We have been working hard to get the house in “appraisal” shape. The one big outstanding job was to finish the hall/foyer floor. On Monday and Tuesday, Chris polyurethaned the floor – we have one more coat to do on the whole hall that hopefully will happen tonight.
Being the resident electrician, I installed a lot of lights this week – the foyer, hall, medium bedroom, and dining room (Chris did most of the dining room installation due to the heavy fixture). It’s amazing how different the rooms look by changing the lighting – some of the lights were very ugly (and incredibly dirty - the dining room light had a quarter inch of dust in it!). Below are the pictures of the dining room and medium bedroom. My camera batteries died this morning while I was trying to take a picture of the foyer light so I’ll post those next week.
Because we had so many lights, we needed a lot of light bulbs. Fortunately, we got a great deal on CFLs – a box of 12 for $3.97 (normally $15+)!
The rest of the week was spent working on the hall/foyer walls and ceiling. The hall needed a lot of patching (particularly where we removed the linen closet!). While Chris was using a putty knife to scrape off some excess drywall compound, the knife stopped but his hand didn’t. He got a really big gash in his thumb and it bled quite a bit. Fortunately it wasn’t very deep so he shouldn’t need stitches.
After that excitement, the priming and painting went pretty smoothly. We still need to do a touch up coat and some edging near the ceiling.
We also primed and painted the interior of the front and back doors. These were very gross and had seen better days. Now they look nice and clean (I’ll have to post those pictures next week too)!
On Sunday afternoon we picked up the trim we need to finish the hallway. This included baseboard and door trim. The original trim around the doors was put on backwards so it was necessary to buy new.
I had removed the original baseboard trim a long time ago and I put all the small pieces in a bucket to keep them all together. This bucket disappeared when we were having our chimney work done and the small pieces went with it. Now at least the foyer/hall will have a nice new look.
The weather around here has been perfect the last couple weeks - day temps in the 60s with not a drop of rain. One thing we have enjoyed on these nice days is looking at the beautiful colors of the leaves.
The not-so-enjoyable part is when the leaves fall all over your yard. Fortunately for us, our old neighbors gave us their yard sweeper. The yard sweeper gets attached to the back of the tractor. The turning of the wheels of the sweeper cause the brushes inside to turn as well (resulting in the leaves being swept into the bag. Chris used it on Saturday to pick up all the dead leaves. It took him 15 minutes to complete the task while it took our next door neighbor 3 days to do the same job with a leaf blower!
The next couple days we’ll work on finishing the hall (installing radiator covers, doors, trim, etc.). We also hope to get the crown molding installed in the living room and dining room.
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