Sydney gets in on the action

Sydney is such a good helper. Here she is giving us a hand in the kitchen.

Brad's first Friday alone with the house

As you may know, Brad gets most Fridays off, as he works a 4-10 schedule. So, yesterday was his first day to have some quality time with the house. His first order of business - remove those pesky walls in the closet. The result is a lovely view from the living room to the front of the house. AWESOME! It's already so much brighter on the inside.

Brad did find something fairly amusing in the wall with the light switches - unsecured electrical wires. 

 

Brad pointed out that the jacket on the wire was shredded. It was pinched between the drywall and the 2x4. There was a drywall nail pretty close to the wire too, so someone almost got a big surprise. ZAP!

I came over after I finished work and before we had to go and pick up Sydney. Now that Brad had demolished the closet walls (go Brad!), we decided to tackle the cabinets over the peninsula. Ideally, we were going to save these and repurpose them to the basement for extra storage space. We tried mightily to pry those suckers off, but to no avail. We mourned for a moment about how we would be wasting the cabinets, and then we broke out the sledge. We had a good time with that!

WHAM! 

Did I mention that we found that sledge in the garage? We now have 2! Extra awesome. So, after a few minutes of whacking, we managed to pull the end of the cabinet off.

And, we discovered the reason we were unable to pry it off - it is chock full of nails. Lots and lots and lots of extra long nails.

We then called it a day and went to go get the Sydney. 

I will leave you with this though... Marcus often comes to the new house while we work. He does an excellent job supervising from the family room. 

GET BACK TO WORK!

The long weekend

So, this is a bit late, but better late then never right?

On Saturday, we continued our epic battle with the dining room wallpaper. And, in this battle, we have been victorious. The wallpaper is no more. We'll probably have to do a little sanding to smooth things out a bit more, but it's looking good!

Feeling quite accomplished, we decided to pack it in for the night. It was nearly time for dinner, and Sydney was bound to be hungry soon. Well, that was the plan anyway. Then, I found the hammer and this happened.

Eventually, Brad was able to drag me away. But, only after this happened. 

To be fair... Brad helped. 

On Sunday, Brad set to work on the dining room wall, and I took to the pantry closets. I found some pretty awesome stuff in there.

A very heavy glass bottle, a lunch bag, a stick of orange gum, a sword toothpick, a boot cookie cutter and a tube of blue paint (not pictured). I was successful at getting rid of the shelves in the pantry. Brad was being awesome at removing all the drywall in the dining room. His handy work:

I, being wholly impatient, decided that I must see between the kitchen and the dining room NOW. I decided to blow a few holes in the closet for good measure. Brad models the new holes quite nicely.

On Monday, Brad started to take apart the kitchen and deal with the tedious work of taking off the trim around the pantry closets. It was both inside AND outside. He also got rid of the huge peninsula with this as the result.

It already looks bigger! As we go through the house, we often wonder about the folks who have lived here in the past. This has been our favorite head scratcher. 

It's a door lock, on the outside of the door downstairs. Perhaps to lock the kids downstairs when they get too crazy? Hmm... It might not be a bad idea to keep that. Off until next weekend!

Day 1 - Wallpaper... Ugh.

Brad and I took the opportunity today after closing and lunch to test out our wallpaper removal skills. We started in the dining room. The top layer of the wallpaper peeled right off. Hooray! We then used DIF (better living through chemicals!) to remove the glue and bottom paper layer. I started on a tester patch with a spray bottle. We quickly abandoned that in favor of the super-powered garden sprayer.

Brad is pretty good at this - he managed to remove an entire sheet in 1 piece. I think I should let him do the rest. :o) Oh - the respirator is a little overkill. The DIF doesn't really smell that much.

After about 2 hours of work, we had a portion of 1 wall completely cleared and the topping paper off of all of the walls. Once we get the rest of the floor and windows taped off, it seems like it will go pretty quickly.

While we still had some light and before we had to clean up to pick Sydney up from school, we decided to see how difficult it's going to be to get the wallpaper off of Sydney's walls. So, we headed upstairs. And, great news! The wallpaper comes off very easily. Is there bad news? Oh, you bet! I should say that the TOP layer of wallpaper comes off very easily. There's another layer of wallpaper under it and that layer has the added benefit of having been painted over. Flowery wallpaper (the yellowing part) + gray paint + more wallpaper (tan diamond pattern) = Sydney's walls. Hooray!

This is going to take a lot of elbow grease. Another survey of the upstairs found that the hallway is painted over wallpaper, as is the stairwell. Awesome. We'll be pulling wallpaper until the cows come home. Oof. 

Brad's phase 1: shopping

So, closing is Friday. This is Brad's favorite part - the planning and shopping. There will be lots to do, but nobody will be as prepared to do it as Brad. And, no one will make more trips to Home Depot than Brad. Mostly because we keep forgetting the fabulous gift cards we received over the holidays. Oops.