James and Kristin Whitt’s Corner

More Pictures

We’ve both been pretty busy lately, but I have added more remodeling pictures at the photo gallery at my blog. Still working on getting the photo gallery up an running for this site though. Many other things that need to be done first though.

For the house, we’ve pretty much finished painting Kristin’s office. I still need to fix the door and then paint it. We bought a closet door that is a mirror, and I think George is planning to install that next week. After that, it’s just touch up painting a few things here and there. I’m putting the blinds up in the room today probably and wiring up the phone, cat5, and coaxial.

George has patched the hallway / stairs up. The closet in the hallways has been patched up and fixed and is ready to be painted. The large wood post was cut down and then patched to match in with the wall. He also removed the wood on the ceiling that tied into it and has patched that up. Next week we should be able to finish painting the hallway and the stairs.

After all that, my office is that last major room that needs to be done. There is still minor work in each room left here and there, but nothing major. Just need to get carpet for the offices, hall, and stairs once it is all done. The dining room still needs to have quarter round put in it, but we have to wait formore to come in at Lowes first.

Living Room Laminate Re-Flooring

Kristin and I did really good on the living room floor. Before we went to bed we had about 1/3 of the floor done. The next day we actually finished it all except for about 3 rows.  That’s when it happened.  We took a moment to look at the entire floor and then I noticed that something was wrong on the left hand side of the fireplace.  We had noticed earlier that the right side wall was closer than we remembered, but didn’t think about it too much.  Well, while we were laying the laminate the night before, we were only putting spacers against the left wall and not the right wall where we finished each row.  Sometime overnight or when we were working, the laminate shifted to the right on us.  We ended up having over 2 inch gaps on the left side.  In the end, we ended up pulling up most of the rows and then repositioning the floor, and then laying it down again, this time including more spacers on both sides.  I ended up cutting up what was left of a 2×4 that we were throwing out and using it as additional spacers.  We ran out of time before we could finish the last three rows though.

Living Room Flooring

Well, last night James and I decided we wanted to try to put the laminate flooring down in the living room by ourselves.  We are both ready to be able to move our things up from the basement and start living in the living room.  So James bought a short how-to video of putting laminate flooring down and we watched it and got started.  We have half the living room done so far and are going to finish it today!!  Once we got around the fire place it was really easy and started to go much faster.  I took some pictures of us working on it and we’ll get them up as soon as we can.

Blinds and Floor

Since the new windows are in, we’re now putting in the blinds in the rooms that have been completely painted.  We have already bought all the blinds because we had a 10% coupon at Home Depot which we used.  The first floor blinds are all vinyl blinds since they windows are higher and there is less of a chance for the cats to reach them.  The second floor blinds are aluminum.  We decided to go with the aluminum blinds upstairs because the windows are closer to the floor and the cats can easily reach them.  We’re hoping that the cats will not be able to destroy the aluminum then.  So far, I have installed the blinds in the windows in the master bedroom, kitchen, living room, and dining room.

George has been working on the subfloor in the living room and dining room.  We’re adding a new subfloor layer over the planks that is plywood.  We’re going to be leveling the floor out under the plywood so that above the plywood will be level.  Once that is done, we can start laying the laminate flooring, which is the last thing that needs to be done before we can start using the living room and dining room.

Windows are in!!

The windows from Nu Vue are all in and they look great. But more importantly, we don’t feel any drafts from the windows anymore. It used to be really drafty by the window in the master bathroom and you could see outside through cracks in the window frame.  Overall, we were pretty happy with the installation.  It took them about 2 days to get our windows done completely (all 19 of them) and the workers were very nice.  The only gripe that we had (which we talked to the project manager about) was the mud in the master bedroom.  We had put some plastic down on the new carpet around the windows.  Apparently they did not put their own down for additional areas that might have needed and tracked mud around almost every part of the carpet that did not have something on top of it.  Luckily, we were able to clean it up.
Last night we went out and got blinds for our bedroom and James put them in. Today, we’re going to go buy blinds for the rest of the house and put them up as we finish rooms.

The house is really coming along now. The master bedroom is completely finished. The kitchen only needs some touch ups and blinds (which will all be finished today). The living and dining rooms only need minor touch ups and the flooring put down. My dad has been patching holes and cracks throughout the house to get it ready for primering and then painting. He’s started working on my office already and ripped out the tiny old closet where the walls were falling in and made it bigger and put up drywall. That room will be done in the next few weeks and then on to James’ office!

Windows

We got a phone call from the window people today so our windows our being installed tomorrow morning!!  Yeah!  James had fun painting all the old windows the nasty orange/brown color that we had gotten for the baseboards in the living and dining rooms.  We even wrote a happy birthday message on the outside of the windows for my dad because tomorrow is his birthday.  Happy Birthday, Dad!!