Anniversary Week

Yes, that's right, we've lived in The Lodge for nearly a year now.  We moved in on April 25, 2011 to be exact, and man have we been busy.  There's so much I still want to do to this house, but instead of bumming myself out about the fact that we've been here for nearly a year and still don't have this place even close to the way we want it, I'd prefer to take the week to celebrate all that we have accomplished.  It's a pretty big list.

Let's start with the first 2 split levels as you walk into the home, which includes the Foyer, Living Room, Dining Room & Kitchen.

Right away we left all our furniture for all these rooms in the garage, and started painting. With two story high ceilings, this was no easy task.

 

This included some death-defying heights over the stairs.  (That's a 5 story drop I'm perched over with my ladder.  I still have nightmares.

Here's the look from the bottom up.  (That's my very brave and generous Dad at the top of that ladder.)

Then we had to patch some popcorn ceilings left over from the plumbing debacle,

before we started the back breaking, and ridiculously messy task of tearing out the tile in the Foyer, Dining Room and Kitchen to make way for new wood floors.  With concrete and lath buried beneath the gross old tile and thin-set, this was a two week project of chiseling, sledgehammering and scooping that in retrospect, I can't believe we accomplished all by ourselves.

 

 

Throwing away the last piece of lath.  The Hubs was a little excited.

 

 Then we had to lay new subfloors throughout all 4 rooms,

 Ryder wore his safety gear and helped.

We used self leverer to fill in any low spots,

removed the full wall mirror from the Dining Room,

 and laid our maple wood floors.

 

We finally got our furniture out of the garage, and into the Living Room.  We've gone through a couple of rugs, and we're still working on it. (Year 2 Project)

 I refinished a kitchen table found on Craigslist,

 and hung a new pendant light.

We removed the gross chicken wire from the floating steps,

tried to refinish them,

and added wooden back risers.

 

 We don't love the result, so we'll definitely revisit this in Year 2 as well.

We tore out the green floor tiles that made up our Kitchen counter top and back splash,

took down and rebuilt the off center L shape cupboard that floated over our peninsula,

 and installed a new recessed light in it's old spot to make everything symmetrical.

We got new granite counter tops,

installed a glass tile back splash,

as well as our new beautiful sink and faucet.

 

We lined the back of our glass cupboards,

and fixed the dishwasher more times than I want to count. (here and here are a few.) 

We hung a new chandelier in the Dining Room,

 

And patched a few water leaks from the plumbing that Bath Crashers installed above it.

 We fixed figured out how to light our fireplace,

  

and removed the blinds from our trapezoid window.

  

 

Out in the Foyer we painted and reorganized the Mud Room,

 

and added a timer to our outdoor lighting.

 Whew! Believe it or not, that's not everything we did in these four rooms in our first year, just the big stuff.  There's still so much we want to do though:

• Find a new rug and change up the decor in the Living Room
• Paint the front door.  (It's still purple)
• Fix the steps for a much more polished, center piece of our home.
• Paint the cabinets and the trim in the Kitchen.  (I can't wait for this one!)
• Complete re-haul of the set up in the Dining Room, possibly including building built-ins and a seating bench to push the table closer to the far wall.

It's tough looking at these spaces to remember to think about all that we've accomplished, and not all the stuff I still want to do, but going through this list makes me really proud of what we tackled so far.  Some of those pictures brought back repressed memories- I can remember now how absolutely insane it was living in this house for 2 weeks with 700 square feet of floor that was dangerous rubble.  How dirty every single room felt before we were able to paint them.  How it felt like we would never get all the concrete dust cleaned up.  How truly disgusting the animal hair and old food left behind from the previous owners and lodged in the chicken wire was. 

We've crossed so much off The List, and these are just the first 4 rooms, so the rest of this week we'll recount the journey of the rest of this big, bad project house.  Feel free to tag along.