One of the things we considered our first major milestone in the home reno, the upstairs carpet, was installed last Friday! Woohoo! Sure, I got painters wrist in the process, but we got it donezo! Here we are enjoying our new carpet.. haha
Here’s Oak scraping off the popcorn in the almost-last popcorny-room upstairs.
This is in the last bedroom with popcorn. (We have a “not-thinking-about-it-now room that still has it – our master bathroom. BOOO. But it doesn’t have carpet, so as far as we’re concerned it doesn’t exist at the moment)
Many milestones achieved this weekend:
- Our contractor came and installed the new subflooring in the gray bedroom and hallway.
- Put first coat on trim in gray bedroom.
- Re-hung fan in gray bedroom (Thanks Dave!)
- Oak finished mudding and sanding the aforementioned “last bedroom”
- We spent like 3-4 hours cleaning all the drywall dust off the floors of the bonus room on Friday night (yay! engulfed in a dust cloud!). However, we did learn the running the vaccuum in “wet mode” by putting some water in the bottom of the canister allows the suction to stay MUCH longer than using the filter, with the same amount of exhaust dust. NICE shop vac tip there!!
- Washed all the bonus room walls with Murphy’s oil soap, which I’m convinced I am semi-allergic to, due to the minor rash I get from it EVEN WHEN I WEAR GLOVES! What the heck. Too bad this stuff works so well and smells nice.
- Primed the walls and ceiling of the bonus room. Thanks Dave!
- Cleaned drywall dust off many hardware pieces, like all the switchplates, and the ceiling fans and other light fixtures that need to be re-installed. Thanks mom!
- Painted the ceiling in the bonus room with our favorite Glidden color-changing paint.
- Put wood putty on trim in bonus & “last bedroom.”
- Murphy’s oil soap fun in “last bedroom.”
- Primer coat on walls, ceiling, and trim of “last bedroom.”
Hm. No wonder I am tired. haha. This will probably be the last post I make before carpet. We’re down to crunch time, folks.. 
We had the first major snow in the house this past month. We got about 6 inches of snow, shut down worthy in NC. Luckily for us we had plenty to keep us busy at home. However we did enjoy watching all the kids outside. For awhile, our side yard was the sledding spot. (Yes, the kids were polite enough to ask first). Then, when the road froze over (behind the trees in this picture) they all moved to that area and went nuts. There were seriously at least 20 kids out there sledding – and they went pretty far – about a quarter mile each run! This was almost better than TV for awhile… especially when they decided to start piling 3 kids on a single sled. Oh boy.
Pretty!
I’m back with an update on the basement bedroom. It’s been “done” for at least a few weeks now, but I finally got down there to take a few pictures. Half the issue is that we haven’t re-hung a light fixture in there yet, so I can’t snap a picture of darkness!
The paint was (once again!) found in the “oops” section at Home Depot. This is actually some Behr kitchen and bath paint (fancy!). I figured the light blue would lighten up the basement space. I had considered using the gray that I used in the upstairs bedroom down there, then I figured that’s just too much gray for a basement.
Here’s the closet. It’s totally a weird color – another oops paint.. It looked more beige in the store. Oh well, the white doors will go back on eventually! I’m pretty sure whatever is living in the closet doesn’t care what color it is. Whatevs! haha.
I don’t have too many plans in this room besides hanging a curtain and using the awesome $12 bedspread I got at Tarjay. I’m hoping when we go through all our stuff i’ll miraculously find some appropriate wall hangings for this room. Fingers crossed!
Yes, we’re still alive and still working on the house. Unfortunately we’ve been enslaved to the evilness that is the Bonus Room. While this is a wonderful room with lots of space (and a Wet bar! LOL)… it also means it has a LOT of drywall to be smoothed out. Double Booo!!! We spent like 3 evenings in a row in there sanding and smoothing. So much that we both have raw hands from the sanding action. Oh, fun-ness. I think we have a few more nights of some lighter sanding and mudding. I will definitely take some more “before” pictures before we prime and paint that room, which will hopefully be in the next week or so.
Oak also did a TON of work on another one of the upstairs bedrooms this weekend.. removing the texture and doing the initial “mud work.” In that room, we discovered some kind of previous ceiling damage when we removed the popcorn.. there was a good size 3ftx2ft patch in the back right corner of the room. Not sure what happened there, but it seems like it’s going to look okay, and whatever caused the issue to begin with is resolved. Oak noticed that the popcorn came off a lot harder in that room, and we think they probably painted the popcorn to match when they did the patch work.
In other news, I painted the closet in the gray bedroom. I used some boring ivory colored oops paint so that’s not really too exciting for a picture. I’m hoping to work on some of the door trim/windows in that room this coming week.
I need to choose a color for the stairway and hall. The problem is that it needs to be the same color as the entryway, which openly borders 3 rooms (formal living room, dining room, and family room). Do I go with a boring beigy color or a lighter version of the family room color I’ve chosen? The family room color is kind of a dark slightly bluish green which should compliment the wood trim in that room. I am thinking a chocolate color for the dining room, and the formal living room is currently a dark tan, which might stay that way for awhile at least (that room is actually in pretty good shape). Any thoughts?
