17 Days and Counting!

Starting the Kitchen Floor & Finishing the Painting on the Kitchen Walls
Jonathan may be stuck in this position after so many hours using that nailer.

Hello Friends!

Am I really leaving the country in 17 days?! With our departure fast approaching, we are moving and grooving on the house to see how much we can get done! Perhaps we will be able to move in after we come back from Thailand in April…. Or maybe for a night or two before we leave??

Saying the kitchen floor is BEAUTIFUL is a gross understatement. We bought this birch flooring at the Restore (Habitat for Humanity’s second hand home-goods store) for a little more than a song, but I didn’t know it was going to be SO GORGEOUS! Will and Jonathan spent the week putting it in and I am happy to report that it already has two coats of varnish on it! I am stunned that this is my actual floor that I get to walk on while I am in my kitchen. Yikes! It is too pretty for my feet! The old ripped up kitchen floor has been SO scary looking and SO ugly for SO long that I can’t believe my eyes…or my feet!

Renting the sanders for the kitchen floor also led to the first steps of refinishing the dining room floor and the upstairs hallway. We made a MESS but it is sure fun to see something that looks like a floor rather than dirty gray carpet pad stuck to a really old floor. Sarah and I also started chipping away at the stairs to see if we can refinish them…what a job! Stay tuned for more pictures on these projects ;)

My painting tornado weekend with my sister Rachel was awesome and crazy. When we put our heads together to accomplish a goal, there isn’t much stopping us...especially at 3 a.m. when our sanity is questionably blurred by fumes and exhaustion. We had lots of fun, drank lots of coffee, and got a lot of painting done! Our efforts extended to every room that could be painted. I just have a couple areas left that are full of our stuff from moving and the whole house will be painted! I would STILL be painting a week later if I had to do it all alone!

I crunched the numbers for you all to see:

1 weekend (Friday night – Sunday night)

33 Hours of Painting

7 Areas (Rooms/Hall/Stairs) (Including Ceilings)

15 Gallons of Paint

11 Different Colors

2 Crazy Ladies! :)

What’s next? Kitchen cabinets! Woohoo! It is time to free the cupboards from their cardboard confinements so we can actually SEE them! My bro-in-law Arric is headed down here with his family today to help us put them in over the long weekend. This also means that we will be “gaining” another room in the house because the cupboards have been stacked in the dining room for months! Stay tuned for more pictures!

That’s all for now.

Enjoy the pictures!

Back-of-steel Jonathan and his crazy painter wife

Almost Finished Laying the Floor!

If we aren't already at the house working with the guys,
us girls like to visit the house to see what's going on.
Will and Jonathan always say they work faster when we are there.

Floor is laid and we are ready to sand!

Second coat of varnish!
Please note that we can actually wear SOXS without shoes in this part of the house now without fear of foot-death!
It is like a real-live place to live!

Helping with the second coat of varnish. Look how pretty it is!!

Ladies and Gentlemen... my kitchen floor! (Don't drool too much :)
Does this look like 'cheap' flooring from a second-hand store? I think not!

Painting the Kitchen -
The first colored paint of the weekend after ceilings were complete.

Painting pals. We had fun :) Notice one of many cups of coffee.

Our cheer leading/ snack bringing/ comic relief/ support crew delivering paint from the mother ship (aka, Will and Cub's House) These girls kept us laughing with many surprise visits to the house throughout the weekend.

Our chameleon accent wall for the Kitchen had a hard time deciding what color to be.
Purple won over swamp green, gray, and navy blue.

This was the beginning of our 3 a.m. madness. We went over to the house "real quick" at 10:30 p.m. to figure out a color for the office upstairs. Let's just say the fun didn't stop there. In this picture, we are "custom mixing" colors to try and create the perfect blue for the office accent wall. Of course we couldn't SLEEP after finding the PERFECT color... we had to paint! ...turns out paint takes 'longer' to dry in the middle of the night :)

TaDa! The perfect blue looks black in this picture, but I assure you,
we made an awesome color!

Finished product for the office.
Jonathan wanted "regal/modern" ... So, we have regal blue and modern gray.
I know, we're brilliant.

Painting the accent wall in our bedroom... so much fun!