Sale Prep - Day 14

Things are moving along nicely at this point.  Day 14 consisted of finishing out the painting in the office, the kitchen ceiling, and continued work on the downstairs doors.  All in all, the place is really starting to come together.

The downstairs doors have had problems for a long time.  They were originally painted with oil based paint, but the previous owner did a quick cover up without primer and using water based pain, so we ended up with peeling doors.  Peeling paint on a door is like peeling a sunburn.  It makes the problem worse, but you just can't seem to stop doing it.  So, our amazing painter sanded off the old paint and finished off the doors with a clean primer and new coats of white paint.

The office, it seems, we finished recently!  But the paint refresh is really nice.  No more mars and scratches from things being scraped by the wall or bumped into the wall or anything like that.  Just a clean, lovely newly painted wall.  I do miss the art, though.  This was my rotating Fuji Instax gallery, which is one of my very favorite things.

The ceiling is done!  The ceiling is done!!!!  COULD.  NOT.  BE.  HAPPIER!

Sale Prep - Day 13

Lots more good stuff happened on Day 13.  The painters were on hand again to continue their amazing progress and we continued to pack stuff up and get it out.

The fireplace surround now has it's first coat of special primer.  You can still see the underlying color a little bit, but things are really moving now!

The big deal today was the kitchen and the new wall.  The painter cocooned himself in the kitchen with tape (we actually taped him in from the outside) so that we could do the sanding of the new wall and the finished ceiling in the kitchen.  There was a ton of dust, even with the cocoon, but no worries.  Sooooooo much stuff was accomplished, I don't even mind.

In the meantime, we prepped the wet bar area to be painted by taking all of the wet bar stuff and putting it on the dining room table and the coffee table.  Pizza for dinner tonight!

But the empty wet bar was too tempting to the painter, so during a break from working on the wall and ceiling, he knocked it out.

So clean and pretty.

And in the kitchen, we are making real progress on finishing out our "temporary" ceiling and light fixtures.  Oh, if we had the time and inclination we would have finally installed the can lights we always wanted.  Cest la vie.

At least this way we will have a finished ceiling with the appropriate texture that will look finished and clean.  Win, win.

Sale Prep - Day 12

Day 12 means the painter is back!  It turns out that a lot more work gets done when he is here!  And boy, howdy has a lot of work gotten done.

First off, I don't know if I mentioned how AWESOME our painter is.  He has already taken on some projects that weren't in the original bid and not asked for anything in return.  We are going to compensate him anyway, because he brought down his original bid, so I'm just going to raise it back up.  SO WORTH IT!

For instance, we asked if he could paint our fireplace surround.  It doesn't match the hardwood floor and we think it would look nicer painted.  He said yes, but it is going to take a special kind of primer because of the finish on the wood.  So, it is marked with tape to remind all of us of the project.  He has also finished out our wall (details to follow) and has agreed to help us with our kitchen grout, which is dirty and crumbling.

In the meantime, he prepped the bathroom and got one coat on.  The cabinets, shelf, and mirror are down, but you can already see the change.  Such a huge difference between the dark brown and this lighter tan.

My office is also getting it's first coat.  It's hard to work here, one of the many reasons that I took my time with the update on the blog posts, but it is a clean, open space and now the paint will match as well.

And, the wall.  We're pretty proud of what we did, but what the painter did makes it look really official and intentional.   I think that's what was starting to bother me about it is that it didn't quite fit in and I was worried that we may have made a mistake.  Because the floors don't go under this wall, we started the wall project when the floors were about to be installed.  But now it looks awesome and natural and even original.  Now, the other version looks crazy and wrong.

Now, this is one of my favorite parts.  Do you remember when I was staining the cabinets and I over stained onto the wall a bit?  I always told myself, "Ah, no worries, someday it will be painted."  AND NOW IT IS!!!!  No more evidence that I didn't use plastic, paper, or tape to stain my cabinets in place.  Ahhhhhhh, that's a huge sigh of relief.

Yeah, the ceiling isn't done.  So there is still evidence there.  But not for long!!!

Sale Prep - Day 11

Day 11 was also a day we spent doing work ourselves.  SPF finished off the door install with two tiny pieces of base board at the edge and we prepped for the final stage of painting.

It looks nice, huh?

Unfortunately, our garage is looking less nice and more like a hoarders nest.

That's okay, though.  Our goal is to get a lot of this stuff out of the house so that we can stage it.  Our realtor's exact words were "Whatever you can live without for three months, put in storage."  So, we are.  Actually, we're doing two better.  As things come out we are putting them in three piles:
1 - Store
2 - Give Away
3 - Trash

Sigh.  We have lost a lot of our sentimentality in this process, but so be it.  Do I really need that t-shirt from middle school where I went to that one day camp that I don't remember?  Probably no.  But someone else might like it, or it might be useful as recycled textile.  Still, though, a lot of this is getting stored and saved.  Turns out that living in a space for 12 years, almost 13, means accumulating a lot of crap.

Sale Prep - Day 10

I know, I know, I'm the worst!  I promise you, a lot has been happening, so the lack of information is not reflective of the amount of work happening.

Luckily, I know what days we worked and which we didn't, so I have an idea what happened when.  And I will recount that information here.

Day 9 was all us, as was Day 10.  We were less productive, as it was a weekend day, but SPF did manage to finish out the door and we did that last touch painting around the new window sills.

Ultimately, this little area needs a patch, but it is nearly done at this point.

And the window sills turned out so beautiful!  I realize that whoever buys this place won't know the work and love that went into each decision, each detail, but I hope they at least can appreciate how lovely it all is!