The First Week: Painting, Mostly

We closed on the house on Wednesday, May 2. Ben had to go back to work for a meeting, but I took the day off. I drove over and parked IN MY GARAGE. 

I spent the afternoon scrubbing the kitchen and meeting with the general contractor and then a flooring guy. I accidentally negotiated the flooring guy down to the very low end of our range, which was a nice surprise. He said he would drop off some samples on Saturday. I also had a second person coming to give a quote Saturday so I said this was fine.

On Thursday after work we went to Home Depot and bought $400 worth of paint and a lawnmower. Benjamin was pretty excited about the lawnmower.

Then Friday, it was time to start working.

I was desperate to get the yellow fireplace room covered up, so spent Friday evening taping those walls. We also ordered a pizza, which we had to eat on the sun room window seat as we had no chairs.

Whoo, boy, this room.

While I was taping, Ben went around the house and removed all the drapery rods and switchplates. The sellers took the awful drapes, for some reason, but they left all the hardware. So considerate.

On Saturday we brought over a card table and chairs. We ate lunch in the kitchen! The first flooring guy never showed back up with the samples and the second one came in even a little cheaper, so we went with him.

The fireplace room was amazingly better, even with only a coat of paint. Fortunately the woodwork in this room is bright white and looks great, so no need for further painting here beyond touchups.

Ben cut a hole in the carpet to see what was under there.

The second room to go was the sunroom, also the same yellow/green. The woodwork in here was also fine, which is good because we don't have to paint it, but bad because we have to tape it off to protect it. Taping takes forever.

We also painted the front TV room, which was a generally inoffensive cream. We painted all the main rooms a light grey.

The original plan was to paint two rooms per weekend, but it turns out painting is easy and fast, and this hallway was also too awful to let it sit there.

On Sunday we tackled the front bedroom, which we are keeping for ourselves because of the window seat, despite the fact that another bedroom is the one with an en suite bath.

This is in the en suite bath, which will be for our guests. There was a shelf here, screwed into the wall.

When you're in that house for a long time it helps to look out the windows. I can't even believe this is my yard.

The sun room was looking fantastic!

Ahh, so much better than washed out yellowish-green.

The smaller bedroom is going to become Ben's office and studio. It was also yellowish-green.

We painted it too.

Much better!

There is still one bedroom to be painted. I don't know what Harriet had going on in here but there was a lot of spackling involved to fix it.



The one pending issue was a crack in the foundation of the house, which a structural engineer theorized was due to a root from this large tree that sits about 8 feet from the side of the house. The seller had agreed to pay for the repair, but I was pretty worried there was something else going on that would end up being a catastrophically expensive problem. On the other side of that tree is a steep hill down into a ravine, and in my head the house was definitely crumbling into that ravine. I went outside to look at it on Sunday and I had to admit it did not seem likely. But I was still nervous.

Look at all the roses! So many.

By Sunday afternoon we had painted all three living spaces, two of the bedrooms, and the hall. Ben was going around spackling things and I was sort of out of things to do, so I decided to try peeling off the dining room wallpaper. To our immense relief, the whole thing peeled right off in sheets. A million times better than in our townhouse 13 years ago.

It was still a big giant mess, though.

Inspired, Ben decided to try peeling off the painted-over wallpaper in the kitchen, and it turns out this comes off pretty easily too!

On Monday night we went to Home Depot to buy the remaining paint we needed, and then Tuesday we headed back over to work on more kitchen wallpaper peeling. The kitchen is starting to look pretty depressing.

We took Wednesday off.

Thursday they delivered the hardwood flooring. It's a LOT of wood.

This is only 1/3rd of it. They had to split the piles up in various places because it's so heavy.



They also started ripping up the carpet. Underneath the carpet, throughout the entire house, is an extra layer of 3/4-inch particle board. The hardwoods project manager is a deadpan Estonian man who keeps wandering around the house sighing heavily and shaking his head.

They have 2 days of work to clear out the current floors, and then the wood has to sit in the house for at least a week to acclimatize to the humidity. In the meantime, we are going to get as much painting done as possible to avoid immediately ruining nice wood floors the instant they're installed.

When I went over to meet the floor guys, I was surprised to discover men in the back yard finishing up the foundation repair! They didn't speak much English but the main guy said, "old tree root, came right out, footing is good." !!!! I almost cried with relief. The general contractor was over a few minutes later and he said it turned out to be the best possible scenario. When does ANYTHING ever turn out to be the best possible scenario?

The contractor has a few more things to do inside the house - they're putting in a gas line so we can have a gas stove, taking out the awful brass fireplace fitting, repairing a plumbing leak and rotted subfloor, tearing out the railings in the front room - but everything else to be done is small stuff we expected, and beyond the optional things we wanted, most of it has been paid by the sellers.

Now I can really believe it: this is my yard! My house!