The Trees are getting a haircut.

This past weekend we worked out in the yard and gave the tress a hair cut. We have some work still left to do this coming weekend but the house is now visable adding a little more curb appeal.
Before & During

Flowers my wife planted

Today I found that I could post the weather on the blog, which is a little too late for everyone to see the heat index of summer around here. My wife planted these sunflowers from seed in our garden. She makes everything so nice in the house.

Entry room started

This weekend we have started the entry room. We were going to make a small second bedroom here but it would be 7' x 12' and when I drew the framing marks on the floor my wife showed me how it would be difficult for anyone of size to even come into the house. I thought we could sell the home only to skinny people but no such luck. Now it will be another living room or something like that. Here are the before pictures.

One of those Before & After pictures

Here is a before and after shot, from when we first started until today. Still more to do but it is a far cry from where it was.

New Floor

New Floors this weekend! We found a deal on flooring and put it in. The living room is coming along. We have resurfaced the plaster walls, dropped in a new sub floor, painted, redid the windows and put in a working ceiling fan. Other stuff as well but I don't remember it all. Those pictures will follow shortly.

Started on the living room

So this weekend we started demo on the living room. Check out this window temp however. It will be 101 today but in the sun, in the window it is 115. I wonder if it gets to be 114 actual temp will the thermometer explode in the window. We have remained inside as much as possible during this part of our Missouri Summer Vacation. Here is the living room before the hammer has been swung. We painted the old #1 wood that was down for the sub floor to block the smell from old pet stains. Blitz 123 is the best stuff I found for this problem. Kilz only amplified the stench.

Boo Boo has become my supervisor on this project. He is always right there to lick me in the face whenever I am fixing something close to the ground. His slobber in my face really doesn't help the project but I don't want to tell him that and risk hurting his feelings.

The old moldings are really in bad shape and would take too much effort and time to repair, so next weeks posting will not be featuring them. lol

Counter tops and top trim

The kitchen counter tops are all on now. The 3/4" plywood wrapped in $3.00 Walmart material was nice but the upgrade is nicer. We still have to do above the stove; shelves or cabinets. The one cabinet we have is 48" so it will not fit correctly and I guess we will use that in the mud room. We also trimmed out the top of the half walls, painted them and finished them off with 8-9 layers of wax. It gives them a factory baked finish look, that the fancy cabinet makers have without the need for a walk in oven.

It will be so nice to get the wood floor and base board trim down.

There is Boo Boo in the backgrond and the next room waiting to be started. That will be the living room when we are done. Last weekend we hung the fan & light. We still need to place the fridge in the slot, left of the sink. We must purchase a fridge that is 30" wide as the slot I made and the fridge we found do not match up. Right now the fridge is in the living room. It makes for a big work triangle in the kitchen. lol

This morning

Here we are with a few updates this morning. The kitchen so far. The sink has the counter top in and we are painting so that's why the blue tape. By the stove the counter tops are 3/4 plywood from the old cabinets, wrapped in 3.00 Walmart tabel cloth. It will work unitl we can buy the counter tops. The floor now has 1/4 plywood ready for a real floor but we are very thankful to have plywood vs the old floor. The sun is coming in the windows so you cannot see my beautiful wife handy work with the curtains but trust me they are awesome. I am sorry guys but I do have the best wife in the whole world.

This is the outside of the house this morning along with the temp and our old refrigerator shown next to the new one. The old one is for sale. Now we paid $2.35 for it but now we have learned a thing or two about Missouri and we know this thing is worth $350.00 for sure. See if you went to a store to buy a new fridge you would have to pay $600.00 and this one is only 51 days old. So we will consider offers above $300.00, shipping is extra. It's the old fridge for sale by the way. If we cannot get at least $300.00 we will just keep it. See we are learning the culture down here too! lol

Here we are about two weeks ago, in the kitchen. If you click on it you can see the pictures bigger.

Here we are in April, when we came down for 5 days and we were going to fix the place up and sell it, all in 5 days of course. The first night here I told Kristine, let’s just load up your stuff and abandon this place. Of course this was picture was taken after 3 days of work and many more before I even showed up by Kristine. The above picture there is paneling on the floor to cover OSB that is soaked in old dog urine to cover an old furnace grate. Below the OSB gone and the floor repaired with new boards. The walls were painted too and the kitchen cabinets (if you could call them that) are removed. We were feeling pretty good about the 5 days of work we did here and left for Wisconsin.

1st posting

Well we have been here 51 days now and decided to keep everyone up to date on our progress with the house. We are calling this our Missouri summer vacation that we happen to be remodeling a house. Yesterday the kitchen & dining room walls were repainted (1st coat), a fan/light was installed in the dining room and Kristine made curtains for the windows out of $1.00 a yard fabric we bought at Walmart. With the tension rods each curtain was under $5.00. We also purchased a refrigerator, which we were very excited about. We had been using a cooler and a bag of ice every day. The Salvation Army had the fridge for $65.00. It took all day Saturday to rent a trailer, haul it home and then clean it up. It ran all day as well so our spirits were a bit down as we thought now we have a bad fridge, but it finally adjusted and runs occasionally now. So we have things like cold food, cold drinks and even homemade popsicles to enjoy. Every day we find some new thing to enjoy in this process. Things that the rest of the country probably thinks is standard, we acquire slowly but surely. We went from heating our water on the stove and bathing in the tub to a hot water heater and actually taking a shower in less than two weeks. We were roughing it on our Missouri vacation but now we are starting to up grade and fly first class. Anyhow, since this is my first post and the first time I have used Blogger I will publish this and the photos before telling more of our exciting Missouri Summer Vacation.