Home in a Frame

One of the things we knew we would have to do when we bought our house was to put a fence up. We felt the need to discourage the critters coming in and keeping our critters within, as well as the dog :)

We thought we would have to wait until Spring to do it. I actually got three quotes from local companies and they were each 1000 dollars apart for the same thing. The first guy was a nice guy but was the most expensive (2k more than the cheapest). He wanted 1/2 the money down and then he would wait till Spring when the ground softens up (ummm,no.)  The next guy was quiet and not much of a talker. Seemed like a nice enough guy and he gave us the lowest quote and said he could do it in a week or two, the ground wasn't a problem. The last guy was super friendly and I liked him a lot. His quote was more though, and in the end, we chose the cheapest one because we want to build a garage in the future and they had an A rating through the BBB. Good enough for me.

The auger has arrived, had to take the boys over to see this :)

Look at all those beautiful post holes...too bad I had to make them move all of them to the other side of that little tree. That's me, making friends wherever I go. No, the owner was very cool about it and I felt very bad

OK, we are on the right side of the tree now

There's poles going in

It's taking shape

I see rails

This side is already done

It looks so pretty, like a picture frame for our house.  I took this later that same afternoon from up next to the house we are renting, yes we live that close

Front

It's all done, at least the fence part

I feel like I should turn my horse out (if I had one)

It's a good day

They are supposed to come back next week and put up square wire on the inside and do the gates. They still haven't asked me for any money. Some faith has been restored in community businesses.

Pretty Surprises

It is amazing what you find in old houses. The lights, the paneling, the floor under the floor under the floor....

This is just awesome, that stripe is seriously sparkly!

This floor was almost a keeper :)

Another interesting floor choice

It's all over the place, love the curly railing too and the pretty lantern

This is really a green color, this was under a subfloor

Still trying to capture the green, there was another under this that was completely avocado colored

This pic you can see the green of the vinyl and also where the wall we tore down butted up against the fireplace. Since we didn't want any sort of wall here, we came up with another plan for this exposed concrete. Check back :)

The whole house has terrible lighting. These lights are very period and next to impossible to replace, especially in areas that are not drywall. They don't give much light either. We will replace them upstairs and leave them downstairs. We do plan to replace the glass with reeded clear glass for some better light

First Coats of Paint

The painters are busy painting everything, I mean everything. Other than the cabinets, this is turning out to be a good thing. The house is starting to look really different. They have pulled up the dingy carpeting and there is no brown paneling left. Yay!

Living Room

Boys Room

Master

Other side of master, this paint is a chameleon

Pop of color! Laundry room. The pipe is kinda ugly but the dryer used to vent into a bucket. This disappears in the ceiling and out the side of the house. I much prefer this. It will be painted to match.

This is really pretty sage but it's not showing up in this pic

Downstairs

Hallway

Entry looking into Living Room

Moving Right Along

It seems they are moving so fast. They have until June to finish and they have told me they will be finished by March 1st. That's crazy but very welcome. It is, however, very hard to keep up. One of these days I will catch up to the progress or so I keep telling myself. I do have to go everyday to take pics or I'll miss something.

This is the "weird space." Because we only have a carport and not a garage (yet), we needed some storage space so we decided to wall this space off for that purpose.

This is the Master Bedroom. If you look closely, you can see a door framed in the center of the wall. I had to ask them to "fix" this because this is the only free wall in the whole room. We need to put furniture and tv's on it. So, they had to re-frame it and put a new door off to the side where it was originally supposed to go

Plumbing and framing going in for the new shower

Shower Head up there, way up there (yeah I can't reach it)

Future spot of new bathtub

More plumbing

Shopping

Before we started this project, before we even closed on our house, we had to go with the contractor to pick materials because we had to come up with a cost to base the budget on. Many of our materials were picked on the fly in October, two and a half months before we even closed on the house. We don't have samples and are praying we still like what we picked. Here are some photos of just some of the things we chose for the house:

This is a tile (I think)

Another tile

Carpet

Ledgestone

Tile

Glass tile

Caesarstone (doesn't the name sound like a stripper?)

Black!

So, I mentioned before that we had decided to stain the cabinets a darker color and get rid of the honey oak that was there. It was between that and painting them white, but in the end we all agreed upon the dark stain.

So, we were a little surprised when we came over and found this:

That's primer. Last time I checked, you didn't put primer on cabinets to be stained. We called a meeting with our contractor and he said, no worries, it's all part of the process. We were skeptical but decided to wait and see.

So it was even more a surprise when I came in a couple days later to find this:

That's paint, Black paint. Not even a particular color, just Black...Can you see Finn in that darkness?

Another look at Before:

Such a pretty kitchen :)

Cabinet Detail

Another view 

It's now Black, very black. We toyed with the idea of distressing it:

and it looked pretty good but, in the end, we decided to keep them black to avoid any more issues and hits on our budget

It's starting to look better

Or maybe I am just getting accustomed to it

I think it will look better without all the plastic on the flooring and windows and walls that are painted black too. I keep telling myself this. Still haven't found a finish that we like though :(