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| My new art desk, a gift from an awesome friend. My reward at the end of the long weekend was getting to assemble this! |
I was going to do a second post for the second half of Memorial Day weekend, but then I forgot to take photos. My friend Danielle and her significant other, Jim, came to our house to help us prime the living room, then we had a lovely dinner! It was the first time we got to eat at our table, which is currently residing under the pergola on the back patio. One day it'll find a home again inside the house.
This past weekend was our big 4-day push to make progress on the house before slowing down on our workload so I can work on other things on my nights and weekends. We had a bunch of people at the house to help out.
Our first visitor was John, who helped us remove all the knobs and hinges from the kitchen cabinet doors so they could be spray painted later in the weekend a bright pop of color! We would have preferred to replace the fixtures, but with 23 doors and 8+ drawers, that's a LOT of hardware and the least expensive I could find were $2.50 each! I chose the $10 for 2 cans of spray paint option. My artist friend, Tania, was the one who helped me color the knobs and hinges, and she also helped with priming the hallway and stairwell.
Steve and Lisa came down from Santa Cruz to spend the majority of the weekend with us and help us tackle the large project of the weekend: replacing the flooring in the downstairs bathroom. This included demolition of the particle board subfloor, measuring, cutting and installing the new cement board subfloor, then cutting and laying the new tile and grouting. One paragraph doesn't do justice to how mammoth this project was, particularly since at some point throughout the entire weekend 7 different people worked on this task in one way or another as we tag-teamed this project. I got to lay some tile and grout, then do the touch-up grouting.
Our friend Philip helped us tape off the ceiling and doorways and paint the first coat of color in our living room. Later in the weekend, Philip and Eric put down the temporary linoleum flooring in the kitchen. When Philip's wife, Jenny, arrived with their kids, we put Jenny and the kids to work painting the accent wall in the living room--bright orange! It's intense, but awesome! And if we find that we don't like how the wall looks after all our furniture is placed in the room, we'll repaint it to another color--probably the same dark blue color that will be on the bottom kitchen cabinets if I ever get around to finishing those.
Scott, our regular visitor, came and was awesome. He rocked it by always being around to help just when you needed someone to assist and he got some of the less fun tasks of the weekend, such as cleaning all the hardware before we painted it, being the one willing to go on one more errand when the 2 home owners are getting angsty, and--of course--demolition! Ok, maybe that last one was fun.
I tackled wallpaper for my big project of the weekend, in the art room and in the bathroom. It sucked and after a full day of working on one wall, we have decided to save our pennies (and our energy) until we can pay for the art room walls to be professionally refinished later on in the year. I still have plenty of wallpaper to tackle in the kitchen and that has only one layer.
The one negative to the weekend was the icky rodent problem continues. I don't want to think about it, so I'm not writing about it.
But enough talking. Photos!
Painting:
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| The wall getting a second coat with the help of some enthusiastic assistants. It'll need at least one more coat before I'm happy with it. |
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| While this was more mid-weekend, I wanted to start the photos off with a splash of color: "Cayenne"! |
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| more taping |
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| Philip taping off the walls prior to the painting above. |
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| The first coat of color. This grey is a bluish grey called "adirondack" |
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| Painting by torchere, since that's the only light we have in the living room at night. |
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| Lisa cutting in color around the doors and edges. She helped me pick out this lovely color. |
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| Everyone's a critic |
Bathroom Tile (vaguely in order):
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| Farewell vanity! Yay for powertools! The new vanity will be about 4 inches taller, better for our heights. |
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| Particleboard demo |
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| more demo. Go Steve! |
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| This project had a regular audience throughout the weekend |
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| brothers! |
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| our new subfloor. The wonderboard is wonderful. |
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| prepping for the circular to fit around the toilet. |
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| tile trimming, prior to renting the tile saw. Steve cut all the tiles and dryfit everything prior to mixing the thinset. |
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| more tile trimming, using nippers. Don't ask me how C painted his face orange, we still don't know. |
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| Add caption |
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| demo, close up |
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| Sealing the seams of the subfloor. |
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| and the tile goes down! |
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| Eric's turn! |
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| laying the thinset mortar. |
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| Phil's turn! |
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| Gail's turn! |
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| Mixing the thinset--everyone was interested (gail was scraping wallpaper) |
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| I got to lay the last of the tiles in the bathroom. |
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| And to lay in the first of the grout the next day after the mortar had set |
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| It's a dirty job. |
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| Eric's turn, grout and clean |
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| The finished product! We still have to seal the tile, finish removing wallpaper, seal the walls, then paint before we can put the toilet and new vanity back in place. |
Kitchen:
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| Scott cleaning the kitchen hardware |
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| It's mine! My precious. |
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| Tania priming while the guys lay tile |
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| more kitchen tile |
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| The finished kitchen (and partial dining room) tile. Still no cabinet doors--that'll be another weekend. |
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| Spray painting the hardware! I went for a bright yellow-green that will really pop off the white and dark blue cabinets. |
The Art Room:
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| The evil wall of wallpaper--2 layers! |
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| Scraping off the first layer. Note: daytime |
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| yep, still working. Note: nighttime. wallpaper, you suck. |
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| While this is a perfectly decent bookshelf, it was built into the FRONT of the closet, leaving a bunch of open space behind it. Space I need to put art supplies. |
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| Look at how deep that closet is. That is my new large paper storage and printer/scanner access, with bookshelf above. |
Chillin':
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| Lisa |
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| Eric and his birthday gift: hot sauce! |
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| John and Phil |
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| Playing cards with the kids |
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| I picked up some wooden trays so the kids could make some mosaics with the scraps of tiles. In the foreground is my tray with reject tiles. I didn't realize at first that i bought 2 slightly different sizes of tiles. Luckily there were only a few sheets of the odd size. |
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| There is no more Lisa, only a jungle gym for children. |
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