Day 28-32 - Harder Than It Looks!

Friday
The installers were back at it Friday to finish laying the laminate floor.   They had poured a few areas with self-leveling concrete on Wednesday to even out the sub floor.  But by Friday, a few areas were still not completely dry and set.  They'd never seen that happen before and even called the  local sales rep for the product to come out to take a look.  Not wanting moisture to seep into our new flooring, they came back Monday to do the last two areas that still were showing moisture from the drying concrete on Friday.  We are very happy with the floors!  Here are some before and after shots - excuse the dirt. The walls in the hallway look kind of yellow in the photos, but they are the Autumn Mist color that is in most of the house.

Saturday & Sunday
Guess what!  I got to paint more!  Thrilling stuff folks.  But it is nice to have fresh paint everywhere.  Over the weekend I focused on painting inside all the storage closets - hallway linen, over the stairs,  master bath linen, coat closet and pantry.  We're using a semi-gloss white paint for all closet interiors and doors to help cover wear and tear.  I've never really painted with semi-gloss before, but let me tell you, it is slick!  The first coat I put on looked like a two year old had painted it.  I rolled, then cut and the paintbrush took more paint off than it put on.  The second coat went on much better.  And now the closets looks so fresh it made it worth the time I spent painting in places most people will never see! 

There's a neat storage closet on the upstairs landing that goes over the stairway.  I didn't realize it until I climbed inside to paint it but that thing is huge!  I stood straight up inside it so it's at least 5'3" tall and about 4 feet deep.  I'll be honest, while I was standing inside it painting I thought to myself, "I think we'll use this closet to store extra bedding.  Then as soon as Maria is old enough to really play hide-and-seek, I'm totally hiding in here!"  It's true, I'm still 10 years old at heart. 

Daniel sanded, primed and painted all the cabinet doors and drawers.  It was fairly nice outside so he was able to work on the covered patio.  I can't wait to open all the windows at the house when it gets closer to 70 later this week!

Monday
We're finally ready to start reassembling the kitchen.  As much as we would have loved new counters and cabinets for the kitchen, for now we are making the old ones work with just some sprucing.  Unfortunately, the drawers are in pretty bad shape.  One was actually supported by duct tape on the bottom...  Yikes.

 But we can make it work - it's what we do.  When we brought the doors back in to start reattaching them, we made an unfortunate discovery.  Somehow, when we detached the doors from the hinges, we broke the pin that held the two pieces of the hinge together.  It was a hidden hinge, but an outdated design.  After a quick trip to Home Depot, we found that the only hidden hinges available in the store now were the kind that require a cut out in the doors for the hinge.  Of course these ancient doors don't have the cut out so we had to put up visible hinges.

I'll be honest, I kind of assumed that to hang a cabinet door you just screwed the hinge to the door, then held that sucker up to the frame and screwed down the hinge.  Yeah, not so much.  It's a lot more difficult than I thought it would be!  Those hinges were tricky to get just right.  You'd think it was lined up, but it wasn't flush against the wood or the top was right but the bottom slid out of place.  Goodness.  The first three doors were tough, but Daniel got pretty good at it after that.  We banged up our paint job pretty bad so I will need to touch that up this week.

Daniel's dad had wired all the ceiling fans for us but left off the blades so we could paint the ceilings around the fan bases.  Attaching the blades was another job that turned out trickier than I would have thought.  There's very little space to work with the screws that attach the blades to the unit, and of course I kept dropping the screws.  I did get one fan finished though.  I love that I'll get to have a ceiling fan in the kitchen!

We're starting Maria off in the "family business" of home remodeling early.  I had her at the house for a bit before I took her to a friend who offered to babysit.  She "helped" me touch up the paint on the cabinets.  During the process, she managed to almost stick her hand in the paint bucket, eat my hair, and grabbed a paper towel for a pre-dinner snack before I got it from her.  Needless to say working on the house is much easier when she's with someone else!  But hopefully we can instill a good work ethic in her from the start.  You've got to work for the things you want and sometimes that means holding a baby in one arm while you paint with the other!

Keep dreaming my fellow DIY-ers!