Anyways, to sum it up. Tomorrow Andy will be back to start the upstairs since we need that done in order for the guy to come do the floors. His helper will finish up the bathroom downstairs. When he is done with that, Roger will be here patching in the tile, installing our pine baseboards, swapping out the toilets* and hopefully moving the washer and drier in there! Can we say finished basement bathroom any one?!?! In case you can’t tell, I’m very excited!

*I should probably explain about the toilets. In the upstairs bathroom we had a new one and the one in the basement bathroom was in the house when it was bought. In all honesty I hated that one, probably because I wasn’t used to it. Well all it took for me to change my mind was a plumber telling me it was old enough to be original to the house. So now I’m putting the “old” one in the upstairs and moving the new one down!  Funny how that works huh?!

To make my post complete here is a picture of the kitchen as of today:

Here is the actual floor plan for the kitchen:

Counter tops:

Cabinet door style:

And this paper will be applied to the ceiling (and then painted):

The kitchen pre-texture:

The bathroom pre-texture:

Today, pending no cancellations due to the blizzard (hey, I’m at work…), both of these rooms should be painted. I cannot put it into words how nice it will be to have these painted. There is something about a layer of paint that just makes things feel more “done.”

On a different note, when the painters were working on the main floor bedroom, he had to do some skim coating to smooth out the transition from painted plaster to areas of the plaster where the paint fell off. Well, the painted plaster happened to have a crackle chemical in it. This caused the skim coat to crackle. So yesterday he also worked on applying some nasty chemical to remove the crackle and then primered the room. I’m not sure if he plans on getting anything done in there today, but I won’t complain if he does.

Okay, it isn’t quite that yellow in person, but it is yellow none-the-less. Once we get the dark woodwork, and the white claw foot tub, toilet, and pedestal sink in here, it won’t be quite as blinding. We hope.

The part on the light fixtures that hold the shades are new, non-lacquered brass. These will be aged to match the fixture better in the future. Casey also had to have her antique toilet paper holder installed, even though we don’t have a toilet in there yet.

Hard to notice is the hole to the left of the chimney. This is where a cabinet will be built for towels and toiletries. We will also have wood corner trim running along the edges of the drywall next to the chimney.

My last post was posted the day after Christmas, the day we found out our home was more wet than the south coast after a hurricane. That was a day before we were supposed to pack our stuff up from Eden Prairie, MN and drive up. Most (sane) people would have decided to stay put for a while, or at least find another place to stay while the house dries out and is getting repaired. Of course, we were too excited to move into our place, we moved loaded the truck up on a rainy/icy Saturday and headed off to find out what shape the house was in.

Pulling up into the drive way, we see this:

As we walk around to the back door, we see this:

Comforting, right? Just the thing a first time home buyer wants to see.

Walking into the back door puts you on a landing on the stairs that head down to the basement. Directly in front of the door is a wall that has had wainscoting applied a few years ago. It didn’t look like this a month ago:

Taking a left brings you up a few steps to the kitchen. The water flowed in from the upstairs bathroom floor directly through the kitchen ceiling. This resulted in a nice hole:

Looking around quickly in the kitchen, you’d think the hole in the ceiling and a bit of pealing wallpaper were the only things damaged. Look a little closer you’d find the cabinet doors are all separating, and the stove top is rusting from getting rained on.

And another frustrating find was some door hardware we had just stripped the paint off of a few weeks ago:

However, a somewhat nice thing is all of our paint in the living room is falling off of the plaster, all 1/8″ to a 1/4″ of it:

We had been planning on sanding (meh) the paint off of the living room walls as it was extremely textured and simply much too thick. I’m hoping I can literally peel the paint off the entire room, saving the extremely dirty job of sanding it down. Granted this is a few months sooner than planned.

Going upstairs to the source of the entire problem, the bathroom. The day we received the call about this, we had Casey’s dad (who used to be a plumber) attempt to do a quick fix while everything was still wet. The upstairs bathroom had a washer and dryer hookup in it for a stackable, and it looked to be a reasonable candidate for breaking due to the dryer vent right next to it, possibly dropping the temp a few degrees lower than the rest of the room. So that wall was tore out and pipes were capped:

Sadly, when the water was turned back on, the waterfalls in the kitchen resumed. At that point, we figured any other plumbing fixes in that room would require much more time and destruction so he just turned the water to that room off. Problem solved? We thought so. So we turned the water back on and… no leaks. Yay! Upstairs there is also a small kitchen (which will be torn out once this is all fixed, but is rather convenient now). We had the water on for what must have been 6-8 hours and not a leak. Well, just as I was about to go to bed on Saturday, I was walking up the steps and felt something hit my head. Putting my hand on my head, I felt what I expected, water. Ugghh. There was a pin hole sized leak in the water lines running to the upstairs kitchen. Since this was now our main kitchen, we called up a plumber (since insurance will cover it) and he had to demolish some of the plaster (don’t cry, we were planning on flipping the stairs back to the original position, and this would have had to come out anyways) to find the leak. Well, after all that, the guy says he doesn’t carry any PVC plumbing parts (what???) and only installs PEX and copper. Weird.

Assuming I can find time tomorrow, I’ll post an update after the fans and dehumidifiers (hopefully) leave.