Rehabber’s Rehab

Liz is off downstate pretending that a massive earthquake has hit southern Illinois.

This gives me the great opportunity to get dirty and make a mess!

First I finished up the master bedroom closet.  I finished the steaming of the wallpaper.  The top half, thankfully went a lot quicker.  I then spackled some of the plaster that was raw and sanded for two days.  Then I primed and painted, It isn’t immaculate, but its clean and plain white.  Now if I can just get Liz to actually put her clothes in the closet rather than on the floor.  But to her credit, we are in need of a large dresser, all for her of course.  I’m relegated to an old dresser in the back bedroom.

Ink was a great help painting the closet.  But like any painter he got a little on him.  He didn’t appreciate the cleaning I gave him.  I’m afraid his whisker may be white from now on.

But back to the messy part.  (more…)

Well we’re doing our part.  On Thor’s day off today he picked up a console table that is great for our living room.  It is narrow enough that you can still walk past it, and our stuff just fits on it.  We might put another under the living room window, although I was hoping for something with bigger drawers that we could keep games in.  Now we’re going to keep our eye out for a bench with storage underneath in that area instead.

He also purchased a microwave so we have now expanded our limited kitchen and our cooking options.  In addition to eating sandwiches every night or cooking bratwurst up on our mini propane grill, we can now heat up left-overs in minutes.  We bought the cheapest microwave we could find since we don’t know what exact size will go in our kitchen when it’s done, or where it will go.

Some cheap and free physical labor was done today.  Thor finished scraping the wall paper in the bottom half of the closet.  Unfortunately this is probably the easiest part since the rest is over eye level and on the ceililng.  Yes, they even wall papered the ceiling.

Thor spent his off hours this week stripping the wall paper off the closet in the front bedroom.  He has been painstakingly using a steamer and scraper to get it off.  By the end of the first day his arm began to have sympathy for mine after scrubbing down the door jams.  I sent a lot of positive encouragement his way.  Soon we may actually be able to put something inside it.

After the cleaning spree of the past few days and with a friend coming into town this weekend, we are considering spending our first night in the house in the next couple of days. But first, we needed to set the furniture up, leading us on the first steps of layout and deciding how we want the rooms to look.

living room with couches and a bed thrown in

back bedroom with guest bed and room for side tables

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Our most dramatic change to date has been the floors. In the first minutes of owning the house we immediately turned to ripping up the nasty carpeting from the sixties. What we uncovered was a mess or red oak floors. The previous owners had applied several different stains, from light gold to dark red. The floor had about a dozen places badly damaged areas. Our floor guy suspected the damage was caused by a overly competitive pets urinating around the house.

The fortunate thing about uncovering something disastrous in a remodeling is that if it can be fixed easily, it can have a dramatic impact and greatly improve the value of a home. Step in our floor guy, Jerry. Over our six day vacation, Jerry worked wonders, repairing the pet markings, filling in where we had taken out the living room-dining room divider, and refinishing all of the living space. (more…)