floors walls floors repeat

It's been a while, you may be saying. Well...I've had a lot going on. New job. Trip to CT from hell. Got sick after said CT trip from hell. The house, of course. And then I put my Seattle townhome on the market 9/10, so had to prepare for that. Thankfully, a full price offer came in four days later. Oh yeah, and my dog got hit by a car (she is fine!). Needless to say, blogging has not been a priority. And yet here I am world!

Where did we leave off? I think floors...yeah, it took me a week to recover from that ordeal.

Hallway after Stew removed the parquet crap. No hardwood. GASP! Fortunately, this can be repaired, and has served as truly my only bad surprise in this process to date. I consider myself lucky.

I also had to pull the laminate from the upper/master bedroom, but that literally took less than an hour (yes, I timed myself, 10:48 AM - 11:40 AM, how else am I going to have any fun?), including removing it from the house and adding it to my growing pile of trash on the patio. Here are before shots; after shots are further down. And of course, guess what was underneath the laminate? Yep, more hardwood! But interestingly, the stairs were painted forest green (same color as the kitchen) and the closet bright red (same color as the living room). I don't get it...but that's probably in my favor.

I then spent the rest of THAT day cleaning the windows in the spare bedroom. Nobody had cleaned the windows in years. Gunk was caked onto the windows. The key to this task is a toothbrush. Fortunately, my mom and Stew actually think of this stuff and save things like old toothbrushes, so I did not have to buy one (and the fact I did not have to buy something as "cheap" as a toothbrush in this situation is HUGE because the costs are really adding up, sigh...). Meanwhile, Mom started to plug all the nail/screw holes in the window frames with spackle so we could prepare to paint. Progress is sweet.

A week passes...

I then proceeded to clean the windows in the master. It took hours. Yes, my life has been reduced to this. What is a social life, after all? I now speak to windows. I have not even gotten to the screens yet. I wonder what those conversations will be like.

Not sure if I mentioned this yet (my brain is in overload), but the hardwood guys cannot refinish my floors until the week of October 26, which is AFTER I want to move in (my townhome closes on October 26). Fortunately, I will be in Europe rocking out to U2 and chasing northern lights while they coat my floors with carcinogenic substances. Still, I have to return and have a place to sleep and work. Thus, the master bedroom has become my priority; my rest of my furniture will have to be tossed into the garage in the meantime. I will be carpeting the stairs and bedroom/closet rather than refinishing the hardwood so my spoiled dog has one room of carpet to roll around on post baths. So, this weekend I had to start painting. My mom helped. We went through 1.5 gallons of paint on the ceiling alone (color is Behr's Maui Mist...ooh la la). It was ridiculous. The plaster dude put a sand finish on the ceilings, so the surface area is pretty great and since this is the first (and ONLY, thank you very much) coat of paint/primer going on the ceiling, it was sucked up pretty well. We did not get to finish the closet because we ran out of white paint, and yes the closet will be white because I don't want color interfering with my clothing selection. I am fashion challenged enough.

Next, we painted the rest of the walls, and it took EXACTLY one gallon of paint (Behr, don't know the name of it). I wanted a mauve, not pink or purple, something not too feminine...hope I nailed it. My mom thinks so. The trim will have to wait for another day. Here are photos.

And don't you just love the photo with the light fixture dangling from the ceiling? My expectations are so low right now.

And as an added bonus, since you actually made it this far through the post, here are pics of the living/dining room in their current state. Nothing is painted yet. I shudder to think about how many gallons of paint these ceilings will consume.

Funny how when everything else gets cleaned up, the fireplace looks like an explosion occurred.

Entryway that used to be covered with parquet.

I will be painting the beadboard white.

Home Depot is heading over to the house on Thursday to measure the front door. I will be installing a new front door. A black door. No, I don't care to know your thoughts on that one.