I have fallen behind in the blogging lately, much in part thanks to our fun new addition who is now almost 2 months old!! We are a family of 6 and I love it! It hasn't been as much of an adjustment going to 4 kids as it was to 3, so I am thankful for that. The baby is super easy and it is wonderful to see his siblings love him well. We have been slowly, slowly trucking along on the house. In our last update, we were prepping for dry wall to be installed throughout the house. If we thought the prep time was taking awhile, the actual installation took way longer... In retrospect, we should have ripped all of the existing sheet rock and dry wall out of the house and started from scratch. Instead, we patch worked a lot of the places which added a lot of time to the project. But with a TON of help from our family and friends, we finally got it done.
See the patchwork sheetrocking in the picture to the right? So tedious... I'm sorry to everyone that helped with this.. This house has definitely been a learning project every step of the way, and next time we will just start from scratch! Also you'll see the floors that Joe just finished had to be covered in plastic to protect them from the insane amounts of dust produced when sanding the mud in between dry wall sheets.
Seriously, dust for MILES. The plastic under Joe's feet used to be clear. If we do anything like this again, apparently they make a vacuum attachment that will suck up the dust as you sand. It would be a worthy investment for sure.
One good thing is that our master bathtub arrived! I spent a good bit of time researching a soaking tub that also would not be too high up to step in for a shower and came across this gem that had good reviews and was the right price compared to the $1000+ tubs I was coveting. Our master bathroom still looks like this, but when we get around to finishing it, I'm so excited to use this baby.
Once all the walls were sanded and even, it was FINALLY time to paint!! Some gracious friends loaned us their paint sprayer and we were able to prime the entire house super fast. I wanted separate colors for the rest of the house, so recruited some friends and we had a ladies night paint party. It was
After painting was done, I could finally start to set up the kitchen!! All of our cabinets are DIY assembly so I got to work on that as soon as I could. All of the bases are assembled and now we have to install them or attach them to the walls before we add doors, kickboard, drawers, etc.
You get a glimpse of our ceiling in this picture, which I am stoked about. I wish I could convince Joe to add it throughout the house, but alas... I will be satisfied with the kitchen since that's where we'll spend the bulk of our time.
Rambling aside, what you really wanted to know was where we are in the renovation process...
To move in we need :
- Functional kitchen
- At least one functional bathroom
- Baseboard installed (not necessary but I really want it done before I try to set up furniture)
Where we are with that list:
- Kitchen is pictured above, so we are halfway there.
- Bathroom is *almost* done but not quite. We do have a toilet and the shower is halfway tiled thanks to Joe's mom and my dad. The sink is functional and here's a sneak peak of it to the right.
I'm still trying to work out small details like backsplash and hiding the plumbing underneath. But I like how this turned out and will share details of how it was put together on a future blog.
- Baseboard was delivered to the house yesterday and Joe will probably get to work installing that this weekend.
So we are very close, but not quite there. Once again, shout out to all of the wonderful friends and family (framily?) that have helped us throughout this process. We totally could not have done it alone!
