After the Move

So we've been in the house now for just over two weeks and have been able to use our three weekends so far to bring a bit of order to the inside of the house. The outside may still have a lot of construction materials and a very bad looking propped up porch roof, but the inside is organized. (mostly).

Here is our living room the best looking area of the house at the moment. It looks much smaller and more crowded than it really is, partly because I wanted to have the sofas facing each other but not blocking the dining room entry. I really need to get a nice fish eye lens for my camera so it can look like we're living in a mansion. But it really does look smaller than it is.

And here is the beautifully refinished floor that I told you about. So many great lines and colors throughout the wood, it's the exact texture and color I would have wanted if I could have chosen new floors.

And here is the old old heater (or do you call it a furnace maybe?) in between the living and dining room. It may look its age and have a bit of paint on it from the previous owners poor painting jobs but it actually works. Without any modification. Although you do have to use a pair of pliers to turn it on because while there probably was a knob connected to it once, it certainly isn't there now. That goes on the search list - after all, it's an interesting piece and it will look nice once we clean it and paint it a nice nearly black color. Not to mention, best make it look nice and functional as it would cost thousands to remove it.

Here you see the living room from the dining room (bit of bad lighting in the picture, it's not so yellow). I'll agree with Patrick here that the sofa does not look good from this angle, blocking the passage, but it's the best place we can put it. Eventually we'll get a nice comfy chair for that corner and get rid of the loveseat. The blur around the light from the window shows our cheap one dollar shades from home depot. They really don't look bad. Certainly better than some pictures I've seen with sheets pinned up over the window. Once we repair the cracks in the walls and repaint, we'll chose curtains to go with the new colors.

Now, I won't show you another angle of the dining room because, really, there's nothing more to see except the still badly finished built-in and Patrick's messy electric piano.

The bathroom, however, is coming along - compared to the gutted hole from before. We have all the necessities - which is nice as I swore when I first saw that port-a-pottie in our yard that I would never use it. We have our brand-new clawfoot tub (in the end, after looking everywhere the only reasonable option - and easily the cheapest - was to buy new). You can see our beautiful tile and the old mats from our condo bathroom. You might also be able to see the gaping hole in the wall. That is where the previous owners had a toilet roll holder - our contractor removed it but I guess it took the wall with it. We want to eventually take off the remaining bead board and put up new stuff with a better technique. The other guys just tacked in up and left nail heads visible everywhere. It seems so stupid. I figure use screws at the very top under where the cap will be and at the very bottom under where the baseboard will be. But no accounting for all the crap they did.

Now look at the pictures below to find out what my little Stiggy's favorite thing to do is.

She is a real bathroom cat. The moment I'm even walking to the bathroom, there she is trying to squeeze herself in. And as we don't actually have a door to our bathroom right now, she has free range of it. It's really quite adorable, she's never more affectionate and playful than in the bathroom, she's always been that way. In the picture above she may look like she's just lounging about but she's rolling around and purring like crazy. I just barely got a picture in focus.

Anyway,

Here is the make-do kitchen. We have most of our appliances now, a new refrigerator and dishwasher. We got both at the Sears Outlet in San Leandro and they make me so happy, knowing how cheap they were. You know it's quite odd having a built-in dishwasher without the surrounding cabinet. Can you say over balanced? I'm pulling out the top rack, loading it for the first time and it begins to tilt, and I'm too slow to react so the bottom rack flies out and onto the ground in. Luckily all of the breakables already in the rack were okay. We now have a very heavily filled suitcase sitting on top of it.

See here our make-do oven, range, cabinets, workspace i.e. the table and floor i.e. the cardboard boxes laid about the room. But we've been over to Home Depot and planned out our future kitchen now and maybe this next week one of us will visit our credit union to see if we can get a two or three year loan to make it easier to afford. Our plan is for a kitchen as economical as possible while still looking good for resale.

We had chosen this style with MDF doors but then noticed that the white finish is applied after the door is put together making the corners and edges look really bad, so we changed to the painted maple which felt great under our fingers. It was an upgrade of about $1500 but the MDF was really ugly so I can't imagine the next buyers thanking us for the kitchen remodel. The countertops will definitely be of stone... eventually but to save the $1700-2000 it will cost, we'll put in laminate for about $200 and upgrade in a year or so.

Moving on...

Here's our new back of the kitchen configuration. That new corner houses our water heater, accessible from the outside only. Obviously, our laundry next to that, no pedestal for the dryer yet. But, really, no dryer yet because that one is electric and silly me, we don't have the correct 220 hook-up. So we're currently waiting for a good gas dryer to pop up on the Sears Outlet website in our itchy clothesline clothes. We'll get that one returned when we find the replacement and hopefully we'll get the restocking fee waived by buying the new one in the same place.

Next, our badly badly painted built-ins. I finally started my first DIY project - refinishing our kitchen built-ins. Above you see our first door missing. I used a heat gun to strip off the four layers of paint on the backside of that door - every color horrible to imagine. Then, after getting practice on the back of the door I turned it over and found out that there was only one thin layer of white paint on the outside. So the other owners took care of the nice finished outside of the cabinets up until the last poor paint job. And the wood for the cabinets - now I'm not exactly knowledgeable in this area but I think it looks like a beautiful redwood. You tell me. You can only just see the clean sanded wood in the picture below on the left side door.

These two doors show the progress we've made so far. I stripped the back of the left one to where it looks like the far right side of the right door. The right door is the interior side of one of the doors. I half stipped that with the heat gun and then we tried out a chemical stripper. When I found out that there was only one layer of paint on the outside of the doors, I also found out that the heat gun doesn't work very well on such a thin layer of paint. So as I went on to the next door, Patrick tried to sand off the thin layer which worked pretty well - you can see the smooth sanded middle of the door. Then, he went to get a chemical stripper to see if it would work any better. It was definitely easier - the part surrounding the sanded middle is what we had after two chemical layers were scraped off. He also tried it on the rest of the door that I was peeling and it worked quite well but I prefer using the heat gun I think.

In the closeup you can see the residue of the mushy paint which is left behind after scraping the chemicals off. With some washing I guess it will all come off but I kind of prefer the slow gentle removal using the heat gun. Though as we plan to paint the cabinets white again, we can probably just lightly sand the outside of the doors and cabinets and then repaint (still stripping the inside because there are so many layers).

Also, while I was using the heat gun earlier in the day, I was quite close to the paint on the outside of the house so I got a little curious and aimed the gun at it for half a minute. When it started to get all bubbly I scraped a bit off and found out that the pink isn't original. It seems our house used to be a very nice canary yellow. I would have much preferred that. Not that I've changed my mind - I still want blue in the future.