing machine shutoff valve issue. What was the answer? A tool! Hooray for tools! Hooray for evolution! It was called a channel lock and it basically just allowed the valves to be closed all the way (hand tightening would not do it). So hooray! No plumber!

The rest of today was spent moving crap. We have one more load at home and then we'll clean that place and be done (well, not really - we have to put everything away here too of course).

We're in!

After an exhausting day, we are finally in our new house! We are so excited :)

We are slowly putting things away while also moving miscellaneous stuff over from the condo. I am not terribly pleased about having to go back there but c'est la vie, right?

The moving part yesterday went fine - it seemed very expensive but I'd rather pay someone to move a king mattress and two couches in the ice and snow than do it myself for free. We also got our cable/internet hooked up yesterday (hence this posting) and Sears came to deliver the appliances. Two problems there, however: 1) the fridge has the handle on the wrong side of the door so they have to bring us a new one; and 2) the main water valve for the house doesn't actually shut off nor do the shut off valves for the washer so they couldn't hook it up for us. Yes, it looks like we're going to have to hire a plumber. So sad.

I also took my first shower in the house last night to much despair. The shower head is virtually just a faucet. In other words, there is no shower of water - it just pours out. We need a new shower head. Also, there is basically no hot water pressure. It seems that, to fix this issue, the owners instead turned the hot water to scalding so that a little hot water would go a long way to make more or less just warm water. Sigh.

I guess we should have anticipated some of this stuff - I mean, we couldn't have expected this to be perfect, right?

So, we're learning and figuring it out slowly. The bedrooms are great and we have tons of room. Thom loves having his own room/office/music room. Mancha even has her own room right now for her litter box and bed!

Back to work tomorrow. Our Wii says it's going to be 48 degrees tomorrow so that means we're going to work on pecking away at the ice mound that is our driveway.