Office Painted!

We just finished painting the office last night and left it to dry to make sure it didn't need any touching up. We had to buy a second gallon of paint, which was annoying, but at least it's done now.

Here are the before pics.

Bedroom Theme + Progress on the Office

I decided the central theme of our master bedroom is the ocean and natural sea life that doesn't look gross like preserved parrot fish or pufferfish. The ones on eBay have those ridiculous stick on eyes, and some of them have little beach hats on, which makes them even more disturbing. It'd probably give me nightmares to have them staring at me while I slept.

So far, it's been shells and starfish that I've been able to find that look nice. I'm particularly fond of my giant starfish that the cats like to smell and lick. It's now out of their reach.

I plan to do 2 canvases that are 16x20 and fit well in the area surrounding the window and then a larger canvas, maybe 24x36, for the wall we're not putting our media center against. I still have to find some shells I like that are flatter for that. If that fails, I'm not quite sure what we'll put there. My hunt for art at Goodwill and Salvation Army could be going better. I found some art of boats, but I'm not very interested in those.

There are quite a few area Goodwills and other thrift shops so I'm hopeful we will find something in the near future – at least to cover the hole in the guest bathroom, if nothing else. The recessed hole size is pretty uncommon and surrounded by 2x4s so we can't expand it. The cheapest medicine cabinet that would fit into the hole costs well over $100 and wasn't even all that attractive. It didn't look much different from the $15 one at Lowe's. No matter how I think about it, I can't quite justify that cost for a bathroom we aren't even going to be using that often. The only way I'd consider it is if we got a roommate, since I'd want a medicine cabinet in the bathroom I use.

We've moved on to the office in terms of preparing the walls. My husband finished sanding, which was much messier than I expected.

Now that we've got the dust mostly cleaned up (the carpet repair and cleaning service will get the rest) and painters tape ready, I've started to paint. I hope we have enough paint, since it looks like I'm going to have to do at least 2 coats to fully cover it. It took over a gallon to do 2 coats in the master bedroom, but it is larger so I'm hopeful we can knock this out with just 1. I'd hate to get some more paint and then have the color not quite match the rest of the walls.

The kitties tried to "help" in the office. Little Kitty is especially "helpful," and Teddy is a creeper who stares.

Master Bedroom

We finished the master bedroom, except for the vanity area, which we are saving until we finish up the office. It was a major relief.

Here are some before and after pics.

Before:

After:

Some Improvements on the Master Bedroom

I am starting on the baseboards tonight. They're all pretty nasty, but there were several spots like this on them. Ick.

You can see the window before in this pic of the painted room.

The window afterward.

You can see the door in this picture, too.

The door afterward.

Just a general picture of the painted bedroom. Still need to finish the baseboards and some of the trim.

Master Bedroom Walls Are Done!

Master bedroom walls are painted! We still have to do the trim, though.

Also, a piece of art was stuck to the guest bathroom door. I took it off. It was covering a large crack.

Photo Dump

I'm so exhausted and sore. I have some photos, though.

Teddy Roosevelt approves of the fireplace. It was the first place he went after we moved the kitties in and let them have free reign of the house.

The sanding of the texture in the office goes kind of well. It's pretty ridiculous, though, how much sandpaper it's taking.

This confuses me. It's in the living room and very, very obvious. Why didn't they just cover it up? I mean they had spare paint for this color that they left in the garage.

I spent 45 minutes removing nails and screws from the wall that had been painted over. This handful alone was from the master bedroom.

This is the ugly picture that was hanging in our second bathroom, and the hole it was covering. I think we can probably get a medicine cabinet for under $30 so that's not too bad, considering art and frames are equally as expensive.

Painting the master bedroom is going pretty well. We still have to do by the ceiling and trim and put a second coat on some of the walls, but really, it's going awesome overall.

Beginnings of the Kitchen

Before I can start moving my kitchen stuff over to our new home, I needed to clean out the cabinets and put down new liner because they were rather nasty.

I finished up one set of cabinet after nervously cutting the cabinet liner with my husband's pocket knife. I will learn to be better with one before we're done with getting the house ready for moving in.

It's been such a busy few days...

It's been such a busy few days! We've been over to the house taking car loads and seeing what needs to be done since we closed.

I'll start with the good things.

We found a refurbished refrigerator at a great price -- $460 delivered. It's a Kenmore side by side with a water and ice dispenser. We had to go pick up an adapter at Lowe's to hook it up to the water, but that went just fine. (The appliance store was going to charge $45 for the part and installation. We got it at Lowe's for $4.83 and installed it in about 3 minutes.) It's not leaking and completely functional. We just need to clean it out before we actually put food in it.

I ordered our memory foam mattress today with Amazon gift cards I either earned through SwagBucks, Opinion Outpost or redeemed from my bank with rewards points I had that I didn't know about until they emailed me to warn me they were expiring. I'm excited.

There's nothing more satisfying than seeing an Amazon order total be $0.00.

I will post pictures of it after it arrives next week. We've decided to just build the frame for the bed without the headboard and have it be a plain old platform bed for now because it saves over $80 in lumber not to do the headboard yet. (Not to mention how super busy we are anyway with trying to move, and the headboard would be quite time consuming to get everything just right. We can knock out the frame in a couple hours.)

Onward to the less good things.

I thought the walls were dirty in the bedroom. I was quite wrong. They are simply badly painted. The former owners were painting white over a dark color and didn't completely cover it, leaving spots that looked dark and kind of dirty. When faced with either leaving my walls looking dirty or painting them, we decided to go for painting them, and since we're messing with them anyway, we're going to test out a patch of sanding them down beforehand because we don't like the texture.

We picked out paint for the bedroom and bought it. It's called Autumn Fog.

The future computer room's walls are kind of...interesting. They have one wall textured like this with chipping off paint and random spots that look like bloody snot. Might just be since apparently the room was inhabited by a little boy.

There's another wall that has a large chunk of paint missing.

Since I was buying painting and sanding supplies anyway for the bedroom, I decided to pick up some additional paint for the office. We decided not to be too extreme in changing the shade to avoid the need for primer.

Hopefully, they turn out well. I'll definitely be posting some progress shots for both rooms as we get this done. I really hope I can finish it completely before we move our future in next month.

We're a bit nervous about the sanding and the mess it's going to make -- even with a sander that lets us attach a hose and shop vac to suck up some of the dust.

Our Lowe's gift card is down to $28 after buying the door knobs and deadbolts and quite a few things we needed for sanding and painting, plus some random things like plates for outlets and switches and a dimmer and some bulbs. It's about enough left to buy another gallon of paint if we end up needing it in either room.

We plan on getting the lumber at Home Depot since it's more affordable there, and they have the pickup truck rentals for $19 for 75 minutes.

I think we may get the lumber tomorrow since we're going over to the house anyway to drop off a load and go to the HOA meeting tomorrow evening.