The sanding

 The reason why we had to pack up the whole house was that we decided to refinish the wood floors at the same time as the kitchen renovation. We've been wanting to and we've been living without baseboards in some areas, so it will be nice to see them looking FINISHED finally.

Unfortunately, you get to experience the photos in reverse order, since I'm posting this from my phone.

Eric headed off to our friend's house in Long Beach for the week, but I stuck around, working from the back yard while they began work on the floors. I was hoping to stay there for most of the week, but after one night of sleeping in the hammock, I realized that was unrealistic and I stayed with a friend near my work and ended up working two days in the office to keep away from the dust.

Lining up my drinks for the day, since they were working between me and the kitchen.

Morning sunrise after a night in the hammock.

I was warm enough most of the night, but got a bit cold towards morning. No mosquito bites since I covered myself from head to toe all night long

Bed for a night! When I laid down, I googled the best way to sleep in a hammock and it is diagonally to allow you to lay as flat as possible. 

Most of the furniture was moved to the kitchen while the sanding took place 

Fancy dinner (cold lunch leftovers) while sitting on the kitchen counter and resting on dresser drawers 

Our bookshelf turned temporary pantry was sealed with painters tape to minimize dust entry.

Upstairs closets with all but the edges sanded

Art studio 

Living room after being coated in a wood filler to seal tiny divots and gaps. This then got sanded down again to the wood surface 

Living room after initial sanding pass

Masks preventing dust from entering the drinks. I was right outside the door from where they were sanding

Dining/kitchen where all the furniture was moved. I still had a few things to pack up in this room.

Same area, different angle

Living room before. In the bottom center, you can just make out the edge of a patch of significant wear and tear on the floors. This cleaned up spectacularly, with no major repairs needed.

Sanding machines!

My daily office, which I had to keep shifting slightly to avoid the sun.

The night before.

What's in a box?

 I had a very busy September working on projects that were NOT related to our home renovation. I finished that up on the morning of September 30th, so that left us approximately 2.5 days to pack up our entire house! 

That's not to say we didn't do any of the packing beforehand. I sorted and cleaned out much of my art studio and we had made initial inroads on starting to pack up the kitchen, but in the scheme of the whole house, that was just a drop in the bucket. 

Things we learned:

• We own too much stuff. We took this opportunity to sort out as much as we could and donate used items to either Goodwill or Habitat ReStore. We will be doing a second culling as we unpack our belongings back into our house. 
• When you think you're almost done, you still have hours of work ahead. It looked like we had packed up the bulk of the house with only a "little bit" left in the art studio and kitchen. That little bit turned into number of boxes!
• Everything is a box. You start to get creative when you bought a number of shipping/storage containers but you don't really want to go out and purchase more. Empty suitcases? box. Hampers? box. Bags that held bedding materials when you purchased them? box. laundry basket? box. rolling cart? box. Cabinets you knew were deep, but didn't realize how deep they actually were? super box! Empty delivery boxes? Definitely reused for packing up the house. 

Partway through packing up the kitchen/dining room, we had boxes and items everywhere!

Packing our jackets/fancy clothes in a wardrobe box. Most of our clothes got packed into airtight bins to avoid any weird garage smells from seeping into the fabrics. This box got a bag of baking soda. 

We were able to fill our hall closet with books 4 rows deep! we definitely took advantage of all the space we had available inside the house that wouldn't be impacted by the work. 

our bookshelves are technically the hallway linen closet. We had a lot of space behind the books, so we pushed them all the way back and made room for our pantry goods. We didn't want to put any foodstuffs in the garage, since we did this when we first moved in and it attracted rodents. 

hampers, suitcases, duffel bags all became boxes to pack away clothes and other household goods.

Starting to move items into the garage. 

the table became half random-catchall, and half donation pile.

the kitchen/dining looked worse before it looked better.

wrapping the tech up to protect it and minimize dust. 

we pulled down all our wall art/photos in addition to packing everything up. Here, our accent wall has almost all the images removed.

we had a jar full of bottle caps that we've been collecting just for fun over the years. While we never fully filled the jar up, we decided it was time to part ways and that the metal caps could be recycled into something better. 

hangars in the bathtub! (the duffel contains even more hangars)

we added the doors back onto our hall cabinet/bookshelves and then taped off the edges to prevent/minimize any dust intrusion. 

This is when we fooled ourselves into thinking we were done and the house was packed. We had more boxes that were added after this point. I don't have a photo of the "after" when it was actually done.

It's mostly empty, right?! 

art studio mostly packed, with the flat files moved to the garage AFTER the blue tarp was covering the the bulk of the boxes. 

Is this thing on?

 Test 1-2. Test 1-2. Am I live? Is this thing on?

You may have noticed an absence of posts in the--oh, 5 years since our last post. Have we renovated things? Yes. Did I forget all about this blog for a while and forgot to post? Yes. Am I sorry? meh. 

Since I last wrote, we've upgraded a few things, mostly courtesy of pandemic and working at home constantly: drought-tolerant landscaping when we didn't want anyone inside our house; insulating the outside walls when we were constantly home and noticed either the heat or the cold; replacing the windows and doors; repainting the exterior of the house when we noticed all the peeling; a number of other small changes that any family make to a home as they live it and acquire things and break things or use things. 

But I figured I'd dust off this dated blog. (E asked, "Is that BLOGGER?!?!?!") Why? Because we're about to head back into renovation chaos. And we don't do things by halves. We're updating our kitchen AND refinishing the wood floors throughout most of the rest of the house. We really should have refinished the floors before we moved in, but woulda, coulda, shoulda. 

All this to say we need to pack. The entire house. While I'm trying to work on finishing a project and send it out on submission. Like I said, no halfway measures here!

I started with the art studio while taking breaks from my project and we're using this time to take a very hard look at all our belongings and ask, "Do we even use this?", "Do we need this?", or, in the case of some boxes of tropical teas, "Have we been hoarding like a dragon?!?!"  Where's Marie Kondo when you need her?  (spoiler: I may have also been hoarding bright orange boxes from our covid snack delivery subscription, but they are so pretty!! And, we are putting them to good use now as we pack things up.)

The art studio packup:

A pile of old, unfinished artwork on the floor

piles of art materials that I am keeping and storing nicely in the large format flat folders I have.

Art supplies being boxed up. Two boxes to give away, 2+ boxes to keep.

My art filing cabinets have never been so empty or organized since we moved in. Nor has the closet around them!

A wide angle shot of the table/bookshelf side of the studio, with the bookshelf mostly emptied.

The kitchen:

The current state of the kitchen, which has no cabinet doors since shortly after we moved in. We started renovating it, but then stopped halfway through and have been living with this as-is for the last 5 years.

Starting to empty our shelves and trying to sort everything. It's going to look worse before it looks better.

Boxing up kitchen stuff in the few cardboard boxes we already own.

The dining area is currently not dining-accessible, but the sorting, packing, and staging area for all random home belongings. 

The current donate pile. If we haven't used it in a year+ (to account for seasonal usage), it goes here. If we have multiple of an object and probably do not need to own that many, it goes here. If we are unsure, it probably goes here, too.

I won't miss the current kitchen's peel-n-stick tiles and the exposed subfloor.

...Or the florescent lightbox kitchen light.

...Or the last remnants of the flowery wallpaper the previous owner installed.

The bathroom, weeks 3-4

So the next phase of our bathroom was floor tile. We went to the tile shop by our house, looked around, couldn't agree on anything. We went back a bit later to look again with fresh eyes and we picked out a floor tile by determining what we both could agree on being the least offensive. Not exactly a strong endorsement. After more thought, we both agreed we weren't happy with our selection, so we went looking for options. I'm really not a fan of square tile and I also wasn't particularly enthusiastic for the 12x24 tile that is popular these days. I wanted a narrower, longer tile, ideally a light color to balance the darks in the room, ideally in a matte finish. 

We visited a different tile store in the area and found tiles we loved much more almost immediately. We found about 10 different tile sets that we could have gone with and been satisfied with the result--including a Banksy graffiti tile set. I was amused with the tile showing a graffitied face on it and commented on it. Apparently I had the exact same reaction as all the kids had when families came in to pick out tiles. Gail having the aesthetics of a 5-10 year old. Yep, sounds about right. 

As the salesperson was showing us options, we found the one. Well, ones. We found a beautifully textured tile that varied from a concrete-like texture to a subtle striation that was interesting but not too marble-like (I'm not a fan of marble). Since we couldn't decide if we liked the white version more or the light gray version more, we decided on BOTH! The salesperson mentioned that in his history of selling tiles, we're the only residential customers that opted for 2 colors of the same tile. 

I tried a sample arrangement of the two tiles together in an abstract, random pattern. I was happy to find that there was a LOT of variation in the tile designs to resolve the other main concern I was worried about: repeating patterns on two tiles that were side-by-side. I see patterns very easily and this would have driven me batty.  

Yes, I did create a mockup of the "random" abstract pattern I wanted.

Tile layout in progress

More tile progress

Shower tile going in.

More progress on the wall tile.

The start of the vanity going in. 

A slight snafu with the installation of the wall tile. 

Tile work for the shampoo alcove.

Shower tiled and grouted, wall repaired.

 

Cabinet install continuing

 Vanity from one angle

Vanity from the other. 

Doesn't the gray tile wrap nicely around the vanity?

Toilet installed.

Heated towel rack installed. It is glorious

Threshold installed.

Counter and sink installed

Eric took photos while I took photos. 

 

The new mirror installed.

The shower door installed.

The bathroom from the window. We'll get the door upgraded as soon as we figure out what we want to do with all the doors in the house.

The shiny glass door. 

 

Scott taking the new tub for a test drive.  I think he approves.

We have a few final details to finish on the bathroom, but it's come very far.