Not much to report these days.  The contractor has the inside a total disaster as popcorn is removed and the texture is sprayed.  The wall in the guest room had to be opened up and left to dry due to the old roof leak.  We are hoping for this to be all completed this week so that painting can begin next week.  Here are a few pictures...

Guest room wall.  The two panels are now open and drying.  The windows look good though!  :)

Family room mess

Wet bar mess

Down the hall mess

Dining room mess

Living room mess

We will be so glad when this is finished!

Sorry it has been so long since the last update!  We have the contractors working on the inside of the house, so we have been trying to stay out of their way.  Our roof and exterior painting has finally been finished.  Yeah!  Yesterday we had the windows in the front of the house and the sliding door in the family room replaced.  Here are the pictures...

Remember this house?

Here it is now!

Here is the slider before...

And now...

What a difference!  Now for the inside!
 

Whose bright idea was it to get this huge yard anyway?!?!  I spent the day pulling weeds, trimming bushes, and avoiding the gazillion ants, spiders, pincher bugs, and other creepy crawly things.  I am pretty sure gazillion is an accurate count too!  Here are the pictures of the day...

            Before                                                                            After

            Before                                                                             After

 

Before                                                                             After

            Before                                                                              After

Did I doing anything today??  It sure doesn't look like it from these pictures!  But here is the evidence...

Thanks to hubby for filling in while I was helping mom...a guest blogger, how exciting! 

What a transformation from when I left!  The kids and I came home Tuesday and just stopped by to see all the work that had been done while we were away.  The roof was on, the paint was almost done, the popcorn was gone...from the ceilings anyway.  Thursday's job was to clean the popcorn off the floor!  What a joke that was!  All I can say is, it is a good thing we are replacing the carpet.  I tried vacuuming up the popcorn and it would just smear from one side of the room to the other and every time I would pick up the vacuum to move it, it would leave a trail of popcorn like breadcrumbs.  The vacuum looks terrible and I am pretty sure it will never run the same again.

I also started tearing apart the bedroom closet shelves.  Actually, they were already half torn out, I just had to finish the job.

 Here is the before

And the after

This is in the guest bedroom.  There was a pretty nice built-in in Jenna's closet, but it had about an inch on either side that did not touch the wall and there were quite a few bugs/spiders that had taken up residence.  Also, we wanted to have the carpet replaced and the popcorn removed, so we decided to take it out.  I started working on the one in the boys room, but did not finish yet. 

The other project for Thursday was paint testing.  We love the green color in our current guest room/Jenna's room and would like to have it in the new guest room.  The only problem is we are not sure what it is.  I have a paint chip that we think is the color, but there are three different shades and we are not sure which it is.  We bought samples of two of them and after testing them on the wall it must be the third one because those two just aren't right!  How frustrating!  The picture is bad, but here they are...

I went with the kids and selected one paint for the master bedroom, two shades of pink for Jenna's room, and three shades of brown/tan for the main rooms and the boy's room.  Here are the brown/tan...

I do not know what it is about us and paint colors, but we just do not work together!  Master bedroom color too blue, the brown/tan not what we were looking for, and I just gave up and didn't even paint the pink yet.  We may use the far right tan for the boy's room.  It should not be this hard to find a creme/sand color! 

On a happier note, we are hoping to get our new windows and slider tomorrow.  We went over to take down the blinds this evening, but it was too dark to take before pictures.  Hopefully we can do that tomorrow before they are replaced.  I think we mentioned before we are having the three front windows (living room, & two in the guest room) and the family room slider replaced to start.

The roof and painting job is nearly done.  We were hoping that it would be completely this week, but there are a few things left.  The trim around the windows still needs to be painted and a few miscellaneous things need to be reattached (doorbell, pool tools, etc.).  We will be so excited when it is done!   

The accomplishments of the weekend

With the rest of the family out of town for the weekend, I had lots of opportunity to work on the house and the wife had high expectations for what I would acomplish.  I am happy to report that the acoustic has been removed from all the ceilings that are not vaulted!  On Thursday night I scraped the spare room, Friday night I scraped the Boy's room, and Saturday I scraped Jenna's room.  I do have to confess that I hired someone to help me Saturday (shhhh, don't tell the wife) and he scraped the master bedroom, closet and a couple other areas.  Since he was moving along so well, I moved outside to do some work.  I cut up a tree limb that had fallen down, ground off the metal brackets that used to hold the patio cover posts, hung up the lights on the outside of the garage, and removed the rest of the base boards.

Below are a few photos of the bedrooms with the ceilings scraped.

I am so glad to have that job behind us!  I am going to have a contractor scrape the vaulted ceilings and then he will texture the ceiling in the entire house.

Here are a couple of pictures of the front of the garage with the new lights up.  There is one siding board in the middle of the garage that they haven't put up yet and I don't understand why.  Other than that the garage is all painted.



Hopefully the contractor will finish the roof, siding and exterior paint early this week.  We'll post an update when he is done.

Guest Columnist Reporting News

Home Sweet Home has a guest columnist for the next few days, "hubby" will be posting a few pictures and comments.

The last few days have been spent removing baseboards and the acoustic ceiling from the hallways and bedrooms.

The kids are so helpful.  Here removing baseboards!

A few before pictures of entry way and hallway.

And after my lovely wife scraped them clean.

The kids were very excited to wear their own masks as well.

Now for an update on the exterior.  By Thursday evening all of the facia boards had been painted and the tiles were loaded up onto the roof.  On Friday morning the roofing crew started laying the tile and I was very impressed how quickly they laid them.  By the end of the day Friday everything was complete with the exception of the garage.  They ran short on tile by about 200 square feet so they won't finish the garage until Monday.  Here are a few pictures of laying the tile and what it looked like this evening.

Notice the patio cover was taken down.

You can see the new wall paint color on the stucco in this picture.

This is what the new roof looks like!!

I am very happy with the brown tile and blue trim.  Now I just hope it looks okay once the new paint is on the walls.

The wood siding on the front should be done tomorrow and the rest of the exterior painting as well.  Tomorrow I am going to have more fun taking down the popcorn ceiling in the bedrooms.  I finished 2 bedrooms and have 2 more to go tomorrow.  More to follow!

Well, by Friday night my hands were not only sore, they stunk!  I decided to try and clean the outside lights before hubby came home.  Here is the before...

I realized they were not painted green as I originally thought, but they were once bronze and had turned green.  I looked up ways to clean bronze and the most common answer is...you can't!  I did find one recipe for a rub you put on and let sit, then rinse and polish.  The main ingredient, vinegar!  Vinegar + salt + flour = messy, smelly hands.  It was supposed to be like paste, but mine was more like bread dough...

Once it was rinsed, hubby and I looked the lights over and decided to go with the original plan and buy new ones.  In addition to the green tinge, several of the glass/plastic pieces were broken and would have needed to be replaced.  We found some nice ones this weekend and we are excited to see how they will look.

We drove by the house Friday evening and here is what it looks like...

Since we could not work on the house we decided to start collecting supplies for our various projects.  Friday night we collected paint chips for all rooms in the house.  Saturday our first stop was a tile store...we are tiling the laundry room, halls, and eventually the two bathrooms off the halls.  We were not excited about any of the tiles, so next stop was the window shop.  We decided to get the living room window and two guest room windows replace as a start.  The current windows and sliding doors are original and all need to be replaced eventually, but we cannot do them all at once.  The first three should go in after the roof work is completed.

Next stop, Lowe's for flooring.  We got our wood for the master retreat and decided to get their tile.  We bought a light tile and are now having second thoughts because we found a darker one that we like as well...maybe my first blog poll??  I'll have to think about it.  We are hoping to be able to get back into the house Monday evening and continue working...maybe I will finally get the rest of the glue off the laundry room floor!