I’m not used to winning many things in life. Once in high school, I talked a friend of mine who worked at a gas station into giving me the code to get a free car wash. After getting my ‘91 Chevy all shined up, I went back inside and bought a lotto ticket. Scratched it off, and sure enough, I won $5. So I gave it to him as a “thank-you.” Technically, I should have given it to the owners for stealing a car wash, but what can you expect from a 16 year old?

Anyways, on Monday, Liz over at A Constructed Life in conjunction with csnrugs held a contest for a free rug. Normally I don’t enter these, but I decided to live life on the wild side and put in a comment for the rug. Sipping my Sobe this morning, checking out a few of the blogs I normally visit, I saw that we won the rug! I’ve been a little out of it this morning and had to re-read it to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.  I might read it again later to make sure, but as of now, it looks like we won. Wahoo!

Thanks Liz and csnrugs!

I feel like I just got my house some what in order after having it pulled apart for 5 months  and now the mess starts again! Our basement is unfinished except for the bathroom down there.  It’s been in our “house to do list” to eventually finish it. The plan is to make an office/bedroom, storage, furnace area, and family room. Shane decided last week to pick up the sub-floor while we had a vehicle to do so. This last weekend and week he has been staying busy putting the floor in and framing the bedroom/office. He’s almost done except for framing the last wall. We apparently have two old knob and tubes there that Shane thinks goes to the upstairs bedrooms. The problem is they are too far down the wall so we will have to move them. Shane’s Dad is an electrician so the plan is to have him come and help and possibly rewire.

Once the last wall is framed in we will have the room foam insulated like we did the bathroom when it was demoed out. I am very excited to have this room done. My goal is to see it done by August as that is when our son’s birthday is. Brendan turns 2 and my grandparents are planning on making the trip for his party! Of course, it’s not me doing the work, it’s Shane! I’ll let him add the finer details of what all he’s doing in the basement at the moment. I will say this though. I hope he hurries, because the basement is trashed and I can’t even stand to look down there!

On an update with the rest of the house, its trashed! I love to have an organized and clean house and ours is any thing but that. Every room has unfinished woodwork that needs to be completed and windows that need to be cleaned. When my mother-in-law was here she confided that just looking at all the work we had left made her head spin or something to that effect!  (I can’t remember exactly what she said) Basically it’s overwhelming. My game plan is to pick a room and finish that room before moving on the next. I came up with this about two weeks ago and have yet to start! Shane and I have both super busy with work and Brendan. I also think it’s harder to want to work on it when the weather is gorgeous.

As for outside I have never really talked about the outside of our house. The actual house needs to be repainted We were planning on doing this next Summer, however, we will be building a new garage (hopefully). I also find it overwhelming when thinking about having to paint the entire house all at once. I am trying to convince Shane we should start now on one side and see how much we can get done this Summer, without feeling rushed. The yard itself isn’t too bad. We’ve planted some peonies and other plans around the house’s foundation. I’ve also taken out 3 trees that were planted in odd spots. I’d like to take out one more in the front, but I have yet to do it. I’ll try and get some pictures of the yard taken and posted!

Now that I’ve written this my head is spinning and I’m overwhelmed with how much we have to do! Of course we could stop starting new projects and finish the other ones first! But who wants to be inside when it’s Summer and nice out?! Well that’s it for now.  I hope every one has a great weekend!

Today I’ve managed to keep myself busy ripping apart the upstairs kitchen. I don’t remember off hand if we posted any thing on this room.  It’s a small room upstairs that was converted into a small kitchen. Shane and I used this when we lived in the upstairs during college. This was way before we bought the house! Here’s a before picture.

Last week we sold the cabinets and counter tops so Shane took all of them down last night.Last night Shane took down all of the cabinets. It looks so empty not having any thing in there any more.

This morning I decided to be destructive  *cough cough* I mean productive and continue taking apart the room. It took me approximately half an hour to rip down all of the wainscoting. When I was done I had a huge mess on the floor.

I was dreading having to carry it all down the stairs and then outside. Before I could start I was given the idea of throwing it out the window and from there loading it into the truck! I was a little nervous at first, but once I got into the swing of things I was chucking boards super fast out the window. I did manage to get a small board stuck in the gutter. Sorry honey!

The top window that is open is the window I used to throw out my mess.

My mess!

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I’ve been looking for a clean solution to having a dynamic connection string for a LINQ to SQL data context. My primary desire for this is developing/debugging an application on a test database. Sure, you can always go change your connection string in the app.config file, but I tend to forget to revert it back before deployment.

After doing a bit of research today, I realized that if you open up the project’s property pages, click on the settings tab, and then click on ‘View Code’ on the top, you’ll access the “base” partial Settings class. In the constructor, add an event handler for the SettingsLoaded event handler:

this.SettingsLoaded += new System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventHandler(Settings_SettingsLoaded);

Then you can set up the event handler in a similar manner:

///
/// Dynamically update settings for development when a debugger is attached
///
void Settings_SettingsLoaded(object sender, System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventArgs e)
{
    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        // Adjust the connection string as you see fit
        this["yourConnectionStringName"] = "Data Source=yourDevHost;Initial Catalog=yourDevDatabase;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=yourDevUser;Password=yourDevPassword";
    }
}

We are finally getting to the home stretch in the burst pipe restoration work. Our main contractor moved all of his tools out of our kitchen for the first time in almost 5 months. We have a 100% functional kitchen to use now. You have no idea how good it feels to say that.

We haven’t started the “decorating” phase in the kitchen yet, but here are some non-cluttered pictures of our kitchen:

Things to note in the pictures:

• The ceiling is a tile wallpaper that was painted with a (much too expensive) copper looking paint
• The refrigerator door opens too close to the wall. We’d do that different if we could
• The upper cabinet to the left of the fridge is awkward as it has a shelf thing on the door. Hard to get to stuff in there. We’d do that different if we could.
• You can’t see it, but our appliances need a good buffing

I also installed a vanity sink top and faucet in the basement bathroom. We don’t post a lot about this room as it doesn’t have any historical character. It has a fiberglass tub/shower, a new toilet, washer and dryer, and a new sink. Eventually we’ll make it a bit more charming, but for now, it is function over form.

Things to note in the pictures:

• The pine trim will be painted white (gotta do whatever you can to make it feel as bright a possible in the basement!)
• The door needs to be stripped and repainted

Also, my office is finally getting put together!

Ignore my fancy desk chair. I know you are all jealous. It is mine, all mine. Ignore the mess on the desk as well, I haven’t quite gotten to the organization part of assembling the room yet.

In the office, we’ll be stripping all the trim eventually. For now, we are going to take a breather from stripping wood. I haven’t made a post about it, but we’ve stripped I swear close to a mile of trim in the past two weeks. We are sick of stripping wood.

Also, one of the benefits of moving our furniture to the main floor is our basement is slowly becoming more manageable:

Still a disaster area, but not nearly as bad. Once we FINALLY close on our loan Friday (yes, it has been almost 5 months since we were supposed to close!), we’ll probably start tackling this mess.

As you can tell, this post is making for lots of lost time! So to continue jumping around, I’m going to show you our new and old baseboard trim. In our upstairs bathroom, and downstairs kitchen, the original baseboard was long gone and we didn’t want to put the cheap stuff back in. So we had ordered some douglas fir and our contractor cut it to the almost identical profile as the original stuff.

New trim:

Old trim:

Ignore the dust. We have given up on keeping the dust away until the contractors are gone. As you can tell, the old baseboard trim is much tighter grained. It also has a coat of polyurethane on it, which the new stuff hasn’t received yet. These are also both stained different colors. The old trim picture is actually a non-original color. We tried to match the old trim with the original color.

Speaking of the dust, we also had our air ducts cleaned yesterday. I’m glad we didn’t dust prior to that as it put a layer of fine dust on top of *everything*. The guy came here around 2PM with their fancy air duct cleaning trailer. He didn’t leave until 6:30PM. Around 6, I asked him how many houses had ducts as bad as ours. He said he never saw one as bad. He had to unclog their machine 5 times. He showed me what was clogging it up. It was literally a 3″ thick layer of pure dust. Yum.

Yesterday we were able to start moving furniture onto the main floor. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it was to finally do this. Shane came home over his lunch and moved the couch, buffet, dresser, and room dividers in from the porch. Brendan and I spent the majority of the day rearranging furniture and then playing on the couch. Brendan seemed to have a blast! He was laughing almost the entire day!  All that’s left now is to hang pictures and lights. We also need to finish setting up Shane’s office. Hopefully tonight we’ll finish.  It looks like a rainy today so we might be stuck inside. So I might start unpacking our boxes that are left from when we moved in upstairs.

While I was busy with furniture yesterday the kitchen counter tops were being installed. They look amazing and I couldn’t be happier with the kitchen. Now if we could only use it! Still no word on when the electrician and plumber will be here. Tomorrow our painter will be here to refinish the bay window and closet door.After that he’ll be painting the kitchen ceiling and back entry. He will also be doing touch ups through the house as a courtesy. After all of this all that’s left is the cleaning work and the rest of the wood work being installed. I did find out yesterday that the duct work and duct cleaning will be done next week at the earliest. After that they’ll come back in to clean carpets upstairs and steam clean the tile floors in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. I have to admit I’m not happy that we’ll end up waiting again. We’re just so close to being done that I’m getting impatient.

It has been a bit overdue, but I am excited none-the-less. Our floors are ALL DONE. Every last bit of them. No more flooring contractors over here anymore.

Since I have been bad with posting pictures recently, hopefully this one will make up for it.

Our living room:

Dining room:

Close-up:

Hallway to the main floor bedroom:

Main floor bedroom:

Quality test – PASSED:

We have to wait until Monday to move stuff in to allow it to fully “cure.” So, after 5 months of living upstairs, Monday is our “move-in” day. If I didn’t owe a good chunk of hours to my employer, I’d love to have taken the day off. For now, we are going to have to settle for cleaning all the dust off of the wood work and windows.

Some time today, our main contractor is supposed to be coming over to install the main kitchen counter top. That will allow the plumber and electrician to show up on Monday and get the kitchen finished. I should say that is the ideal scenario. I emailed the second tier “general contractor” to set up the plumber and electrician and haven’t heard from him yet. I’ll assume they’ll just show up sometime early next week.

What’s left?

1. Kitchen counters (today the main piece is installed, early next week the island and sliver between the stove and fridge is installed)
2. Sink, dishwasher, stove, and refrigerator hookup
3. Baseboard trim in the kitchen
4. Cabinet crown
5. Kitchen ceiling paint
6. Baseboard trim re-installation in the dining room by the door to the kitchen
7. Dining room door to the kitchen trim
8. Baseboard trim in the main floor bedroom on the wall opposite the kitchen (where we took out the added door)
9. Main floor lights installation
10. Upstairs hallway trim installation
11. Upstairs bathroom trim installation
12. Upstairs bathroom cabinet installation
13. Duct cleaning

All-in-all, not too huge of a list. Most of the items are pretty simple. 80-90% of it should be done this coming week. I probably missed a few things, but if I did, they probably aren’t more than a 5 minute job.

We’re getting there!

Winter just doesn’t want to let go of North Dakota. We enjoyed near 60 degree weather on Saturday. A trip to the park for the little guy to go down every last slide, as well as breaking out the grill and making some steaks, cheesy potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Sunday, it rained. It was cold. It snowed.  Yes, those white flakes that fall from the sky fell once again. When I started to see them fall, I decided to go to sleep early in hopes it would all be gone by the time I woke up, making it appear to just be a bad nightmare. It almost worked. My car had a little bit left on the rear window.

In a way, I was greatful for the change from rain to snow. While it was raining consistently, I started hearing a water drop every couple of seconds. This house just loves water incase you haven’t noticed yet. The leak I had hoped to have fixed a month or so ago in the roof isn’t fixed. I have no idea where it is coming from. So when the rain turned to snow, the leak stopped. Tonight I’ll be climbing back on the roof with more roof caulk stuff in hopes to find the issue and put it to rest. This time I hopefully won’t drop the tube of roof caulk stuff off of the roof. Yes, I dropped the roof caulk stuff off of the roof the last time. Rookie.

You remember the flooring contractor who was supposed to be here almost two weeks ago? Fired.

Round two starts tonight with a new contractor looking at it at 5pm. If this guy can keep his word, which I find half of these guys can’t do, he will be here Thursday to patch the floors if we give him the go ahead.

That is all I have. Just enough for three sentences and not even a single picture.

Hope you all are having a great Monday!

It has been quite a while since I posted last and I have a lot talk about, but I don’t have a lot of time right now. So I’m only going to focus on a few of the smaller details!

The first one is all of our heat registers and vents. They have been painted several times over the years so we decided we were going to try boiling them to get down to the metal. I managed to get one done and it was such a pain. Because they wouldn’t fit in a stock pot I put it in the sink and dumped boiling water in the sink.  I worked on this register for over two hours and then eventually quit.  I was able to get down to the very first and original layer of white, enamel paint. As you can probably imagine I was overwhelmed and frustrated with how I was going to get all of these cleaned up! Well I mentioned what I was doing to our main contractor and he suggested taking them in and having them sandblasted. Brilliant idea! However, I didn’t want to put out a ton of money on this at the moment. Fast forward a couple of weeks and our contractor offered to take them with him on his vacation to his in-laws and clean them up. In the process of him working on all of these we communicated via email. He ended up putting a ton of work into these as they weren’t coming clean with the sandblasting. There was over 7 layers of paint on them so stripper also had to be used as well as a wheel grinder and then sand blasted! I’m sure glad I sent them with him instead of continuing to use the sink method! Anyways, in the end I went with the contractor’s idea of painting them a pipe black in glossy to make the registers look like the old cast iron. They turned out amazing and I couldn’t be happier!

Second subject is light fixtures. Insurance covered the lights so I was able to have a little fun! I purchased a unique brass chandelier on ebay  and a wedding cake chandelier from our local antique dealer. Now here is my dilemma; I’m not sure where to put what light. One has to go in the back entry and the other in the living room. My worry with putting the brass chandelier in the living room is it’ll clash with what we have in the dining room. Any opinions would be great!

Last subject is kitchen hardware. Can any one recommend a place to purchase good quality hardware? I’ve looked at Lowes and Menards and they don’t have what I want. I’m after bin pulls, knobs, and latches. I did place an order from Van Dykes and while the style was what I wanted, the quality was not the best so I sent it back. I’m also debating between two styles of bin pulls so again, comments would be much appreciated!