Thursday, October 30, 2008

I'm going to turn into a zombie just in time for Halloween.

I'm still alive! We've lost almost all of our workers in my blogging absence. Stanley stopped showing up in typical contractor style (I'm guessing he has another job or two) and he was sending his people over to work without supervision. The problem with that is that his workers are clueless without someone telling them what to do every moment. Areas that were patched and ready to sand were primed and painted before being sanded. Regular sheetrock was going up on my upstairs bathroom ceiling instead of greenboard. All of this and we were PAYING them to mess up our house. Two weeks ago we said enough and good riddence. All of the major things except for the upstairs bathroom are pretty much finished anyway. We have a lot of finishing work and painting to do and of course the dining room molding repair (I'm dreading this the most.)

We have not interviewed any new replacements for the work left. We've just been doing it ourselves. I'm exhausted.
My Father has been putting our upstairs bathroom back together again - and doing an amazing job. He did a bathroom for my Aunt and for my Mother in the past but I didn't realize that he could skim coat! We're hoping that it will be almost entirely done over this coming weekend.


Fernando, my Sister, my Mother and I have all been working on getting the trim sanded, primed and painted. Here's the foyer trim freshly painted in Benjamin Moore's Winter Snow:



I'm dreading painting the ceilings and walls so we may have to hire someone to do that after the floors are done. I'm not very good with a roller and it's hard for me to get walls and ceilings coated evenly. In our last apartment, I painted our bedroom ceiling. It was so uneven and I never got around to covering everything and painting it again. I would lie in bed in the morning and stare at all of the mistakes.

You can see how gross some of our doors were (right, silly) and what they look like now (left) here:


That's our poor kitchen up there. It's definitely going to be the last room we finish. The new cabinets have been ready for weeks and we're going to just have them delivered soon and installed at a later date.
We finally had our little sink re-installed in the powder closet on Sunday. The new faucet is by Pegasus and is from the Halo series. It was only available in brushed nickel which was not my first choice - I usually prefer polished nickel or chrome. Since we don't have any other major things going in here to match to it, I'm sure the brushed finish will be fine. I do like it and it makes washing hands in this small sink easier because with the faucet so high, there is more space to move around. Unfortunately, we didn't plan anything for underneath the sink... so I'll have to figure something out to make it look a little nicer.


Speaking of plumbing, when we did our waterproofing project (now finished) we found a cracked waste pipe in our yard! Most of the ground happens to be clay and the clay was packed around the pipe covering the old crack and stopping it from leaking. As soon as the dirt was removed the yard was getting a little "wash" everytime we flushed. Luckily, we had an amazing plumber named Christopher fix it for us for a nominal fee. Christopher also fixed the pipes behind the wall in our upstairs bathroom and installed that little sink for us.

Here's a shot of the cracked pipe:



And here's Christopher in the hole fixing it:


How brave is he? That hole was underneath our mud room... cramped and scary.

We also had a vintage ball lamp installed in our vestibule. It's on a motion sensor - which makes it even more fun.

I do have a better photo somewhere... next time.

5 comments:

  1. Glad to see a new post! I love those curved walls!! Happy Halloween!

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  2. hi! de-lurking to say get the pink ceiling paint. It goes on pink, so you can see where you've apinted, then dries white. SO awesome. I've done 5 rooms with it + it works great.

    also, enjoying the blog. :)

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  3. Hi Monica,
    Thanks for de-lurking! I've seen that pink ceiling paint and wondered if I should buy it... such a good idea. We've actually decided to paint some of the ceilings colors and the rest we're painting the same white as the trim - but a flat finish. I'm definitely going to recommend that to my Mother though - she still has a few untouched spots from the last ceiling paint job!

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  4. I love the molding! It's gorgeous.

    I do have to say, definitely keep your receipt for your Pegasus faucet - i bought a nickel finished one for my bathroom and the finish didn't even last a year. It has a full warranty, but you need the receipt...

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  5. Oooh - thanks for the tip! I hope the finish doesn't start coming off of this one. It was the only faucet my husband and I could agree on!

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