Explosive excitement

Dumpster #5 is gone. Whew. The city came and cut down the dead trees in the park, so they aren't there anymore, but unfortunately the dead tree in front of our house is lost somewhere on their 2 year waiting list. The tree is in such bad shape that it won't hold up for the winter, so we have some tree guys coming to quote removal and replacement. 

The Mr. decided to knock out the fridge nook and frame it. By himself. Unfortunately there was a cool vintage light fixture with a shaped glass shade on the other side of the wall. I said, "Did you take down that light?" He said, "What light?" Needless to say, there is no more light. 

Drains, glorious drains! They are glued together and run from the first floor bathroom, the future utility sink, and the kitchen sink into the basement. Today we worked on cutting out space for the big poop pipe from the upstairs bathroom to the basement. Then we took the garden hose inside the house and ran water through the drains to test them. No leaks! Also, it entertained The Kid for a good 10 minutes! 

Bathroom sink drain and the new door. I don't know why it's tan. It won't be for much longer. At least it fits the hole now. 

This is now connected to the upstairs. It has been quite the project, but we're so close to having a toilet that we can flush with a bucket of water. I remember when the bucket flush felt so pioneer, like we were Little House in the Big Park or something. It now seems wildly luxurious. Using the bathroom! In our own house!

Labor Day is a big day in the park, with a concert and fireworks display. The Kid took this picture from the neighbor's yard. It was so nice to celebrate a holiday with our neighbors and be part of our community. We also had the best family trip to Menards before the fireworks. Seriously. It's the little things. 

Behold, my skills of a hunter-gatherer

I'm about to have some shiny new pictures of progress for you all, and let's be honest, that's why you really come here. I know. So I thought I would do some wordiness now so you can enjoy some progress pictures tomorrow. 

• The front porch trim has all been primed. It looks way better. What you can see of it around the kitchen cabinets, that is. They haven't been moved to the garage yet. 
• We have a whole saga about the new doors, which have literally taken over a month to order, escalated us to the Assistant Manager at the blue store, gotten us repeat follow up "I'm so sorry if I pissed you off" calls from the orange store, and have required multiple conversations with the factory about our strangely sized doors. But we have paid for them, and they tell us that they will come. Sometime. 
• My cousins Chris and Casey have been super helpful and Casey is going to help us out a bunch this week too, working on demo in the kitchen and mudroom. I think my life will be a lot happier once that kitchen ceiling is down. Dumpster #5 is being ordered tomorrow. 
• Almost all of the old plumbing is now gone including the giant cast iron 'stack' - that big hunk of metal running from the top of the roof down under the basement floor, down which everything drains. The stack is coming back in au courant PVC and we are looking forward to being able to flush like champions (albeit with our bucket water delivery system) once again. It's not really picture worthy, and yet, it is excellent. 
• We have selected an electrician and had our plans approved by the electric company, so the service and breaker box will be moved and updated soon as well as installing new circuits for the mechanicals. That will be a huge relief and an important first step towards not setting the house on fire. 
• As for me, well... I have tried to be helpful. We are in a strange spot where things are advancing in some areas and moving backwards in others. Handling the kid, housesitting, cleaning for showings and jumping through all the hoops before I go back to work has actually kept me pretty occupied. In the meantime, I have been shopping. It sounds like an unimportant, trivial and perhaps even counterproductive job, but the fact remains that someone has to do it and that someone is me. There is a lot of data processing involved, between reading reviews and price comparing and coordinating with other stuff. And I want someone to appreciate my hard work, so here are some things I have recently purchased: 

allen + roth vanity light at Lowes.com. In your face, stupidly expensive schoolhouse lights! 

This is for the upstairs bathroom. 

Also at Lowes.com, The Aquasource Norcroft faucet for the pink and black bathroom. Hoping this is a winner because it's about half the price of the Moen Brantford version at the orange store (way, way less than half of what BB&B is selling it for) and the Moen Brantford tub and shower kit comes without the shower head and is mildly affordable and is what I would like to use upstairs. 

I know a whole lot more about bathroom fixtures than I want to right now. 

The Gaston corner pedestal sink, to display the aforementioned faucet in the pink and black bathroom. Apparently, corner pedestal sinks are stupidly hard to find, I only like this one, and it is only sold at three places that I know of and two of them have them backordered until 9/30/13. Thankfully I got a tracking number on mine tonight (free shipping!) courtesy of Signature Hardware. 

And now for some color selection action. 

Dining Room Battle of the Turquoise Winner: Valspar 'Sprinkle'

I finally concluded that 1) there was no reason to deny myself the ease of using paint colors I liked by trying to force them to match up to a Benjamin Moore equivalent and 2) there just isn't very much light in the dining room and 3) therefore BM's Jamaican Aqua was too dark and too blue because it just never got enough light. Pantone's Bay was a nice option in the lighter, green direction but ultimately was too green. Someone looking for a lovely vintage green might try it out. Valspar's Sprinkle just glows on the wall, and that is what I was looking for. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will make me as giddy with excitement when it's all over the walls instead of just on my sample poster. 

I put sample paint on $0.32 posters from Target. Because otherwise I would have to clean the walls to put the samples up and ain't nobody got time for that. 

The living room color was actually pretty easy to find. One sample of Pantone's Ecru and we were good to go. Likewise, Benjamin Moore's Palladian Blue is a winner for the master bedroom, but I had to get it off the porch (and away from the blue carpeting) to see how much I really liked it. 

The surprise loser was Benjamin Moore's Yarmouth Blue, which was slated for the other upstairs bedrooms. It was just too dark. The next sample to go up is Valspar's Cincinnatian Hotel Abbey. I have never typed Cincinnatian in my life, and yet there it is. We tried the Icy Blue but it was really light, and CHA is the next color on the paint chip. We'll see. It's a much more aqua shade than I had planned, but the kid really loved Palladian Blue and after I drew the line at having all the bedrooms the same color he was pretty stoked about the 5004-9 card. He was so cute at the store today ordering his sample. The men gave him a blue sucker while they mixed his paint, because why not? That kid gets more swag than anyone I have ever met. 

Also, I spend a lot more time re-shelving paint chips than you might believe. I'm actually getting really good at it. That kid loves him some paint chips. 

This Week, Next Week, We Need, Pending...

In my past endeavors, I have accomplished some fairly impressive feats of organization with some large groups of people. Last week I thought, how did I do that? How did we keep everyone on the same page? And part of the answer was: white boards. I love a white board. It fills my little planning heart with joy. And now we have one, complete with some smiley faces and an extremely grumpy face. I'm calling it 'the job board' so that I can deflect responsibility on to it. We have to do it, the job board said. Also, under "To Buy/We Need": $1,000,000. Guess who added that. 

This week's major project is cleaning all the windows and scraping and painting the trim on the front porch. Just cleaning off the porch helped me feel like we were moving on to the next phase, having bagged up the gajillion pairs of work gloves and safety masks from our demo party and thrown out a bunch of napkins and debris from our recent fast food lifestyle. The major MAJOR difference comes from the clean glass. It's amazing. So much brighter and cleaner. It's like you're not sitting in a dirty aquarium anymore! Priming will take place on Friday, and hopefully we'll get the top coat on soon after. This will eliminate the primary area of concern for lead paint, although we are pretty sure that the paint that could even possibly maybe be lead is under at least one layer of latex already.

Of course, 100% lead is still readily accessible, and when scraping started on this window it was discovered that someone had painted over a fair amount of the lead cames already (that is what they are called I know because I googled it). So we're going to prime and paint all the other trim and come back to this window when we have a better idea of how to handle it. We think some stripper and steel wool will get the paint off the lead, and then we can reglaze this and some of the other original window glazing that came off. The windows here are otherwise in very good shape.

Inside we have been busy as well. This is the current view from the kitchen to the dining room. Notice a few things missing? Unfortunately we're going to be wall-less for quite a while, I'm afraid. Which is fine, since I'm struggling with the wall color in here. The sample that's up now reads much greener in the photo than it does in real life, where it feels too blue. I have a second sample up on the other side that feels too green. ARGH.

This small patch of pine flooring between the pantry and the basement represents four hours of hot, sweaty, frustrating work, and a full day of recovery (at least!) for my neck and shoulder. I am not built for this job. And yet.

I had two guys come through to quote refinishing the floors, so I can make some educated decisions on what to do and when and who will do it. One of them told me that this is the original heart pine floor. I had kind of been hoping that it was circa 1975, although when we got to the part where it joins the oak hardwoods the craftsmanship was a little too good to be seventies era. Believing it's a recent addition makes it less stressful when a sliver comes up with the glue or something gets gouged, so I may choose to believe the 1975 story for awhile.

Speaking of 1975, peace the spork out, grody range. Enjoy your trip to the big metal recycler in the sky. The Mr. took all the pipes and vents in to be recycled today and made a whopping $27 for all the plumbing, venting and chuting we could remove ourselves. We're rich! The stove was hoisted into a truck by some scrappers, who drive around picking up metal to recycle. They were thrilled to get it and we feel happy to have helped them, and thrilled that we didn't have to lift the stove into the van. I had thought we would scrap the dishwasher as well, but when we were trying to get the linoleum out from underneath it, we discovered that it was brand new and had never been used. Whoops. We don't love it still, but the question of it's fate can be decided much farther down the line.

Nasty. 

Lastly, the wet and moldy vanity in the pink and black bathroom got taken out late last week and this is the situation that got left behind. I've had a corner pedestal sink picked out for months (actual, real months) and have been waiting to get a plumber on board before I order it. The last plumber I talked to didn't think it was going to work because of where the plumbing is located in the wall and the sink pedestal is only partially open. So I have a second choice sink picked out in case we have to go flat against the wall, in which case I'm worried that the pipes are too close to the corner. So when we have a plumber I guess we'll see what they say. The Mr. has his spec sheets put together now and we're hoping to have some movement in that direction soon.

Pink and Black Bathroom

There is actually one room in this whole house where I want to keep the wallpaper as is: the downstairs half bathroom.

This may be because I have no idea what to paint this room, and I kind of enjoy the swanky little fish. It's also in much better shape than the other wallpaper in the house.

The current plan is to replace the toilet and sink with vintage looking white fixtures. The black toilet just really squicks me out for some reason. Is that weird? I'll put in a pedestal sink instead of the nasty vanity and paint the cabinet over the toilet a glossy black. Then we'll rip down the curtain and call it a day.

The tile floor has a lot of yellow in it, actually, and has been painstakingly laid to be flush with the hardwood floor. So we're not interested in replacing it unless we absolutely have to. There are a few wonky spots where they've done some repairs, but we have no idea what's behind the vanity or the toilet.

I'll admit that my first impulse was just to demo the whole thing, but one of my BFFs convinced me to keep it  as a highly coveted vintage find. It grew on me, what can I say. 

My only other idea for this room is chalkboard paint above the tile: