Let There Be Light!

Again, despite my best intentions, here we are a month since our last update.

In our last update we mentioned that we were going away to spend the weekend at Stacie's parents house. Thank you to those of you that prayed for us. While a difficult and challenging weekend, I think it was healthy to be together in that place.

Since that weekend we've turned on the after-burners. We are really moving on the house and burning the candle at both ends to do it! I'll try not to make this update too long despite all the progress we have made.

Now that the drywall taping was done we needed to get the texturing done since the drywallers left the floors covered. The majority of the work was masking everything off that we didn't want overspray on. This was a big job in the living room, hallway and entry where we were re-texturing all the ceilings and the walls.

We got the master bedroom done before the weekend which was helpful so that my dad's wife could paint when they came up to help us on that Saturday. Vicki primed the ceiling and walls of the bedroom while my dad helped with tiling the shower floor. I didn't expect the tile to take us all day, but it did. There were a lot of cuts, and not many of them were straight, but it turned out really well. We also tiled around the window opening in the shower since this would need to be completed before the wall tile started.

The next week was spent texturing the rest of the house which included the master bathroom, the hallway, the living room and the dining room. We also spent some time choosing paint colors. Since we were painting so much new area we took the opportunity to reconsider the existing paint we had. We decided on a slight change in both ceiling and wall paint which meant we needed to repaint everything.

We wanted to get all the texturing and painting done by the end of the weekend and we barely made it. We sprayed the bathroom and hallway before the weekend since it didn't require as much masking. We masked and sprayed the texture in the living/dining room Saturday morning. Then primed and painted the bathroom and hallway. By that time the texture was barely dry enough to prime the living/dining room. Sunday morning was spent painting the dining room, living room and kitchen. We finished up just in time to head to my aunt's 50th birthday party.

This last weekend was spent getting all the electrical hooked up for the lighting. It seems like it shouldn't take all day, but it did (8am to 11pm). This included a trip to Home Depot and Orchard Supply to pick out the lights for the hallway and bathroom. It also included rewiring the halway lights once I was done. The switches we have for the hallway have to be wired in a very specific order, but it is worth it having a 3-way switch for the hall lights that is dimmable at both ends. We also had to install the bathroom lights twice because a trip to Orchard later in the day revealed better fixtures than the ones we had already bought and installed from Home Depot earlier in the day. We finished up by installing the kitchen lights tonight because the parts we needed weren't available on Saturday. It is really nice to have all the lights hooked up. It makes the house so much more warm and inviting.

This week and weekend we will be installing our bathroom vanity and getting ready to paint the exterior of the house. There is so much prep work to paint the existing exterior that we might just paint the new parts to get by this winter. It will look a little funny with the new half painted in completely different colors, but then we would have the time to prep and paint the rest next spring/summer. The other option we're considering is to pay to have it painted.