Renovation Chaos: Progress, slow and steady

The past two weekends have been half downtime and half work on the house. Mostly, we've been pulling staples out of the floors downstairs. We've spent MANY hours at this task and very much appreciate the inexpensive kneepads we purchased for this task. They made a huge difference on how long we were able to work on this at any one time.

Overall, the floors are looking pretty nice. There's wear-and-tear, which is to be expected on any flooring 60 years old. The stairs got the most damage when the tack strips were being removed, but I'm hoping it will be something that can be repaired when we refinish the flooring. The damage is to the back portion of each step, so while it's not pretty, the stairs are fully functional.

We made our first trip to Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which was pretty fun! We found a lot of paint, which alas, i have plenty of right now. A miscommunication with our drywall guys that finished the ceiling meant that we have a leftover 5-ish gallon of untinted paint. So I'll be taking that back to the paint store to get tinted, and it will be the color used in the living room/hallways/stairwell/kitchen walls. It will be put to good use. But back to ReStore. We found some cool aluminum and wood chairs that I liked, particularly at $20/chair, but we decided to hold off on purchasing them since we're not quite ready for furniture yet. Instead, we found some nice ceramic tile that we will be using to retile the downstairs bathroom floor at the end of May with the help of some friends. We also found another store down the street that we'll be checking out, since it's a home furnishing outlet and we didn't have time that weekend to check it out.

After determining that we were adding tile to the list of projects for our BBQ/home repair shindig weekend, I realized that we can't tile a bathroom AND remove wallpaper from said bathroom at the same time, so I reprioritized some of the projects and have started working on removing wallpaper from the bathroom.

Other things that are progressing along with the help of some contractors, including my coworker's father:

Electricity in the garage restored, and some other minor electrical work started
extended the shower heads in both bathrooms so the showers will work for someone beyond a hobbit.
Changed the leaking faucet in the upstairs bathroom. This faucet will stay in whatever final bathroom renovations occur, even if the rest of the sink area does not.

new subfloor plywood in the dining room to cover up the floor joists

carpet removed, with lots of staples yet to pull

dirty stairs sans carept

pulling staples

pulling more staples

stairs, from the other direction

we like our new old hardwood floors

The entry hallway

our first crockpot meal, and prepping the right cabinets to move all the kitchen stuff into, so I can go back to painting the other kitchen cabinets.

What's our first meal in the slow cooker? chili, of course!

How to eat without a stove or microwave: 1. rice in rice cooker, 2. salad, 3 protein cooked in convection oven (pot roast!) This has been our general meal plan for the last week and a half. The stove works, but the exhaust is currently full of leaves and we have no ladder at the moment to get onto the roof and clean it out.

Tile! it's apparently called "hexagonal dot" even though it's technically an octagon.

Oops! we're a little short. Luckily, we found an extra box of it online that should be arriving before our install weekend.

new faucet.

just when you thought the wallpaper/cabinet liners couldn't get any worse.

byebye roses

the adhesive/paper layer with the wallpaper remover sprayed on. I wasted part of the bottle spraying it on the first layer, which did nothing, but then I mastered the process.