"my Family is Great."

That's what Ray told me after they left after spending most of the day (or afternoon) helping us spackle, attempt to steam off wallpaper, move appliances, pull up carpet strips on the hardwood floor, clean - among many other things - on Saturday.
My mom and dad arrived early - Dad had his own ideas for removing the useless utility sink in the laundry room, and we'll eventually build a bench to box-in the plumbing and create a storage chest - we'll need it in this tiny house.


Since Ray and I were able to scrape off most of the glue Friday, we were able to spackle the walls on Saturday. Here my dad spackles away in his old work clothes...

Though the previous owners had left the house immaculate, I knew my mom's strong suit and put her on "fridge duty". Now I can feel comfortable putting food on the shelves knowing that they are C L E A N. (Sorry, Mom, no photo of you cleaning the fridge!)

My sister Nancy and brother-in-law, Dave, arrived mid afternoon, and were able to get quite a bit done - two big things: pullout the dishwasher so that we can put it in the new cabinet, and pull up the carpet staple strips on the hardwood floors, among other odd projects. Here my sister is scraping wallboard glue off in the front entry way in style...

One thing that plagues this house is wallpaper. For some reason people of a certain generation seem to like wallcoverings. And of course that doesn't suit our tastes and we attempted to steam it off using a Wallpaper Steamer.

Unfortunately, we chose a room in the master bedroom that the previous owner constructed, rather than a wall that was all sheetrock. This left the wall quite messy as the joint compound was starting to come off because we had to get the wall so wet. So the result was spending 1.5 hours steaming a wall of about 5 feet wide.

Ray and I decided that because the wallpaper was obviously done by professionals, and that the seams are darn near perfect, we're going to paint over it. We purchased "the gripper" primer coat paint and will make an attempt this coming weekend. As Ray said, "There's just too many more important things in this life to consider besides the seams of wallpaper." And that was it.

We closed! Finally...

It was a nice sunny afternoon. We closed at 2:30 PM on Mar. 24. All went smoothly. And within 24 hours we had ripped off all the wallboard and paneling in the hall and living room.


Here Ray starts the overhaul of the living room.

.And what it looked like later that evening... We actually felt quite bad about ripping the place apart - it is in excellent condition, it's just that we didn't want wallboard and 70's brown carpet in our living room. It will be 100 times nicer when we are thru with it. it has to be.

a creative break

lord knows I need it after the ridiculous loops we had to jump thru last minute to close on this house, which is now going to happen on Mar. 24.
so on a quick creative break, I came upon the uvscene and realized that they have some good stuff on their site for what's going on in the Upper Valley of NH.

On their site I came upon this cool tool, from the flickr site and an inovative way to spell out what you're thinking :

now if I could only find cool numbers like this for our house...

NOT closing day

if you read my previous post, "banks" and "smooth" should not appear in the same paragraph, let alone sentence.
i'm so bummed... we were supposed to close today at 9 am, then it got put off until 4 pm, now it's scheduled for tomorrow at 2:30, and all because of THE BANK. CharterOne is now asking for our most recent pay stubs AND proof of insurance, both of which we gave them previously.

nuts.

Closing day...

And it's going **fairly** smoothly!
We had the walk thru this morning and will be closing at 4:00 PM today, and not at 9 AM as originally planned. Some how the bank lost our purchase and sale agreement (??) and that was holding up processing. Fishy.
House looks good - it's so darn clean! Can't wait to get in and call it ours!

built in shelving for the LR, ordered stove

Today I got the price from one carpenter to construct built-in bookshelves in the livingroom. (Photo to left is for idea purposes only, we're looking at something with less mouldings, simpler lines.) Apparently for the size we're looking at, about 6 linear feet plus a small bench with open shelves underneath, we're looking at $3500-5000. Not in our price range... a couple of more people to ask and then I'm on to doing it myself, with my Dad's guidance, of course (he was self-employed as a fine furniture maker and made furniture for The Modern Furniture Barn for 40+ years). I did find some ideas online too, which were helpful in getting the juices flowing. Also, This Old House had some ideas.
Next week we hope to get into the house and do some measuring.

We also ordered a new stove to replace the old (15+ yo) coil-top stove that's there now (note: in this photo, the dishwasher will be moving and we'll be putting in cabinets next to the stove). We ordered a glass top from Sears with 5 burners, 1 dual and one additional warming burner. Though we'd prefer gas, there isn't a gas line for this house, and we weren't about to put one in for a stove. Color? White. We debated over the black and white options. Both are the same price, but we chose the white as the kitchen is white, as is the fridge. Dishwasher is black. We have black kitchen top appliances and will be installing a charcoal countertop. We thought the black might be too ominous in such a small kitchen. No stainless steel - doesn't quite fit this cottagy-type house, and the constant fingerprint markings we decided would drive us both nuts. It was only about $200 more. Plus nothing else would be stainless steel in the kitchen except for the sink. ;)