Kitchen Still Moving Slowly

We have pendants (but only two lightbulbs)! For the first time, we both really like the kitchen because it's starting to actually look like one!

We will be pouring the concrete countertops next weekend. The island countertop will be laminate with the exposed plywood edges. We're using this laminate:

And someday, we hope to have this Electrolux range:

The Story of the Floor

We have a beautiful living room and kitchen -and corner bedroom- which are not quite yet done (ceiling, in particular) but we love them. The floors are natural and they have a water-based polyurethane on them which I highly recommend. However, I must tell you though you would never know, that these floors were stained Minwax Jacobean three times before they got to stay natural. The first time, we hadn't done a good job sanding and the stain didn't adhere so we sanded it off. The second time we stained it, the first coat of Super Fast Drying Minwax Polyurethane didn't dry for a week. It turns out we maybe didn't wipe up all of the stain very well and the polyurethane wasn't sticking to it. So we sanded it off and did it again but took hours to carefully wipe up all of the excess stain immediately so that there was no residue at all on the floors when we put down Minwax Fast Drying Polyurethane. Three days later it was wet so we took it off again, afraid if it wasn't adhering to our floor that it wouldn't last. We're happy now and will never use Minwax again.

Here's a shot of our fireplace. It still needs a mantle and wood around the base of the hearth, but it looks so much better than it used to. I put a before picture up just to compare.

And just for fun, we got some cool new dining room chairs...

And having nothing to do with our house...

I bought a bike! I hope to replace my usual red speedy ride with this new red one for my 2.5 mile daily commute.

(And no that is not my white picket fence.)

Summer Progress

I guess it's been a while since I've updated, but we've been very busy and we just have so much going on, it goes so slowly. The date is 8-6-08 for the purchasing of the cabinets and living room furniture!!! So the floors need to be refinished the weekend before that so everything else has to be done this weekend in order for that to happen. We still have to finish putting up the ceiling, install the new wood floor, sand some mud, paint the windows and structure, paint all of the walls and the ceiling touch up coat among a few other things. So here's the photos from the last couple of weeks.

We poured a concrete hearth

We started installing new wood floor for the kitchen

We started painting

So we have installed some of our ceiling which looks GREAT! We've installed our window, our new exhaust fan and the drywall! We got a lot done this month. It's finally starting to show!

Lazy Dog Days

Been doing a lot of small things around the house. After this weekend, there should be great progress to show. This weekend, we're installing some ceiling and we're replacing the kitchen window so it will be an operable awning window and we will have cross-ventilation for the first time!!

The good news is that on Saturday we got a Boston Terrier of questionable age named Midas. He's everything we wanted in a Boston: he's excited and energetic when it's time to go out and he's a power napper to rival our cats when we're just hanging out.

An Update at Long Last

We've moved very slowly this winter, but we did get a new furnace; we wired, insulated and drywalled our living room and hallway; and just last weekend, we ripped out our kitchen cabinets. We'll take out the drywall and tile floor this weekend.

before after

So the kitchen isn't quite to the looking better stage yet, but it will be soon hopefully.

I was really hoping to find some old photographs or stashes of cold hard cash while we ripped out the cabinets, but we found something cool anyway. On the floor under the cabinets was a brochure from the builder of the home. It has yellowed and suffered a little bit of termite damage from the termite infestation years of long ago, but it's still mostly readable and very enjoyable as it advertises a "magazine cover home designed by Cliff May" built by Stanley Cowherd Company and "plastic topped mahogany cabinets" (I think ours got skimped on that part -- it was pretty ordinary masonite and plywood).

So it's 5 degrees outside and our furnace broke!! You have to admit, that's pretty amazing timing on it's part.

We could get it fixed for more than we want to spend on an old bottom-of-the line furnace, but we thought it would be money better spent on getting a more efficient model. We'd really love a heat pump, but that just may be too pricey. Any ideas?

Oh, Wait! Our Living Room Ceiling is Gone!

So I just created this post to tell the world that my husband had a good idea. Now, our living room ceiling is gone and we certainly didn't rip it out without thinking how on earth we were going to replace it. We were prepared to install drywall but we were afraid that with ceilings like we have that are so visible and get lots of light bouncing off of them that if we didn't do the drywall just right, it would be so obvious that we didn't know what we were doing. Since we're completely redoing the living room/kitchen this year, we can't really afford to hire it out. So, that's when my husband mentioned that we could cover the rafters in simple tongue and groove wood paneling and just paint it. Well, we're pros at woodworking and surprisingly, we've found that it's cheaper than hiring out the drywall work. I thought this was a very good solution. So many Cliff Mays have the exposed rafters and decking. We obviously can't have that as it isn't the way our house was designed, but this is the next best thing really. We plan to do it for all of our ceilings when the time comes.