August 11, 2016
When we purchased this house, one of the big considerations was the fact that expensive, important, and un-sexy work had already been done – the roof had recently been replaced, the foundation repaired (quite substantially), and the sewage lines had been replaced. This was tens of thousands of dollars worth of work, the kind of […]
Read moreJuly 27, 2016
Rightly or wrongly, we dove into the kitchen renovation with one immediate goal: get the flooring down so that we could put the new appliances in. As I mentioned in the last post, we ended up purchasing appliances during a Memorial Day sale when our dishwasher officially kicked the bucket, and by Independence Day weekend […]
Read moreJuly 20, 2016
WOW, it’s been a long while since I wrote anything – over a year since any real home improvement. But to be honest, we haven’t had any DIY mojo over the last year (and truthfully we haven’t had any DIY budget, either). We focused on other hobbies and general life, and very little got done around […]
Read moreApril 7, 2015
I know that putting the words “paint” and “wood” together make some people rage. And I understand that. Truly. I grew up in a 200+ year old house, with a mother who dealt antiques and a father who restored furniture, so I do appreciate the beauty of unpainted woodwork, either in a house or in furniture. I […]
Read moreMarch 31, 2015
So I’m glad to say that we followed through on what we started in ripping out the kitchen floor. I am sad (but unsurprised) to report, however, that of course things didn’t go according to plan (or at least the result wasn’t to plan). We decided to cram this whole event into a weekend – […]
Read moreMarch 27, 2015
Let’s keep talking about this kitchen: We already talked about the plan for our temporary floor renovation, and the floor certainly isn’t the only thing we’d like to change about this kitchen. Unfortunately, we’re not financially in a position to do the “big” kitchen renovation we want this year, which is what we’d originally planned on. So […]
Read moreMarch 24, 2015
That title isn’t a typo – I meant floors, as in more than one. There haven’t been any updates lately because, well… we haven’t really been doing anything around the house. Side projects have taken up time (me: learning to sew, Alex: learning … Playstation?), and we don’t have the money to tackle the project that […]
Read moreDecember 3, 2014
We’re continuing to make (very slow) progress in the bathroom – most recently, on the vanity, where we finally got one of the two drawers built and installed. As of the last update, there was an embarrassingly long list of things on our “to-do” list. Out of 9 items, we crossed two off and made progress […]
Read moreOctober 20, 2014
What started as daily updates switched to weekly, and now monthly. Yikes. Did I have unrealistic expectations or am I just lazy? I think the answer is probably both. We got ourselves to the “usable” state the day before moving in, and then pretty much called it quits. We had other things to worry about […]
Read moreSeptember 12, 2014
Here is the current state of affairs in the bathroom: I’d call it about 85% complete. That may seem generous given the obvious amount of work still to do, but consider that this was the starting point: We grossly underestimated how much effort this would be (ok…. I grossly underestimated it, and Alex didn’t step […]
Read more