Whoops!

Guess I forgot to turn the comment feature of Blogger on! My apologies for anyone who wanted to leave any tips for the last post.

Anyway, here's another pic of how the bedroom looks at the moment. As you can see, we have drywall everywhere. I actually saw a story in Dwell about a house where the owner left the drywall unfinished. Hmmm... laziness or avant garde artwork? Your guess is as good as mine, though I think we'll stick to traditional methods. :)

Speaking of art, that's actually Amy's dad David in the picture, who, by the way (*warning* shameless father-in-law brown-nosing coming up), has a wonderful business creating kinetic artwork. We actually have several of his pieces in our house, and visitors are always intrigued by them. Check out his site! www.woodthatworks.com.

It's Beginning To Look Like A House!

Well, after a weekend of hard work, I can say with all honesty that our first floor is done! With the exception of hanging a few pictures, we're just about where we wanted to be. Shelves are all hung, walls are painted, and we even had time to string up some lights in the front part of the floor. It feels really good to see one part of our vision of the house coming together.

We also spent a good part of the time working on our soon-to-be bedroom on the second floor. This was one of those projects that went from simple to ugly fairly quickly. To give you an idea of the history, the room originally looked like this:

Originally we were just going to re-paint the room, but then we discovered that a) the walls were all some kind of hardened masonite board, and b) the wiring was all sorts of crazy. In the end, we decided to tear out the plaster and start from scratch. For anyone who attempts this route, my two words of advice would be to 1) use a good mask, or else your lungs will punish you; and 2) realize that the demolition is probably the worst part of the process. We may well hire that part out in the future, if only to avoid carrying bags of debris up and down flights of stairs. Although, it is a lot of fun to carry out sanctioned destruction via a sawzall!

Several weeks, three garbage cans worth of plaster debris (and let me tell you, that stuff is HEAVY), one roll of Romex 12/2 wiring, and 12 sheets of drywall later, we are now taping and sanding the room in preparation for painting it. Once that's done, all that will be left is putting in a laminate wood floor, and we will have completed our first full out renovation!

Oh, and if anyone out there has some tips for putting in laminate floors, feel free to leave them here on the blog, as we've never tackled that before. Come to think of it, we've never really tackled any of this before!

Well, we've officially killed our first tools. Yesterday my poor loyal Dremel tool decided to bite the dust (literally) while cutting openings in drywall. With a blood-curdling shriek and an awful smell, it left us to use a utility knife to cut holes for outlets. Luckily, we only had one more to do!

Then this morning, Marji's (Amy's mom) drill also died as we were drilling holes to mount shelves in the dining area. Guess old house wood can be pretty tough, huh? I felt bad since they were kind enough to drive down from Connecticut to help us with our never-ending To-Do list. Thankfully we had a few extra drills.

Two tools in two days... this house is starting to take its toll!

Well, here it is, my first blog post! Or at least, my first blog post on here. :)

Owning an old house is going to be an interesting experience. Already I've been covered in plaster, drywall dust, dirt, brick dust, and various other substances. I've crawled through tiny spaces that previously would have triggered my oh-so-mild case of claustrophobia, all in the name of a new electrical outlet (note: it was rather important to do so, since otherwise we lost power to the fridge if we wanted to turn the juice off for the second floor... go figure!).

Amy and I decided when we bought the house that we wanted to share our experiences of slowly fixing the house and making it our own. We're hoping for a solid mix of encouragement, how-to, and maybe even some good old fashioned commiserating at times! From reading the posts on the various other fixer-upper blogs on the net, it seems the task of repairing old houses is equally challenging and rewarding.

So sit back and enjoy our stories as we experience this love-hate relationship for the first (and hopefully not the last) time. We're certainly looking forward to it!