Is that the floor I see???

For the past few months, the dining room has been the staging/storage area for Robyn's thrift store and Craigslist finds.  With the 3rd bedroom finished up, we were finally able to organize the dining room.

... and utilize the plate shelf

...and not worry about knocking off our thrift store plate collection.  Most of the pictures I take of the house are taken with my cell phone camera.  Focus and contrast can be a bit challenging as you can see by this photo.

...and to prove it is just as possible to take a video with a cell phone that will give you motion sickness as with a regular video camera.

...and I forgot to include the last posting a picture of the rug we put in 3rd bedroom.







Under the wire...

With my mom coming in this weekend to stay before we head south to Nebraska for Kyle's wedding, Robyn and I were down to the wire to finish up the bedroom we were getting ready for her stay. 

Friday, we finished putting up the ceiling paneling.  We were delayed a day because I didn't want to go back into the house to get my tape measure to measure a piece 7' 7 1/2" long so  instead I used the t-square to measure off a 16 1/2 inches to cut off the short end.  Of course, it was a foot too short.  Tino helped us get the new mattresses up the stairs.  Because of the two 90 degree turns and narrow widths, carrying larger items can be a bit of a challenge.

Using the wall paneling to create a beaded board look on the ceiling didn't come out quite as good appearance-wise as we hoped...

But with the new light fixture, was still a significant improvement over the old ceiling treatment.

Saturday, we volunteered from 9:30am to 2:30 pm at the Irish Fest.  Here's a shot from Harriet Island, on the south side of the Mississippi, across the river looking on to the Cathedral of St. Paul.

Once we finished up there, back to the house to move start putting the bed together and replace some defective wall outlets with newer, safer one. 

Saturday evening, we headed out to the drive-in for a couple of movies.  I'm glad I had just stuffed my jackets behind the seat because they were definitely needed for a night in the low-60's.  Robyn was even smarter and had brought a small quilt.

Sunday, we headed off to the Mall of America for some shopping for a dress for Robyn to wear to the wedding.  If we hadn't gotten our workout already for the weekend, we definitely did during that trip.  After a short stop at Wally World to pick up blinds and bolts to bolt the headboard to the bed frame (a Craigslist find), we stopped by our storage unit to pick up a few items to complete the room furnishings.  With the finishing up of this bedroom, it looks like we'll be able to get all of our items out of storage finally.

Sunday around 7:00 pm, we finally finished up.  Here are the results for the 3rd bedroom.

As soon as the bed was made, Angel and Lucy were giving it a test.  (Angel is between and underneath the pillows. 

In addition to the found headboard we distressed and the thrift store lamp and found cabinet, You can recognize some of our other finds in the next few photos.

Everything appears to have met with Angel's approval.













Company's coming

There is nothing like the prospect of company arriving for a visit to focus you on finishing up things.  With my son's wedding coming on August 20, my mom is flying in from Mississippi on August 17 and then driving with us to southeast Nebraska for the wedding.

The first weekend after we found out that my mom was coming for a visit, our day was brightened up by a cardinal in the blue spruce outside our bedroom window.

Although we have one guest bedroom complete, we want to finish up the larger of the two where we are putting a queen bed.

This is the room we're putting the queen headboard that we "adopted" from the abandoned furniture area at the apartment we used to live in.  Robyn's vision for the headboard is a distressed look and I found some spray paint at Home Depot which matched the room colors.

After a light sanding, Robyn got down to business spraypainting the headboard.

To get the distressed look, I smeared the "high wear" areas with petroleum jelly.

Here's what the headboard looked like after a second coat...

We let the headboard dry for 24 hours, hit it with a light sanding again and then clear-coated it.

Robyn also continued with her thrift store finds which will be used to furnish this bedroom.  Starting with an art deco style vanity chair...



An antique dining room chair....

And a coffee table with a marble composite top...

...along with a mirror and a small box which will be used for potpurri.

While I was patching...

...Robyn was pulling staples out the ceiling. 

Then it was time to mop...



After a trip to Sherwin Williams for a gallon of gray primer, the transformation process began.

We were about a half gallon short in the stairway...

...but this gives you an idea about how grimey the walls were.



We also explored several options for the ceiling, considering a tin-look acoustic tile, paintable sheets of ceiling panels, pine siding.  The paintable sheets were too expensive, the tin-look acoustic tile had to be special ordered, the lengths of pine siding didn't match the room dimesions closely enough.

We decided to go with beaded-board look panels.  Here they are laid out in the yard getting a coat of primer.

Probably not one of my brighter ideas.  Although it was easy to roll the primer on, they panels attracted insects and blades of grass.  Robyn and I have to scrap that off before the final coats of paint.

We wrapped up our painting (Blackberry) on the bedroom last weekend and were able to get started on the flooring early Saturday morning.  Two long, hard days later, it was in...

We were even able to get one sheet of paneling up on the ceiling.

The small air compressor with the brad nailer sure made it a lot easier... Only 4 more sheets to go and we can start moving in furniture.

No longer blinded...

By the light.

Inspired by the impact of the aluminum foil on the stair window, Robyn and I decided it was time to get blinds up in the other rooms where we were getting the most sun light.

In the kitchen nook, we put up some bamboo matchstick blinds:

What I like about these blinds, is they filter out about 50% of the light and you still have a good view of the outside.

For the kitchen window and the third bedroom windows, we put up plain old vinyl venetian blinds.

After I took the picture of the kitchen blinds, I remembered I never updated about the new kitchen cabinet and drawer knobs from Ikea:

...and no, I wasn't the party who drilled the holes crooked.  They were already like that.

We also removed the acoustic ceiling tile from the ceiling in the third bedroom.

The ceiling underneath the tile wasn't in that bad of shape.  And we found out why so many of the tiles were attached with sheetrock screws...

The staples originally used weren't long enough!

As in the other rooms, we uncovered the remnants of the cool original wallpaper.

Our plans now are to replace the ceiling tile with beaded board paneling.  Once that is done and the room is painted,



Lucy will lose her perch.







Hot, hot, hot...

Wow, I just looked at the last post and it's been almost six weeks since we've posted anything about the house.  Just because nothing has been posted, doesn't mean we haven't been working on the house. 

It's just been a bit slower going since we moved it and with summer here now, we are partaking in more outdoor activities.  Plus it has been hotter than... how did our friend Mary phrase it?  Hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell.  With the 1st floor pretty much complete, our efforts are now focused on the upstairs (where it is considerably warmer.)

So in sort of a reverse chronological order...

Since we've moved into a house out of an apartment, Copper isn't getting the lengthy walks that he was before.  His exercise lately has been limited to chasing squirrels and rabbits when he goes outside (or the laser pen inside.)

Robyn has been making a concerted effort to take him with her on morning walks and we can tell when he gets back that he's getting some badly needed exercise.  But the little OCD thing has an issue.  In addition to chasing his tail when excited, he'll stop and sometimes scratch a non-existing itch when he's out on walks.  It's hilarious watching him hop on three, or sometimes two, legs trying to both scratch and keep up.

So on yesterday's walk, Robyn just kept walking, and tugging on the leash, as he hopped and scratched along behind her...  Until she looked behind her and saw that Copper had lost his balance and she was dragging him on his back down the sidewalk.

With the current heat wave, we've been fortunate that we have good shade on the south side of our house and only have one window on the west side that catches the afternoon and evening sun.  No window coverings are up on this particular window because we haven't rehabbed the stairwell yet.

I suspected this one window was contributing to the additional heat upstairs but I had no idea about how much until one day when I got home from work, I applied a Mississippi window treatment

Yes, that is aluminum foil on the window.  I was surprised to find out it lowered the upstairs temperature by at least 5 degrees.

This is how much sun was coming through the window before the foil went up.



The heat wave that is expected to end today started last Saturday.  Robyn and I volunteered outdoors at the Highland Fest in St. Paul.  The front that brought in the heat was proceeded by torrential rainfall that dumped up to 5 inches of rain in about 4 hours.  Here's Robyn cooling off some at the end of our 4 hour volunteer session in the 95+ degree heat.

Maybe it's because of the long winter's here in Minnesota, but there is always something going on in the Twin Cities area.  Last Thrusday, we went to Mears Park, about 2 miles from our house, for their free weekly concert series.

It was fun sitting around chatting with friends.  However, unlike the woman in this video who appears to be really enjoying the show:





I thought my head my implode because the hip hop music was draining all that was good from my brain.

With the prospects of guests sometime in the not-too-distant future, over Fourth of July weekend, we put our efforts to finishing up a couple of areas.  In the foyer downstairs, we finished laying the laminate.

Angel was too perturbed by our lowering her perch by an inch or two.

Down the street in Mounds Park, we took the opportunity to scope out a vantage point for Fourth of July fireworks.

The dome in the near background is the Cathedral of St Paul.  In the distant background, is the City of Minneapolis.  The Fourth of July fireworks were spectactular:

We also got in some lake time on July 2nd at Square Lake in Stillwater.



That's Robyn and some friends floating out there in a distance.  The cool breeze and the water sort of lulled us into not realizing how much sun we were getting.  We spent most our Twin Cities July 4th meetup searching for shade.

Even closer than Mears Park, is the St. Paul Farmers' Market that is held every Saturday and Sunday morning.  Some of St. Paul's finest were looking things over as Robyn and I made our selection.

But we didn't spend our entire weekend out and about.  We also finished up the middle bedroom.  The walls and ceiling were already painted so we just had to put the flooring in.

Which I was able to accomplish on July 5.  (I had a holiday; Robyn had to work.)

I also worked on getting the rest of the sub-floor laid in the bathroom. 

Imagine my frustration when I came up a 3" x 5" inch piece of plyboard short of having enough.

I "made do" with a couple of scrap pieces of laminate.  I'll need to fill gaps and even out the transome with some floor leveler.  With the floor in, Robyn started working some of her decorative magic. 

First, some decorative decals went up on the wall.



A twin mattress set that we bought at one of those discount mattress places was covered with the quilt my sister Tammy made.

The wall colors were selected to complement the quilt and Robyn's $10 thrift store headboard.  The "adopted" lamp that I found plus the Target lampshade blend in well also.

Black and white photos that robyn had collected rounded out the scheme. 

Two weekends before, I finally got the kitchen sink unstopped.  After weeks of trying to unstop it by plunging, Liquid Plumber, Industrial Strength Drain Opener, running a hose down the drain (and getting it stuck), snaking it from the top, I finally broke down and got the saws-all out and cut the drain line.

Once that was down, I put the pipe wrench to the short end and promptly broke off the trap which apparently had corroded.  But at  least I now had access to the drain.  I cleaned out the first 8 inches or so with a large screwdriver.  Robyn kept me company as I worked the rest of the blockage with a snake.  It was only a couple of minutes when I heard a "glug" and the drain was unstopped. 

Fortunately, Robyn was outside of the "splash zone".  I wasn't so fortunate.  A very odiferous experience.

And of course, no project is complete without a trip to Home Depot.  Until I could make it there, I rigged up a temporary drain to the laundry tub in the basement.

Here is the repaired drain.

Amazingly, a couple of days after this was fixed, the cold water supply on the kitchen sink started working. 

Since the end of March, Robyn and I have made a lot of progress on getting this house liveable.  We've finished the dining room, living room, foyer, master bedroom, middle bedroom, repaired kitchen and bathroom plumbing, plus installed a new tub, toilet, and batchroom sink. 

We still have to finish the bathroom floor and walls, the back bedroom, closets and office.

It's still fun, plus Robyn and I are still speaking to each other.