Countdown to Needing Rooms -- Day 1, or maybe Day 2

The college boys men will be home from LaLa Land some time on Thursday, and the college boy man who lives in the house has finished all his degree requirements, soooo....  it's obviously time to ramp up the progress of putting the house back together. We did get some things done over the weekend.

On Sunday morning, the living room looked like this:

And on Monday morning:

That boxes piled in the near foreground are all empty, and the books they contained are on the shelves. Today's goal -- empty more boxes, collapse empty boxes, and put some of the decorative items from the upper shelves back into place.

Future Vet's bedroom looked like this on Sunday morning:

Some friends came over to help move boxes, so by this morning, there were lots of boxes in place.

I'm not sure I have a goal for this room today. Future Vet will be home on Thursday. Maybe putting his stuff back in place is his job.

And let's not forget Media Guy's bedroom, which has been the depository for all the stuff that is reappearing in the living room and Future Vet's room. Sunday morning's views:

And by the end of the day (though the pictures were taken Monday morning):

About all I can say is that there is LESS stuff in this room. Today's goal is to get most of the extra things off of these shelves and back onto their proper shelves in the living room and Future Vet's room. Then we'll see what still needs to be done in here.

Various treasures have already been uncovered in Media Guy's room. Like the basket full of authentic Mardi Gras beads, authentically collected in New Orleans during Mardi Gras in years past.

And dragons. Here there be dragons.

The Aftermath is Chaos

What else is new?

While our new floors are in, the furniture is not yet back in place because we need the painters to come back and do some touchup. As the Drama Queen said, it's sort of like we are still camping out in our own house. The boys young men come back from LaLa Land in a couple of weeks, however, so we'd better get it all sorted out.

In the meantime, it's late, I'm tired and sneezy (or is that Sleepy and Sneezy?), and the camera isn't playing nicely. So that's all the update for right now. More later when either a) the camera is working or b) we have rooms put back together.

Wednesday Progress Report

I fully intended to post on Tuesday's progress yesterday. I even took pictures of the family room every hour on the hour. I decided to spare you all, my gentle readers, from looking at those pictures because essentially they were a record of watching cement dry, a process that is only slightly more interesting than watching paint dry.

Here, for example, is the first picture of the day, taken in the early morning before the installer arrived yesterday:

And here is what most of the pictures that I took for the rest of the day looked like:

The heater moves around, various tools and supplies appear and disappear. And that's about it. The long and short of it was that the leveling material was not quite dry enough to lay the floor over. So we ran space heaters and overhead fans and cranked the house heat up in hopes that today, Wednesday, the work could proceed.

And it did!

A moisture barrier is laid down.

The first few rows of new flooring are installed.

Mostly done.

And a detail of one of the corners where the new floor and the tile floors around the kitchen meet. Transition strips will be put in place tomorrow.

And finally (despite the decision by my camera to mess up the color values), the new floor is complete:

The floor in Future Vet's bedroom was also completed today:

And that leaves only the living room, which -- G-d willin' and the river don't rise -- will be done tomorrow.

But at least the prep work is done in this room and, after running space heaters and fans all day, the leveling compound is dry enough to work with.

Here's one last effect of all this "progress" inside the house. We moved a couch to the back yard because we are not keeping this couch in the new and improved family room.

 The dogs have taken full advantage of this temporary location. (Just for the record, the streaks on the window are not weather-related. They are from emptying the hose to the swamp coolers. I haven't had a chance to clean the sliding door yet. Too busy moving furniture.)

Monday Progress Report

My original plan was to take a picture every hour on the hour to see how things were progressing. The first several hours, however, all pretty much looked the same:

By mid-morning, there was at least some sign of progress:

Those are not our tools.

An hour later:

Apparently, the floors have to be perfectly level  before the new floors can be installed. As should surprise no one who has any familiarity with this house and its construction, the floors were not level. Not to mention all the little holes around the perimeter of the room left behind when we pulled up the nail boards that held down those horrible carpets.

The leveling compound looks something like concrete and it has to dry before the actual flooring process can start.

Leveling the floors in Future Vet's room was also started:

I'm guessing there's a lot more leveling to do in this room. There are holes in the concrete all the way around the room, just like those in the family room.

For the record, nothing was done in the living room. The installer is using that as a staging area and will complete that room last. Which is okay, because I asked him to please do the family room first. Why, you may ask?

So we don't have to hook up the DVR over the kitchen counter and take up most of the floor space in the kitchen with the TV itself. Sports Nuts had to watch Monday Night Football, of course. The Patriots were playing. Need I say more?

Floors -- Gearing up for Round One

Over the seven-plus years we have lived in this house, we have done major electrical and plumbing work, redone the kitchen and bathrooms, replaced a porch shade and a number of windows, and made an open balcony into a screened enclosure (the kitties love it!). Now we are starting on the first round of the final push to make this house marketable so we can leave Dodge. Finally.

Last week, people who knew what they were doing came in and painted the kitchen and dining room, fixing the kitchen ceiling in the process. The end result is amazing. If you had no idea that the original light fixture in the kitchen looked like this:

You'd never guess that was the starting point by looking at the kitchen ceiling as it now hangs:

After all this work was completed, the painters mentioned that they had a cancellation and if I wanted to have the rest of the public areas of the house painted now (rather than in the spring, which was our original plan), they would give me a discount on the work. So Sports Nut and I scrambled to clear rooms (the Wizard being out of town, as usual) and had the rest of the painting done last week. It looks fantastic, but new paint doesn't look all that interesting, so no pictures of fresh paint on the walls.

Next -- new floors in the living room, family room, and Future Vet's bedroom. All three rooms (along with a few others) had carpets that were badly stained and/or shredded. Not to mention poorly installed. Additionally, there were several places where the previous owner's pets had apparently made their mark (so to speak) and the owners had cut out pieces of carpet and patched with cleaner pieces:

In my defense, when I looked at the house before buying it, these patches were cleverly hidden by large pieces of furniture:

We invited all of our friends over (those who weren't busy with other things, at any rate) to pull up carpets in those three rooms. I did not document the process because it was dusty and dirty, as well as involving unpleasant odors, unidentifiable stains, and sharp knives. On second thought, I have no idea why I failed to take pictures. In the end, all three rooms were emptied out. Future Vet's room:

The living room (not entirely empty because the new flooring materials had to be brought in the house to acclimate before being installed):

And see in the background, how cleverly we managed to shove two large rocker/recliner chairs into the laundry room!

And the family room, from which the television set and DVR will be rolled to the kitchen early in the morning before the flooring people arrive:

You may note that the floor in the family room is not concrete like the other two rooms, but is covered with what is possibly the ugliest linoleum tile in the known universe:

The house was built in 1977, so perhaps the avocado tile is understandable, if not desirable. But the random splotches of blue and peach are a little confusing -- and they are random enough to make me wonder if some previous owner's children had a painting accident.

The careful observer may have noted that three rooms have been emptied of furniture and other STUFF and may be wondering where all of the STUFF disappeared to. Well.... Media Guy is away in LaLa Land, so we took full advantage of his unused bedroom:

That picture doesn't do it justice, so here's a peek around the corner:

And toward the other side of the door (more STUFF behind the door, of course):

All I can say is that it is amazing how much STUFF you can cram into one room when you have no intention of using the room for anything else. You have to be much more careful if you want to be able to access things in the room. Back behind the pile shown above are two beds stacked on top of each other. There's no way I could make it over there to take a picture. This room is going to have to be emptied pretty much in the order it was filled.

There is also a bunch of STUFF in the dining room, but not as much because we need to be able to eat somewhere:

And last, but far from least, we checked the weather reports and decided to store a lot of bookshelves out in front of the house:

We might have put these in the back, but I don't trust the dogs, who are having to spend most of their days out there until all the work is completed.

I'll post again tomorrow to report on the progress made.