The Night Is Young

It's 11:57pm and I'm getting ready to start painting. Brad is out in the garage cutting some boards as quietly as possible at midnight with a table saw. It seems like we both just get going around this time of night. Unfortunately. I don't think we've gone to bed before 1:30 in several evenings.

We're on a time frame...Saturday our carpet comes upstairs so we're busy trying to paint and do any projects that are easier when you don't have to worry about destroying the floors. This weekend we painted the stairwell and upstairs hallways...probably one of the most challenging paintings since its a two story stairwell. Last week I painted Baileigh and Mckenna's room. Yesterday I painted all the baseboards and the trim around the window...painful! Trim painting sucks...but everything is creme color and just looks dirty so a fresh coat of white paint makes such a difference...it just takes forever.

The girls room is called "Pale Apple" and tends to look different in various lights. They also picked out a fan on one of our thousand trips to Lowe's that we finally decided to get for them...it's actually spinning on high in this picture so I think it is pretty cool that it looks like it isn't even moving in the photo. I took this picture a few minutes ago...you can see our luxurious accommodations on air mattresses.Brooke's room is chocolate brown and light pink on the top...these colors all look a little off, must be because it was pitch black when I snapped the photo. We added a chair rail and yesterday painted all the additional trim. We're going to rent a paint sprayer and spray all the doors white sometime this month.
This is the room I'm about to tackle. It will eventually be the nursery...Mckenna and Baileigh may split up until March because bedtime has been a nightmare and I'm too tired to deal with it, if so this will be Mckenna's room for awhile. The light blue isn't bad but we decided while we were painting to just neutralize it to a creme color and make changes once the baby arrives.
This the project duJour. The one thing I hate about this house is the current laundry room. It is very small and also serves as the mudroom off the garage so you have to enter through it to come inside. There is barely room for a laundry basket on the floor and I can just imagine how confined we would feel entering with bags of groceries and school bags, coats and shoes etc. So we've decided to use the 10x12 "bonus area" (where I've been stripping wallpaper) awkwardly off our master bedroom to create an upstairs laundry. I had an upstairs laundry room once in WA and I loved it! This room will be even larger and hopefully have a counter top for folding and cabinets and area to hang clothes. It also has two skylights in the ceiling that will now be in the laundry room so it won't even feel like being in a closet. We're rushing to get the wall framed and sheet rocked so its done before carpet arrives. The actual room we'll tile but we want the carpet professionally tacked down along the new wall. The plumber is hopefully coming later this week to move the pluming...our master bath is on the other side of this wall so there was already plumbing in the area to run lines off of.

And the chandelier...one of 10 lovely colonial brass fixtures throughout the house will be going...although it could have created a very formal laundry room!

This is the view from our bedroom into our master bath straight ahead...on the left are two closets and now there will be a wall on the right with the same double doors entering into the laundry room.

The family room issue is almost resolved, too. I don't even think I ever blogged about this...we discovered some moisture problems in the drywall over the fireplace. We ended up ripping it all out and found it was just glued to the cinder block above the chimney and over time rain was somehow causing moisture on the block and rotting the drywall. There was absolutely nothing to use to anchor the flat screen TV Brad ordered into the wall. He ended up framing the wall which allowed him to run electrical all throughout it and get these fancy speakers that you actually plaster over and you don't even see.

This is the room with primer on it. You can see wire up top that will be hidden by crown molding but will allow us to put small speakers in the back of the room. You can also barely see the four new lights in the ceiling that we added this weekend. The floors were on our "to do" list anyway so we didn't worry about them during this project. We're going to rent a floor sander this week and buff the floors and then restain them a lighter color.
That is the latest in our home renovation projects. I'm so anxious for this to be done so I can just sit on the couch and relax and take advantage of being pregnant as a reason to be lazy. Brad has taken the week after Labor Day off from work and we have two friends from NJ that are general contractors that are coming to camp in our basement and help Brad install our new kitchen. The cabinets arrive on Friday and the flooring is already sitting in the garage. The combinations of him being on vacation and help from friends has me much less anxious about getting this wrapped up.

Our household goods are in storage but we only have 30 days before we have to start paying...I think that means we're hoping to have our things delivered by September 15ish. That means 20 more days of cold metal folding chairs...I miss my couch!