The Construction Continues

Matt has moved on to the other half of the basement now. I am so proud of him. Somehow he squeezes in time while he works full time and is taking two college courses at the same time. We had to tear down the ceiling in the tiled room and one and half walls (which were stucco - yuck!) Matt raised the duct to give a little more headroom as well. He's also working on making the unfinished laundry room into two rooms: one unfinished tool room in the back and one finished laundry room in the front. It's really coming along considering the little time Matt actually gets to spend working down there.

When It Rains, It Pours

When people say they have a "Case of the Mondays," it must feel something like today. In the past 24 hours, things have been not so good, to say the least. I must begin by saying the basement has been coming out wonderfully. I have been very busy and haven't been updating as much as I should. To begin with, Matt and his dad finished the ceiling and my Uncle Paul did a fantastic job with the recessed lighting. We weren't sure it was going to work out, but he made it work and I love it. We've just about finished the trim and the rest of the basement as well. Matt and his dad spent all day redoing the stairs so that they could be stained to match the rest of the basement. I spent all this time in Home Depot with some guy in the paint department (not my usual Sal or Gary) and he supposedly matched the floor as best he could. It turned out like this...

And Matt HATED it. It was much too dark and he couldn't stand it... so off I went to Home Depot where Sal tried to save my butt by giving me this stain stripper stuff. I spent about 45 minutes on the first stair with my hands in elbow-high rubber gloves and my goggles on... The stair color went about 2 shades lighter.... and I mean 2 very, very slight shades lighter. In the end, we tore up the stairs and Matt redid them. We got all new treads and started over. This
time, I'm staining and polyurethaning them a lighter color which matches the rest of the trim in the room. It will have to be better.
In the meantime, I told you that when it rains, it pours... and I wasn't kidding. Yesterday morning, Matt mowed the front lawn, finished up, headed around back, and the mower seized up. We bought the mower the second week we were here, around the first of May... brand new... and now it doesn't work. Matt has to take it back to Home Depot and hope they'll help us out. Then, this morning, my friend Tom comes over to replace our hot water heater. He goes to shut off the water at the water valve and the valve breaks. I call a plumber to come and help us while Tom decides to come back next week to do the hot water heater. While all of this is going on, the refrigerator stops keeping things cold and Comcast stops working. In less than 24 hours, it has poured, literally outside and figuratively inside. Hopefully, ALL of these issues can be reconciled without too much pain or money on our ends!!

Making the Pieces Fit

Things are finally coming together nicely. After a month and a half, I have finally caught up with all the laundry. All the clothes that needed to be washed from storage are finally clean and most are put away. The house has been coming along as well. Matt and my father have been putting up trim around the basement. We really only have the stairs and the storage cabinet to do before we can put down all of the trim. I think they maybe could have used one more coat of stain but we got impatient.

On Friday Matt and I put the mirror and shelving back up in the bar area. A piece of it got broken, but we're going to trim it out so that it's not noticeable. Matt and his dad put up the rest of the grid for the drop ceiling yesterday. Matt's dad tiled our downstairs bathroom with this great Canyon Slate tile that I absolutely loved at Lowe's. The wood floors bring out a tint of red in it while the paint color brings out a little green and a little brown. I really love the way it looks.
For some unknown reason, blogger won't let me turn this picture, but it's the best view of the flooring so I'm posting it aToday my uncle Paul came over and put up our recessed lighting. We were worried about it but I think it ended up coming out really great.

A Brazilian Cherry Memorial Day

Memorial Day weekend proved to be a very busy weekend for us. We spent Saturday celebrating Zosia & Eric's new home with them at a cookout and spent Sunday celebrating the newly crowned Dr. Marissa A. Fast, M.D. However, the house did not stop just because we left! While Matt and I were at this fabulous brunch in Malden & then Josh's house for a cookout in Melrose, Rick (Matt's dad) and his uncle Mike were here putting up the drop ceiling grid. I don't know how long they worked on Sunday but they got the larger half of the basement done and we're so psyched. We got home from Josh's around 8:30 on Sunday night and did the second coat of paint on the walls, just a bit lighter in color. We finished the paint close to midnight and called it a night.
On Monday, Marissa's boyfriend Josh came over and he and Matt began laying the new Brazilian Cherry hardwood flooring in the basement. While they were working, I went and bought a new router at Lowe's and decided to router the edges of some 1x3s for the trimwork in the basement. After one trip to Home Depot and two to Lowe's, as well as a lot of frustrations and two routers, the new router that I finally got figured out was great and I loved it. After all the aggravation though, my head cold was bad and I only got through one piece of trimwork before I had to throw in the towel and stop using power tools. My eyes were blurry, my nose was runny, my head was sneezy and pounding, and things were overall, not looking good. My dad kindly came by and took over and routered all of the rest of the trim for me. Mom helped me to stain it and we put that to the side.
Matt, Josh, and my dad did a pretty good job. They made it as far as they could on the floor before quitting. I've got to get out to Woburn to Lumber Liquidators and get some more vapor barrier so they can finish it this weekend. In the meantime, I love how the basement is finally starting to take shape and I can not wait to get my crap put away!

Paint by Numbers

Matt spent the entire day on Sunday sanding the basement. I [conveniently] had to go to PJ's baby shower and couldn't possibly avoid that to help Matt sand. In truth, I felt pretty awful that I wasn't here helping Matt but in the end, I was glad. I hate sanding! Anyways, Matt sanded everything Sunday and I went down Sunday night and helped him clean. Monday morning, my cousin Tony came over while we were at work and primed the entire basement for us. It took him most of the day but it looked great and we were psyched to have one more thing done down there. We decided to go with a beige color, Stonington Beige, for the basement. It's the same color in my mother's living room and we both like it so I picked up the paint and called in the troops. I was lucky enough to have one of my favorite college friends, my roommate Mal, come out and help us out. Between her and my family (my parents and my cousin Tony), we were able to get the entire basement painted in less than two hours. Apparently painting by numbers really does the trick. I'm not sure about the color yet. It's hard to tell without good lighting down there. Matt didn't like it at first. He and I perceive colors differently and he was sure that at the top of our stairs, the color looked to brown. I saw green. Regardless, I think I might go have them lighten the other two gallons just a little so that when we do the second coat we can lighten it up a bit. It is a basement, a movie room, and a bar room so I don't want it to be too bright, but maybe just a little lighter will be nice.

Rocking the House

The sheetrock in the basement has been the thorn in my side since we bought the house. I'm not the most patient person but I've built houses before from the ground up and I know these things take time... but I can't remember the last time I wanted something done as bad as I want to be done with this damn sheetrock! I just can't quite believe how bad the dust is from the sheetrock. It's everywhere! Even when I hung plastic and sheets and the like in doorways, it seems they disappear before I know it and in comes the dust. There are footprints in every room of my house. I don't know how, but they're there. I make it a point to change my shoes when I go downstairs and I make it a point to put out rugs to wipe your feet on and still.. still there is sheetrock dust in every corner of my house.
That being said, the basement is coming along quite nicely. The sheetrock is now, for the most part, done, but I'm almost scared that suddenly they're going to do something else. Suddenly more dust is going to appear - I just know it. In the meantime, I spent some time on my hands and knees washing the floors and every nook and cranny of the first floor in an attempt to rid myself of the dust and hoped for the best!

Washington Cherry

So the basement is at a standstill while the mud is drying so we decided not to blow off a day of work and instead to switch gears and work on the sunroom. There was a greenish carpet in there that we had to get rid of. On top of stains and discolorations from the sun in the room, I can't have carpets; my allergies are awful. On Saturday, Matt tore up the carpet, and he and my dad spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening laying down a new laminate hardwood floor in Washington Cherry.

It was about 3/4 of the way done when my dad and Matt quit for the night. I headed off to Hilltop to spend my Mother's Day waiting on everyone else's mothers & when I got home, the room was done. We still have to add trim and rearrange things, but I love the flooring. I can't wait for this room to be finished and useable so that we can spend warm nights (or cool ones) out here on the couch relaxing.

The Writing on the Walls

We've acquired quite a bit of trash through all of this demolition. I don't know if I'd be exaggerating if I said that we had about 50 or so contractor trash bags full of drywall and plaster, nails, dirt, and dust under our sunroom. Fifty might even be an understatement. My Uncle Bobby has been awesome enough to get rid of a ton of the trash for us, and so he was here for a few hours today helping out with that. While he was getting rid of the trash, I put my cousins to work. Tiana tested out our new lawnmower. She did a fantastic job on the front of the house, but I think it was a little more tiring than she expected. We'll get to the backyard later in the week. At least our neighbors won't think we're slobs!I decided to put my godson Cory to work as well. I brought him down in the basement to the half bath and let him go to town.

He did such a good job, we even let him write his name on the walls. This may be the only time it is okay, right, and appropriate to write on a bathroom's wall.

Tiana wanted to do a little as well.... get out some aggression, so we let her take a hammer to the wall a few times, too.

Besides Uncle Bobby, Tiana, and Cory, we also were lucky enough to have my mother here cleaning the entire basement out once again, Matt's parents and Uncle Mike working on the basement for a while, and my Uncle Paul and cousin Anthony doing the electrical in the basement. Once again, we've been so lucky and so blessed to be able to count on so many people. We even had our new neighbor, John, come by yesterday and offer us the use of his lawn mower until we bought we one. I told him we had bought one just a few hours previous, but if this was his way of telling us our grass needed mowing, we'd get right on it!

Stained

Everything about me is now stained. Friday night, my mom and I took a ride to Mill Stores in Malden while my father and Matt put up sheetrock in the basement. We brought my kitchen drawer with us so that we could match a stain as close as possible. We bought one quart of Zar Rosewood stain; John at Mill Stores promised me that it would cover two end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand. He didn't lie. I got everything done and still have almost a quarter of the quart leftover.
Since late Friday night, I have been sanding, prepping, staining, and polyurethaning (is that even a word?) everything in our living room. Little by little, I've stained each piece, my hands, my arms, my legs, my feet, and parts of my sunroom (where luckily the carpet will soon be torn out). I think the dark coloring looks much better than the light against our Benjamin Moore Putnam Ivory Eggshell paint. I'm just about finished with the television stand, which I think looks awesome. I'm pretty excited about it. I can't wait to be able to purchase a new kitchen set and stain it to match the rest of the pieces. It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.

Closets for Short People & Stairways for Tall

One of the biggest issues with the basement (of course, other than the aqua stucco walls and white stained carpeting) was that if I, at 4'11"ish, was to walk down the stairs, I barely cleared the bottom few steps. The coat closet in the living room caused the ceiling to be very low and, quite frankly, we were pretty worried that Matt or one of our other tall friends would knock themselves unconscious one night (see picture right). We decided that since we'd be doing all this work in the basement, we should definitely spend some time making the closet a little shorter and adding a few inches on so that tall people could go down our stairs carefree! After ripping up the carpets, prying off even more mirrors from the wall, and demolishing the rest of the walls, Matt and his dad started fixing the height today.

If you look close in the picture of the closet floor, you can actually see the saw cutting through my beautiful hardwood and getting awfully close to the doorframe.

After a little bit, the end result is more height in the stairs for tall people and a closet that's got a nice step in it so that I (and other short people) can reach the clothes bar better. We still need to add a laminate hardwood flooring over the top and side so that it looks halfway decent, but for the time being, it's doing its job!

Renovation Realities

The renovation reality is - nothing ever goes quite as planned... but isn't that the fun of it? Haha. Right now, our focus is on the basement. We've been really lucky so far; our family and friends have been amazing with helping us out. After the Matt, Eric, & Joe worked their tails off on Saturday, my Grandpa went down with Matt on Saturday night to do some nail-pulling and general cleaning up. My cousin Tony came over Sunday morning and pulled nails. It sounds so simple but considering how many nails hold up a piece of sheetrock, and how much sheetrock was nailed to the ceiling (far above my reach), it was a huge help. My Uncle Paul was over Sunday and Monday and ran all of our wires for us. He put in new light switches, ran wires in the ceiling for recessed lighting and internet, and fixed some other electrical issues. Eric came back on Sunday and helped Matt with more of the demolition and clean-up. We've got piles and piles of contractor trash bags full of sheetrock and nails and plaster right now. It's a little crazy.
Last night, I spent a couple of hours with Matt in the basement running speaker wire for the surround sound, cleaning up the messes, pulling even more nails, and generally prepping the basement for the arrival, today, of Matt's father and Uncle Mike, who are helping with the rocking of the basement. They got a chunk of it done today. Tonight, my parents came over to help with some more of the clean up. Matt finished the removal of sheetrock behind the bar. With the help of my parents, my Nana & Grandpa, and my little cousin Anthony, we were able to get the basement cleaned up, all of the trash bagged, and the walls ready for more sheetrock.
The upstairs is coming along, slowly but surely. The sheetrock dust from the basement is awful and I can't wait until the rocking is done so that I can clean my house and have it stay clean for more than five minutes. At least we're lucky enough to have such a fantastic family. We really can't show how much we truly appreciate what they've been doing for us over the past week. I think Matt would agree with me that we're pretty lucky.

Demolition Men

Things didn't go exactly as planned, but we're getting there. The other day, Matt and his Uncle Mike went and got all the sheetrock and other things we need for the basement. Yesterday, my cousin Tony and Matt tore up all of the carpet and loaded the trailer for a dump day this morning. Today, Matt and his friends, Eric and Joe, tore up the basement pretty good. Take a look back to see what the basement used to look like. Not quite the same...