Life changes make blogging difficult. With the transition to working on my own, I’ve been putting more time into work than into our house. I’ve also lost a bit of a desire to get on here often and blog. I’m not sure why, but I’m just being honest with the readers and lurkers out there .

Just because I have been putting less time into house projects doesn’t mean that I haven’t been getting anything done on that front. As Casey mentioned in her last post, we are working on flipping the stairs. In the early 1940′s, the owners of our house flipped the stairs around 180 degrees. This allowed them to put a second door in the porch and have an apartment upstairs. But, when the house isn’t used as two separate living areas, it requires you to walk through the main floor bedroom (the “master” bedroom at that) in order to get upstairs. On the plus side, it does encourage us to keep our bedroom mostly clean when company are over.

Getting the stairs flipped is a pretty decent sized project for us. We first ripped out a wall in the old apartment “kitchen” (which was about the size of modern walk-in-closets) and the plaster and lathe on the underside of the stairs in a closet that was added beneath them. This is where the stairs will now start. Then we pulled up the part of the floor that was added above the current stairs to make the room square. After that, I spent a week scraping the linoleum off of the douglas fir.

That is where we are currently. Since the amount of floor in there is pretty small, I ordered a belt sander to hopefully get the floor finished. I’ll need it anyways in a few spots that a large drum sander couldn’t get to anyways. Three weeks from now I have family coming up to do the actual flip.

Other than the stairs, Casey has been working on finishing some of the trim we’ve had on the backburner for months. And we also resealed some of the basement that has had water infiltration issues for a while (which was also likely due to clogged gutters).

We are thinking about moving out of our house and into the country in the next year or two. I grew up in the woods and I want Brendan to be able to enjoy it as much as I did. That is another reason for my disinterest in posting on here. We are at a point now where we aren’t going to start any projects that won’t increase the value significantly (flipping the stairs is likely to be a huge added value to buyers).

Once we figure out what exactly life has in store for us in this, I’ll be sure to do my best to post an update