Days 52-60: Demo, kitchen and this and that!

I would like to say that my lack of posting is because we are SOOO busy nonstop renovating this place. The truth is that we have kind of been taking it easy and enjoying our house. This has been much needed after the past couple of months we have had. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done a lot. We just haven’t been “hitting it hard” as Trent would say.

Since my last post we finally cleaned out the addition and Trent began demoing it.

We are in a rush to demo this thing for several reasons, but the most urgent is that we have had our second dumpster for close to a month. After the one month mark you begin paying dumpster rent in addition to the hefty fee that you pay when you order the thing. Our other reasons are that it’s an eyesore, we are ready to enjoy our future back porch and the addition completely blocks any and all natural light from getting into the backside of our house. Our last house had AMAZING natural lighting. The first thing I did in the morning was open all the blinds, and usually never turned a light on until the evening. Trent plans to complete the demo in a week or so, so hopefully it helps resolve some of the natural lighting issues that I have with this home.

Trent swapped out our very old school porch light with a newer fixture. The new fixture was not my first pick, but it was marked down from $70.00 to $20.00 and I’m a sucker for a good deal.

The exterior is the only area that we decided to use oil rubbed bronze finished hardware, mainly because there are more options in bronze. The same goes for the interior, but we decided to only used polished and brushed nickel inside the house.

A project of ours that has been long overdue was pulling the Ivy from a tree in our front yard. Trent bought a chainsaw the other day and was jonesing to use it, so he was quick to whip it out to help with the Ivy removal. He sawed at the base of the Ivy so that it was easy to pull on individual vines. Let me tell you, that Ivy was THICK. It also appeared to have been on the tree for a decade or so. After removing a good bit of the vines, Trent discovered a huge rotten area on one of the main limbs.

Unfortunately the tree needs to be cut down. I hate to loose a big tree, but prefer it to having a big tree in our living room. I think Trent is pretty pumped that he has another chainsaw project on the schedule. Men and power tools…

While Trent had the chainsaw up and running, he cleared out a bunch of overgrowth that surrounded our pool. The pool area looked like a jungle which was causing our pool to look like a jungle too. All the tree/bush trimming should reduce the amount of leaves that land in the pool.

Did you notice that our pool is no longer green or cloudy?! Trent can now add Pool Man to his long list of titles! He is teaching me the ropes so I can soon be the Pool Girl :).

We finally finished off a job that I started over a month ago.

Eventually Trent plans to relocate all the pool equipment to a more discreet area. Once the demo is complete this will be on the edge of our porch. Weird.

In BIG news, we got countertops! On Monday we got a surprise call that the countertop crew had a cancellation for the day and that they could fit us in nearly a week earlier than planned! Oh happy day! Up until their arrival, this is what we were dealing with:

This is what it looked like when they were done!

Trent installed our faucet and hooked up the sink so we now have a fully functioning kitchen!

Well, we had a fully functioning kitchen for about 2 hours. Shortly after he got the sink installed and I was doing the happy dance, we discovered that our brand new fridge was broken. Such is life, I suppose. Luckily it is brand new and under warranty, so whirlpool is sending an appliance guy out today to look at it.

Though our kitchen is looking great, it’s still not quite done. We still need to install some cabinetry trim, backsplash and the vent-hood.

Our new dining room rug came in! While I preferred the overall look of the first rug, this rug coordinates with the living room rug and the feel of the rest of the house much better. I’m proud that I only returned one rug prior to finding a keeper :).

The only downside to the new rug is that it totally clashed with the curtains. Since the dining room curtains were super cheap I was okay with replacing them. The new curtains came from Target. Funny story: I actually had already purchased these curtains for our bedroom, but decided to return them after a few days. When we needed new curtains for the dining room, they instantly came to mind. One pair of Target curtains were destined to end up in the Bales household.

As you have seen, we finally got around to hanging art here and there and things are coming together.

We are so eager to “finish” things up so that we can invite all of our friends and family over to celebrate this never ending project!