Busy Week, Busy Weekend

Thanks for checking out our blog. We are doing our best to keep updating it, but sometimes it is a little tricky as we are going to work each morning, then straight to the house, and some nights we're not coming home until 11 pm or midnight.  Tonight we left a bit early, around 10 pm, since we both work early in the morning.

As you saw in Rob's previous post we have been busy stripping!  The floor in the master bedroom is looking great.  On Thursday, Rob closes his store, so I headed to the house after work and decided I was going to get through at least the first round of stripping for the whole master bedroom (or work until I ran out of stripper).  As anyone who knows me knows, when I set my mind to something I accomplish it.  I worked until midnight, but darn it: I finished the whole room!!  It was a bit of a challenge for me.  You can only apply stripper to the placed you can reach, so I had to strategically figure out where to apply stripper to maximize my time and efforts, but not end up with areas I couldn't reach.  So I would paint the stripper on, wait the 20 minutes while working on other things, then get to work.  Repeat this til I finished the room and presto-- the first stripping of the room was finished.  There is a lot of touch-up or areas that need reapplication and scraping, but it is amazing to see how far it has come.  I also took all the doors off and hauled them to the basement.  This is something we need to do in order to be ready to sand the floors. I also painted the swatches for our bedroom color, so we could pick one.  I felt great leaving Thursday night, knowing I had accomplished so much!

Friday was a night off.  We had the Wheelies (end of the year awards and banquet) for the Minnesota RollerGirls.  It was nice to have a night off!!

Saturday we celebrated (American) Mother's Day with my family.  I brought three different salads, all of which were prepared in our new kitchen!  Rob joined us after work and when we left my parent's house we headed over to work on our house.  We knocked out another coat of paint on the 'brown bedroom.' And we did a bit of sanding, spackling, and primed the entire master bedroom.  It is amazing how even a coat of primer can transform a room that has walls of three different colors. We also started taping the living room so we can paint it quickly and easily.  We can finally see everything coming together, which is amazing!

Today (Sunday), I headed over to the house with my parents while Rob was at work.  Dad helped us get our lawn mower in working order and even gave the front yard a cut!  He also put our snow blower to 'sleep' for the summer.  He says we got a good bargain... that both the lawn mower and snow blower are good!  While Dad worked on that, Mom painted our final coat on the 'brown' bedroom.  We didn't like the way the walls looked because we had to use a long nap roller, so doing one last coat with a shorter nap made it look nice. I worked on getting all the staples out of the floor in the blue bedroom.  This way we are totally ready to go for sanding.  When Rob arrived after work, my parents left for the evening and he and I headed to the shop to get some food.  I have taken more kitchen things around to the house because quite frankly we are eating many more meals there than at the apartment.  It is so nice to be able to throw together some quick meals so we can keep working!  Tonight Rob put another coat of primer on the master bedroom.  While I did a bit of trim work on the primer, then took the tape off the trim in the 'brown bedroom.'  That bedroom looks AWESOME!  I am so glad we decided to paint it white and keep the dark trim.  It looks very nice.  I also worked on getting the final slab of laminate out of the front hall closet.  In order to do that I had to remove the baseboard and the 'wood paneling' plywood.  We discovered that some work will need to be done in that closet, but nothing unmanageable.  Rob worked on getting the hall floor stripped and started stripping the living room floor.  We are hoping to sand and finish the 'brown, now white' bedroom and blue bedroom, along with the hall, so we can start thinking about moving in more permanently.  Today also brought the realization that we need an expert's help for our snapped pipe under the tub.  I find great respect in knowing when to call in an expert and quite frankly we have older plumbing and we don't want to make matters worse.  Also while the plumber is there I will get them to look at the kitchen sink and see if we can't get more hot water flowing!

Overall it has been a great week and weekend.  I can't believe how quickly time is flying and how much we accomplish each and every day!

Brown bedroom after

Colleen

Brown bedroom before

Mom painting the last coat of white

Front hall closet.  Uh-oh... more work!

Hallway stripped

Master bedroom after the first go with the stripper!

On Wednesday, I came home from work to find Rob wearing sweatpants!!  This was a special purchase for working on the house and I have never seen him wear sweat pants before. I had to capture the moment.  He has even worn them in public TWICE!!