Sale Prep - Day 9

Day 9 is my favorite day so far mostly because all of the work done on day 9 was done by me.

Our painter took off two days to go to his daughter's graduation in San Francisco.  Cool.  I support that.  But I kept thinking, hmmmmm, what can I do to make a tangible impact when I won't be in the way of the painters and don't have to go in to school to teach or go to meetings?

I call it - THE SOLUTION.

See, our problem is that we are outgrowing our space.  It happens to the best of us.  When we bought this place we were just two young people, engaged and looking forward to our wedding and our first little house.  Since then we have had a landslide, had two kids, started our own business, and I've worked about a dozen different jobs.  (Bear in mind, that is the nature of Adjunct educators, so it's not like I've been fired or something, it's just the way things work.)

So, on Day 9, I decided to find a way to clear out the clutter of our lives.  Now, at first, it may seem cruel.  Because at first glance it really just looks like I got rid of the toys.  I didn't.  I'm a pretty nice mom.  But I DID find a better place for them in a closet downstairs, and the stuff from that closet found a better home in the office because it is my photo equipment, and our dining room and living room have opened up beautifully.  The place is starting to REALLY come together.

Clear out the clutter.  Clear out the clutter.

After fine and a half hours of manual labor, I went from this:

To this:

Hmmm.  Not a great picture on that second one.  I will try and reshoot.  But what you should hopefully see is that there are NO MORE TOYS!  You are correct.  Noneso.  Nil.  Zilch.  It actually looks like a real live adult dining room.  Now I just need to get rid of the folding chairs, the wooden chairs that don't match, and buy one more Crate and Barrel chair to match our set of 3 (don't ask) and we are good to go. 




I would buy this place.

Sale Prep - Day 8

Oh, man, I am so far behind!

Okay, for Day 8, a lot more work was accomplished by our amazing painter and his assistant.  LOTS of work well beyond painting - there is dry wall work, texturing, even some grout work is on the horizon.  He's even cleaning up things we did wrong in lives past (cleaning up the overpainted areas on the fiberglass shower surround in the kids room.)  He's awesome.

Some evidence:

Prepping and starting the painting of the wet bar, inclusive of the wine rack, which is built in place and can't be removed for easy painting.

He finished our wall, which now has smoothed joint compound and texture!  It isn't painted yet, obviously, but it is so beautiful!

Prepped the half bath for painting by taking down the cabinet and sink shelf.

Started work on the corner bead and dry wall patching that needs to happen to the kitchen ceiling.  Awesome.  Sauce.

Now, as promised, I will keep actually working on projects as well.  So, this is me clearing off more of my desk, actually putting stuff in boxes, and getting rid of my second monitor.  For those of you that know me, I am not quite certain how I will function without my second monitor, but I'm in staging mode!

Sale Prep - Day 7

Day 7 is when things really picked up.  At this point, I am actually behind in relating the progress, so I will do my best to get a few posts up today to get back on track!

For Day 7, our painter brought in help and the two of them moved through the upstairs like a hot knife through butter.  It was fascinating to watch because they were so effective at what they were doing while also being very fast and precise.  Really amazing work.

I grabbed some pictures of the progress before I went to work.  They had started the prep the day before, with painting the edges near the curtains and what not, as well as starting the painting around the window in the entryway.  The living room is a huge mess, of course, but look beyond it to the wall!

Entryway window:

Detail work around the lower ceiling before the vaulted ceiling begins:

They also did some texturing on the wall where the drywall patch was for the new banister.

When I got back home, holy moly!  The wall up to the vaulted ceiling was done, with two coats, the entry way window was done, the stairway completed, the entire place starting to look more beautiful and put together every minute.  Why are we moving, again?

Again, far be it from SPF and I not to do more work, so he worked on completed his door project by adding in some sealing, expanding foam:

And I tackled my desk so that it could be painted in the very, very near future.

Sale Prep - Day 6

Okay, so after a weird weekend of sick kids and not as much work done as intended, the work started up in earnest again today.  Our amazing painter got to work and didn't stop.  He finally gave this astoundingly beautiful new staircase the finishing touches I've been waiting for.  SO BEAUTIFUL!

Okay, so he started, like he does every day, by carefully laying out the drop cloths and taping off and protecting what needs to be taped off and protected.  Awesome.

Then he works like a Tasmanian devil.  But, a really effective one, not a tornado one.  He's insanely fast and very, very precise.  So maybe not a Tasmanian devil.  Hummingbird?

The result is so great.

This is before.  It's kind of hard to tell, but that space under the apron is the same "white" as the far wall.  It's really more of a cream, though I can't tell you why.

But after, it is a beautiful light tan.  It's really bringing the whole house together and it is SO GOOD!  I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!

Now, far be it from SPF and I to not do work of our own.  I know some of you may be disappointed that we didn't tackle this INSANELY IMMENSE job by ourselves, but you know what?  I can respect a good craftsman and I can respect how little time we have to get our house in order.  I don't think I could have even done the job he did, let alone with so much perfection.

That said, however, we have not been sitting idly by.  Hell, I'm still teaching through the end of this week!  So, don't think we are somehow now the idle rich.  WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Sorry, that one got my funny bone a little.

What we did do, while our painter and his assistant were taking mad swipes at finishing this job, was fix our light fixture.  It had a busted out socket.  We thought about replacing it, for a lovely price tag of at least $119 for a decent one at Home Depot.  So, instead, we asked the electrical guy if he could help us figure it out.  He did.  We dropped it down and took a look.

Then SPF fixed it, moved it 16 inches more into the dining room so that it will actually be over the dining room table, and hung it back up.  Which took not only the new socket, but a new chain and new wire long enough to make it to the middle of where we want the dining room table.  Piece of cake.

Sale Prep - Day 5

Day 5 was intended to be a restful day, hanging out with the grandparents, going to a kids birthday party, but instead it turned into a part work/part taking care of sick child day.  The child in question is my eldest son who was terribly ill.  So, no party, no pool with the grandparents, just plopping him down on the couch with a blanket, a pillow, and a lot of TV (which we really don't like to do.)

At any rate, we were taking care of him and taking out boxes and taking down other things that needed taking down, and taking the leaf out of the dining room table, and washing the tablecloth so that we can eventually stage the dining room table, and doing laundry, because even though you have all of this stuff to do for sales prep, you still have laundry.  And dishes.  And you have to make food.  Not for the sick one, though, he had no appetite.

We did have time, between episodes of Octonauts, to get a little more work done on the front door, which has now been sealed on the outside with caulk and trim and on the inside with expanding foam (which will, hopefully, bridge the gap to the outside to create an excellent seal.)

Don't worry, we will trim it away once it fully cures.  This isn't a "feature."

Sale Prep - Day 4

Sale Prep Day 4 consisted of finishing off the boys room by attacking their bathroom,

Starting and completing the Master Bath painting,

Including finishing off the ceiling that hasn't been finished since we made the pony wall about five years ago?  Maybe more?  (Trust me, it's more impressive than it looks here, and WAY more impressive if you've been living with the unfinished over spray ceiling.)

And some drywall repair left over from the installation of the new banister.

All in all, a pretty fantastically successful day.  Things are really starting to take shape.

Sale Prep - Day 3

The real work starts today.  We have the painter coming, we are moving stuff into the garage, we are making this thing a reality.  The painter, who is truly amazing, wastes no time getting the kids room prepped.  We have taken down the hanging pictures, the curtains, and - the hardest part yet - the vinyl decals on the walls that I put up when the boys were babies.  Sigh.  But, change is not only inevitable, it is necessary.  So, okay, here we go.  He pulled the furniture into the middle of the room and started changing things up.  Before we knew it, our kids sage green room was neutral tan again.

So, now comes the other problem.  We are out of space to store the stuff we keep taking off the walls and off the floor and out of drawers.  So, it was time to ask our neighbor if we could borrow his parking space for a month or so.  And to tell him that we were moving.  He really likes us, so I was not looking forward to the conversation. 

I am not above bribery.

So, parking space has been secured and bad news delivered.  The garage is turning into a temporary storage unit.

Sale Prep - Day 2

Ok, Day 2 consisted of purchasing some paint samples, some sponge brushes, and, oh yeah, a new front door. 

I painted the swatches in about half an hour.  No biggie.  Only a few drips on the new carpet, followed by panic, followed by cleaning the new carpet, followed by a sigh of relief.

Here are the swatches in several different spaces and lighting situations throughout the house.  Keep in mind, these are the same four colors (not used in each swatch because I didn't like number 4 pretty much right away).

Isn't metamerism fascinating!!!!  I love how different they look, which is why I wanted to see them in every different situation.  We chose the one on the left/top respectively.

Here goes nothing!

Now, as for the front door.  Yeah.  It's been a problem for a while.  The HVAC guy that came to fix our unit when we blew a fuse (you remember that, right?) told us we needed to replace the front door because you could see light through it.  And it's an opaque door.  So, yeah, it needed to go.

 So here it is.  I grant you, it doesn't look so bad, right?  Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, this puppy is rotted out nearly completely.  We have had to try and secure the door a little bit better by putting some dowel rods into the screw holes and screwing the plates back in, but even that wasn't a long term solution because it just pushed rotted wood into other rotted wood.  There may even have been termite damage.  It's so far gone, it's hard to say.

Yes, this is our locking mechanism on our door.  You could probably have broken into our house by sneezing in its general direction.

But it's not just the door.  Because that would be easy.  No, the entire frame had to go as well.  Again with the rotting and the termites.  Long since gone, mind you, but they do leave some trouble behind.

So, it's rotted.  Whatever, right?  It's an old door.  The trouble is that it didn't have to be THIS rotted and THIS compromised.  Why, you ask?  The flashing was done incorrectly.  I know, I know, what the hoosegow?  Yeah, it's the stuff that is supposed to go up the outside, over the lip, and up the sides of the door frame to prevent water from getting into the house.  Exterior door, and all.

But the geniuses that put this one in flashed only where the kick plate should be.  (It either rotted away completely, was never installed, or was stolen by strange people.)  So the flashing created something fairly problematic.

A GAP.

And you know what likes gaps?  You guessed it!  WATER!  So the thing that was designed to prevent water from getting in the house not only didn't do that, but it actually allowed water to pool indefinitely next to the wood of the house so that it could worm its way down into the rest of the framing.  AWESOME.

Well, no more!  New exterior door to the rescue!  Foam core, fiberglass, prehung exterior door.  I think I'm in love.

Oh, wait.  I was in love.  Now we have more problem solving to do.  Day 2 is turning into DAY TWO.

The trouble wasn't that the door was too big.  You know the old saying "Measure twice, cut once" well, so do we.  And we did measure.  Lots of times.  We even remeasured with the framing removed to be sure an off the shelf door would fit.  What we didn't account for (lesson learned) was the height of the new floor.  So we had to take a quarter inch off the top of the door and put a quarter inch underneath the new door so that it would open over the beautiful new hardwood floor.  Oops.

Much stress and problem solving later, we had a new door and new door hardware installed.  The door is significantly lighter, which is fun, and now you can't see light through the door and its frame - just through the door frame and the stucco . . . so, next job.

Also, for some reason, NO PICTURES WERE TAKEN DURING THE HANGING OF THIS DOOR!  Which I find strange for me, because it was a big deal and we worked really hard.  But it's level, flush, it opens, closes, locks, and is really, really pretty.

I hope that was enough for Day 2, because this is about when we picked up the kids from daycare and sat on the couch for a few hours while they played.

Sale Prep - Day 1

The first day of the process involved mostly paperwork and a few walk-throughs.  We hired a realtor (the same one that my Dad recently used to move out here - that's a different blog) and we hired a painter.  We walked through the whole space with each of them (there was a little bit of overlap, actually) and hired them on the spot.  The painter said, "Ok, I'll send you some numbers" and left, and the realtor said, "Awesome, here are about ninety pages of things to sign!"  Yikes.  Different industries, I guess.

At any rate, we were left with two "To Do" lists that we have to attack in the next 45 days.  (You can start playing "Eye of the Tiger" in the background, if you want.)

I will elaborate on the list items as we accomplish them.  I mean, what fun is it knowing what you are going to be reading in the next 45 days?  That's a spoiler.  I respect you more than that.

Refinishing our Kitchen Cabinets - Day 23

Yeah, so that post mortem was only about the refinishing of the cabinets with stain.  There was one last vestige of cabinetry that presented a fairly specific challenge.

The TRASH CABINET.

This space used to be taken up by a trash compactor, which was broken and we really wouldn't have used it anyway.  We found a double trash receptacle where we could separate trash from recycling, which was pretty awesome, and it fit the space perfectly.  The only trouble?  No matching cabinet face.

So SPF and I thought about options.  We had just replaced all of the appliances with beautiful stainless steel versions and we thought - If we can't match the cabinets, maybe we can match the appliances!  So we found a metal shop that could wrap the front "door" to the space with stainless steel, even the magnetized kind on the other appliances and with the same finish, we just needed to find a way to open the darn thing.  Turns out, our microwave handle was about the perfect size, so we ordered a replacement.

SPF got to work making the new door.  The one pictured above could have been used, for certain, but one other thing about our appliances is that they have this wonderful taper that makes them pretty and consistent and they blend into the kitchen nicely.  So SPF, being the amazing craftsman that he is, got to work.  He fashioned a wood door that matched the depth and taper, as well as the height, of the necessary space, and he took the door and the handle to the metal working guy.

We are pretty darn happy with the result.