Friday, August 24, 2012

Carousel Room

I decided the theme of my daughter's room should be carousel, since she loves animals (at not quite two, she had no input in the choice, but seems to approve). I found a cute, if complicated, carousel border stencil. I put a fresh coat of light blue paint on the room during the painting extravaganza, so it was all ready for decoration when my mom visited.

There isn't much of a story to tell, this project went pretty smoothly, so I'll just show pictures.




Thursday, August 23, 2012

Wallpaper Hides Many Surprises

I started stripping the wallpaper from the master bedroom several weeks ago. I knew my husband didn't care as much about it, but I really wanted our bedroom walls painted before I started work. I considered it the ugliest room in the house. Here's a picture:


 I was hoping I could just do the job myself. I couldn't. This was, in part, the fault of our daughter who quickly decided that mommy working up high on the ladder instead of playing was simply not okay. But mostly it is the fault of the room itself.

There were two types of wallpaper to deal with, a solid blue layer on the bottom and a weird grassy top layer. The bottom layer pulled off like a dream. Once the wooden trim was removed from the middle of the room, it pulled off in large sheets, leaving no scraps behind. The grassy layer, on the other hand, was stubborn. Sometimes it pulled up just fine, other times it ripped up into a pile of strings that clung to the walls in bits. They weren't hard to get up with the wallpaper remover, most of the time, but there were a lot of little bits.

Still, the job seemed like one I could get done myself, if only my daughter would let me have a little time each day (which she, of course, would not). But then I started scrubbing the walls to get the extra adhesive off. And I scrubbed, and I scrubbed. It was amazing how little I got done in the time I spent. And there were still stubborn little bits of wallpaper here and there that I hadn't gotten to yet. I needed help.So my husband started helping after my daughter went to bed. Part of the reason the scrubbing took so long is that this nasty brown stuff would get our water dirty almost instantly. We asked my father in law about it and he thought we were scrubbing too much and were actually scrubbing off some of the drywall paper, then was puzzled that so much stuff was coming off with water. We discovered the answer on the third wall, when there was finally enough of it in one place to detect a pattern. It was old, decayed wallpaper. Three layers of old decayed wallpaper.

Here's what it looked like on the wall:


And the stuff that flaked off under my sponge:



They not only wallpapered over it, which is standard for these old houses, but in many places plastered over it with drywall mud or something of the sort. I washed more of it off, but then we took the electric sander to the walls, since our ultimate goal was to get the walls smooth enough to paint, not necessarily to get all the junk off of them. That old wallpaper made clouds of dust, so now our bedroom looks like it's experienced a dust storm as well.

And that's not all that was hiding under the wallpaper. We had holes. Some of them may have been knocked out sometime after the wallpaper went on, but some of them must have been there and they just wallpapered over it.
Hole 1: 

Hole 2:

Hole 3:

Hole 4:


We're not done yet, so no pictures of the finished product. Hopefully soon.We had a handyman come in to fix the big holes and I'm in the process of fixing the smaller ones. Then we get to paint and finally put our room back together.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

A Revolving Cast of Contractors

We have done a lot of work on our house already, and we want to have a lot of work done by professionals as well. Despite not having any money yet (my husband's first paycheck comes Friday), we are having a parade of contractors come through to give us estimates. Someone came last Friday to estimate how much it would cost to put in ductwork for central AC, we visited a cabinet showroom over the weekend. Yesterday we had a flooring person by to estimate the cost of refinishing our floors. Tonight another HVAC person comes, then we have two more flooring people over the weekend. And we still haven't found a general contractor or handyman that is both professional enough to return calls and willing/able to fix the wall in our kitchen.

Since we can't afford to get all this done at once, once we have all the quotes in hand we will have to decide what exactly we want done and when.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Painting

So, we apparently decided the whole house needed to be painted (thus the blog name). And my husband decided much of it needed to be painted before my mom came for a visit because he wanted to get more boxes unpacked before she arrived and didn't want to unpack the boxes until the walls were painted, since the boxes contained books that were to go onto bookshelves in those rooms.

If you follow that logic, and I either did or was too tired to argue at the time, the rooms needed to be painted and painted soon. And the rooms in this house are big. A good thing for living in, a bad thing when they need painting. This involved a exhausting schedule. We started prepping walls of my daughter's room and the living and dining room the day after my husband finished the trim in the kitchen. I painted my daughter's room the next morning while my husband kept her occupied, then that night we primed the dining room. We primed the living room the next day, then painted both the dining and living room the day afterwards.

The living and dining room didn't even need a new coat of paint. They were fine, probably painted just before the house was put on the market. But they were orange, and made the rooms look dark. So we painted them. Now they are a nice, cherry yellow.

The entryway, on the other hand, needed a new coat of paint. It was peach-colored, which was actually rather nice, if still a bit dark for our taste, but it had nicks and scuffs and just looked a bit dirty with time. We were going to paint it yellow, like the living and dining room, but as we sat in the living room the night we finished painting it and looked toward the entry, we decided we really liked the peach. So my husband went out the next morning for his first of three trips to Home Depot that day to get some samples of peach paint and a big heavy extension ladder that we needed to reach the part of the wall above the stairs. We liked one of the samples, so he went back for a full gallon and we painted during my daughter's nap.

While my husband went back and forth to the hardware store, I made a pie to bring to our friends' house, where we were going for dinner. We almost got it all painted during nap, but had to finish that evening. And my husband had to finish pretty much on his own because I was a klutz and tired, and was wearing bad shoes, and tripped and fell while carrying the glass pie pan home from our friends' house. The pie pan shattered, and I cut my finger badly enough that I was pretty useless the rest of the evening.

But now it's painted. And it's lovely. Here are some pictures:
Living Room Before
 

Living Room After




Dining Room Before

Dining Room After



Entry Before

Entry After


The after pictures aren't great quality. I'm not a photographer and was using my phone to take the pictures. I've been waiting for my husband to take some nicer photos and upload them on the computer for me, but he's been busy. So I'll update these with better pictures once they are available.

So the rooms we haven't painted are: the master bedroom, the guest bedroom, the bathrooms, the office and the attic. And all of those need new paint too, except for possibly the main bathroom on the second story and the office. The two bedrooms are arguably the ugliest in the house, but we couldn't get ourselves to do another round of battle with wallpaper after finishing the kitchen. It took several weeks before I decided to start doing battle with the master bedroom wallpaper. To whomever thought a wallpaper made out of straw was a good idea, I'll tell you from the perspective of the person removing it, it was not. It looks like our bedroom somehow got overgrown and then someone took a weed-eater to it. But that room will be a future post. We are in the midst of that project at the moment. And I still haven't shown off pictures of my daughter's adorable room.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Worms

I got 1000 pet worms in the mail yesterday. They are now happily in a bin in the basement eating away at my food scraps. This is much more exciting to me than it ought to be. I keep checking on them. They remain worms. But they are already fatter and more wriggly and healthier looking than when they arrived.



I got my worms from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm (via Amazon). It seems like they do the best they can to get the worms to you alive while still being inexpensive. They only ship on Mondays to keep it from sitting in a shipping station over the weekend and send them priority mail.

I mostly used the instructions on this website to make my bin: Make a Worm Composter for Less Than Five Bucks, but also benefited from reading Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhoff.



Thursday, August 2, 2012

Mosquitos

The mosquitoes were another surprise that came with this house. I've lost track of how many surprises we've had, so I won't give them a number. In any case, the mosquitoes are vicious and numerous here. We get attacked every time we venture into the back yard. The front yard isn't as bad. I soak myself in "Eau de OFF" and still get bitten. My poor little girl is covered in bites. It looks like she has some strange skin disease. I cover her arms and legs in OFF and they get her cheeks. I wiped some on her cheeks today and they went for the area around her eyes! They are terrible. And they don't just come around in the morning and evening. They are there all day. Waiting. Making our yard practically unusable. And we picked this house in part because of the nice yard.

I tried a mosquito fogger, despite not liking spraying poison on my yard, and it had no effect. We tried a concentrated garlic oil yesterday, which apparently is supposed to either kill or deter mosquitoes due to the sulfur compounds, but my daughter and I were still attacked this morning. But this evening we saw a ton of dragonflies hovering over our property. I suggested they might be eating mosquitoes, but wasn't sure dragonflies even eat mosquitoes. But we looked it up and apparently they are one of the natural mosquito predators. We think the garlic oil stirred up all of the mosquitoes and maybe gave them limited places to land and now the dragonflies are here for a garlic-flavored mosquito feast. Hooray! Go Dragonflies!!

For future years, I may invest in a bat box. But I'm not sure if my bats might eat my dragonflies. Which one will eat the mosquitoes faster?

Update: The garlic oil has not driven them off yet, but we tried a stronger concentration. I also think I discovered a major source of the mosquitoes, an overgrown garden bed back behind the garage. I'm smothering all of the weeds and ivy in that. I think once those plants are dead, the mosquito problem will improve (though it will probably always be a problem).