Through Day 5

No, we're not exactly on schedule, but we've made a ton of progress! Thanks to the two skilled hands and experienced (no, I don't mean old!) mind of my pops who came up to lend a hand, Wifey and I are seeing noticeable improvements and progress. Some pics...


- The beginning of the madness. As much of the movable stuff from downstairs as possible was boxed up, disassembled or taken down and moved upstairs to our bedroom for the time being. I wrapped up the computer cabinet to keep the impending spackle dust out.

- My God, the holes are actually, and FINALLY, being filled in! It's only been... what? 2 years?

- Digging in. Bought the wrong damn spackle and it made the first two layers really hard to manage. It wasn't until my Dad came up that he pointed out the right stuff to get. I'm going to be writing the good folks at Home Depot a letter letting them know they're people don't know what the hell they're talking about. They pointed me to this stuff, and even though some small part of my brain (wayyyy down deep and towards the back there) told me it wasn't right, I still bought it. Then, another. After $26 and two frustrating coats of this crap Dad got me back on track with real joint compound and it made the final coat so much easier.

- I thought this was messy... oh, you ain't seen 'nuthin yet.

- The living room, end of Day 1.

- I put up this sheet to minimize the dust that was going to get everywhere otherwise. It did a damn fine job too - we haven't noticed too much in the living room.

- Looking out from the dining room into the living room through the plastic. Almost ET-ish.

- I covered the doorway to the kitchen and set up fans down the hallway to blow the dust out. It worked pretty well too. We were blessed with fantastic weather.

- Wifey hard at work at 9:30 pm on Day 2. Yes, we're even tackling the leftover kitchen jobs during our marathon. Wifey had about enough of the color that we had in there, so she picked out a nice relaxing new color.

We've pulled four straight nights of working past 11pm.

- With all the tools being used the kids just had to bust out theirs for some pretend play.

- Yes folks, it's Day 3 and there is primer on the ceiling and the dark red wall has been primed over. After 2 years we can officially say there is a workable ceiling with some form of paint on it even.

- Dad hard at work taking on one of the ancillary jobs I had lined up during this home improvement marathon - replacing all of the base molding and casing around the hallway doors. It looked like these poor pieces of molding had been painted over roughly 25 times, and they were all chipped up from the previous owner's dogs, so they just had to be replaced and I figured there wasn't going to be a better time than this!

- The furnace closet, sans molding.

| - A newly painted kitchen!

- Holey cripes! Look at this place!

- Seriously, look at this mess. And this isn't even as bad as it was going to get! Poor Dad, this was his "bedroom" during his stay too!

- Dad, trying hard to clean up the mess I left him after using that garbage spackle. Working with the real joint compound made the job sooo much easier and it looks great now.

- Check out the new color for the living room! Wifey wanted to spice things up a bit, and I think she did a great job. Green may not be for everyone, but I think our little space will look really nice once we clean it up a bit.

- Dad, trying to paint the wall behind the entertainment center.

- End of Day 5. No, no crown molding yet. We were about to install the first pieces tonight but when we started to we realized that the corner blocks we got (no, we're not trying to compound miter these suckers, we're too lazy) were too small for the profile of the crown we got. So, while I went and picked up the family from JAM's baseball practice Dad ran to the HD for the 9th time and got some bigger corner blocks. We're jumping on that first thing tomorrow so we will definitely had crown up by lunch tomorrow!!!! Not sure how we're going to deal with the rain (can't cut these inside - too much dust) but somehow we'll get it done.

- What was the dark redish wall is now the dark green wall.

- See? I told you it was going to be messier! And this is actually picked up quite a bit! At one point we had a ton of junk from the cabinets all spilled out onto the couch so we could move the cabinets out from the wall. Most of it is back inside the cabinets now, we thought it would be nice to give Dad a place to sleep. :)

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Alright, that's it for now. It is 12:30 and I want to get a little sleep before having to start Day 6 in a few hours.

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