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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

carpet!!!!! woo woo

At long last the epic is drawing to the end of a chapter. We have carpet and it is wonderful!

This past weekend we spent a few hours wondering what was going on upstairs as the installers used hammers, bats, possibly guns and maybe a bomb or two to shake the whole house and pound the carpet down.

We decided to splurge a little on the carpet and got a wonderful cut burber and a nice pad. the carpet feels really lush and looks great with the upstairs paint choices. We were lucky and got the whole thing in with no seams. So far the choice to go with Carpet Exchange seems to have been a good one. We initially planned on doing a lot more shopping but found something we both liked at the first store and saw no need to keep looking.



The carpet is currently shedding some of it's nasty smell and making Mark high, but we hope to be sleeping in a real bedroom very soon. The carpet is also shedding some of the extra threads and we're still working on collecting those. After trying to vaccum most of them up Mark got to perform an autopsy on the vaccum and discovered that it held an accurate archeological history of Jennifer's time in Colorado. After removing two cats, a sandbox and part of a recycling bin Mark was able to breathe some life back into the vaccum and it's getting counseling before taking another crack at the new carpet.

We hope to find a new bed to fit the space and get it up there right about the same time the carpet stops killing brain cells.

This weekend also brought some more progress on the trim. A few more pieces to go and we're done! Three cheers for finishing the bedroom!

Sunday, January 14, 2007

we have storage!


The closet is 97.75% done! We had fun burning up Dremel tool cutting wheels as we shaped the closet rods and shelves. If you take on a project like this, but the heavy duty cutting wheels and make sure to buy a big supply. Unfortunately we learned that there's a 1:1 ratio for cutting wheels to pieces of shelf.

The closet looks great. We'll get the built in units trimmed out and fitted with drawers soon and we'll be all done with that project.

We'll move clothes into the closet as soon as we kick Tom Cruise out and get the carpet installed.































Friday, January 05, 2007

I feel pretty!

Progress!

Last week we finished the last of the sanding upstairs. A marathon effort over new years allowed us to have paint on the walls on the 1st and color shortly there after! aside from the usual fun fumes the painting went quite smoothly. Unfortunately there a re a few drywall blemishes that show through, but we've taken the stance that anyone who points them out will be thrown off the roof and as such there is really no problem with the drywall blemishes that anyone will notice.

















As usual in our process we've found a few heros and a few zeros when it comes to tools and supplies. The first surprizing zero is Ace's PVA drywall primer the stuff is like skim milk and doesn't really seal much of anything. Two coats still leave a mostly transparent sheen on the wall. Instead we prefer Kilz (the kilz 2 with the blue label), it coats completely in one application and seals shut a lot of little dimples and imperfections in joint compound.

The real winner of the day is the lightweight spackle from Red Devil. This stuff rocks in a huge way. First it smells like amonia so it keeps the mice and bugs away. More importantly it's super easy to work with and does a fabulous job of filling little holes and leveling out all of the things you thought you sanded but aparently didn't sand when you were doing the joint compound. the stuff is cheap, easy, smooth and easy - all things we like. Did we mention easy?

The loser of the day is (again) the damn wagner power painter sprayer thing that has been a piece of crap from the day it came home. If you're thinking about a power sprayer, don't get one. A roller is three times faster, wastes 62 times less paint, is 5000 times quieter (who would have thunk that the sprayer sounded like a jackhammer) and at least 10 times easier to clean. The only use for the power sprayer is impressionist painting, or perhaps if you have a burning desire for frustration and walls with random coverage and lots of big ugly globs of paint.

up next, carpet! hooray!