The Big and the small

The Small

Closet door knobs covered in paint:

Closet door knobs with paint removed. Caution. Don't handle shortly after removing paint. It tends to smart. Now to finish painting the doors, closet and do the touch-ups.

The BIG...

The bathroom is nearing completion. The floor tile is awesome. I chose a mid tone grey grout for the floor to match the existing tiling job in the front bathroom. My hope is that it keeps it looking cleaner too.

E installed the shower fixtures and toilet.

Yes, that is a double shower you spy. There's a slide bar on the left and a shower head on the right. Both have their own thermostatic valves. We'll be using a classy tension rod and shower curtain for the next few years due to the fancy pants upgrade made in the shower plumbing and fixture department, but I think it is worth it.

We're waiting to plumb the sinks until we get a counter top. I'll be hunting around salvage yards and stone bone yards this week in hopes of finding something reasonably priced.

Camp House Blog

What do you do when your in-laws come to visit? I put them to work. They are great cleaners and organizers and the house can always use more of both. Our contractor that did the seismic retrofit and dry rot repair, volunteered a day of his time to help us hang cabinets. He asked we unpack all the cabinets, remove the doors and drawers before he gets there so that he can spend the maximum amount of time helping. My in-laws did a great job:

We can see the floor in the dining room and living room again!

The kitchen is sitting and waiting for the install. The walls are painted and the lights are installed. E even installed the washer and dryer; we'll have to move it for the floor installation, but it has been worth it! We've used most of our neighbor's and friend's washers in the past year.

The master bathroom tile was well underway last week. In fact, it is finished but since I'm behind on posting - no surprise there - I only have the "in progress" shots to share.

Here's the two-inch hex tile going down on the floor and the one-inch hex in the shower pan.

Here we see the floor is down, including the matte liner. The wall tiles are in progress.

Here we have the shower walls going up.

I'll share the finished photos once I get around to taking them. This week we plan on installing the fixtures in the bathroom. My grandma is planning a visit to help paint the exterior of the house mid-September and I'm sure she would prefer an indoor bathroom for her stay.

I also flexed my electrician's muscles by installing one of the lights in the laundry room and both of the bedroom lights:

So far, I'm quite pleased with the results.

Back in the Saddle

My traumatizing experience as an artistic administrator is over and I've earned enough cash in 6 weeks of work to pay a tile setter for 9 days of work - almost. What this means is that I now get to split my time between continuing to drive it home (sorry, but not really), substitute teaching, and auditions.

Some serious progress on the house has been made in the last week, in addition to the hard labor E has been putting in under the house installing the radiant heating. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of this process to share with you. The photographer was unavailable, missing, running and screaming, and was not available to document the process. Fear not, there are many more hours of labor for the photographer to observe.

So instead may I present my mother's summer vacation from law-school:

E's ingenious invention for painting the grooves in the siding of the back house/garage:

If you've painted a bit before, you may have giggled. If the previous image didn't elicit a chuckle, may I now present to you a visual tutorial of why painting grooves sucks:

I am a firm believer that it may take us the same amount of cumulative labor hours to paint the main house as it did the back house simply due to the pesky grooves which had to be painted with a brush.

Not to mention, the first paint color that we put up on turned out to be very cool and minty. The front and a side and a half got painted before it hit me. More honestly, before we ran out of green paint and I stepped back and looked at it all. Even though it provided a lovely contrast to the bubble gum pink color lurking on the back corners of the building, it had to go.

Deciding that the paint was a bit too refreshing, we opted for a softer mushroom sort of green. Some may even say taupe, maybe grey? Honestly, I'm not even sure. I can say that I LOVE the trim color.Since taking this picture I've painted the front door a darker moss color and plan on using it as the accent color for the inset arches on the front of the main house. It's looking rather snappy if I do say so myself.

Today we painted the kitchen and tiling is underway in the master bathroom. I'll have an update posted soon. Tomorrow my in-laws will be attending Camp HouseBlog, so I hope to have an even larger back log of news.

Visual Gratification

The back of the house is starting to look like a house. The drywall has been textured in all three rooms (master bedroom, master bathroom, kitchen/laundry/mudroom). Painting has begun in the mbath and mbed. I'm a bit overjoyed with the colors and currently believe it is because they are AMAZING and not that I'm simply giddy at the thought of something being close to completed. It is a bit tough to capture with my stellar photographic skills but if you squint hard you can see the bedroom is what I like to call a "light silver sage" while the bathroom is a "light and dusty robin's egg blue".

Trim work is almost finished in both rooms and tile has been ordered for the bath. I am sad that in the end we couldn't salvage the curved trim work originally found in the room. It turns out that again, previous modifications were made to it so that when we went to remove and salvage it, it simply fell apart in our hands. I'm not kidding, it was held up with paint and wood putty. A 4''x4'' corner piece fell off the wall in 6 strips of broken wood. The pieces had been taken down by the previous fellow, which he then rehung with some mystical system in mind; they were never the same. Fortunately, we were able to recreate a similar baseboard to that found in the rest of the house. The only difference is that this one is 6" high vs. the 8" high found elsewhere. The reason behind this madness is that the previous owner/genius wired the room with outlets that cut into the baseboard. The wiring was all too short to raise the outlets and we opted to obtain some shred of our crumbling sanity by installing shorter baseboards since we had to replace them anyhow. The option of recreating the curved molding is a bit out of our budget at the moment and E isn't too fond of it to begin with. We will be adding picture molding around the room to mimic the real stuff in the rest of the house.

E also hung the medicine cabinets and light fixtures in the bathroom, I think hoping for some visual gratification. The lights are upside down but that's a detail, and we're not at the detail phase yet.

He's been spending an awful lot of time under the house painstakingly installing radiant heating tubes. I can't blame him for wanting to see something looking livable. The bedroom and bathroom now even have a fully functional heating set up. A nice neighbor fellow of ours informed me that since I was unavailable for the unveiling of the heating system, he went and experienced the sweat lodge in my stead. For this, I am grateful. I hope to keep all future gatherings in the house at a more respectable temperature.