Rehabber’s Rehab

Well we’re doing our part.  On Thor’s day off today he picked up a console table that is great for our living room.  It is narrow enough that you can still walk past it, and our stuff just fits on it.  We might put another under the living room window, although I was hoping for something with bigger drawers that we could keep games in.  Now we’re going to keep our eye out for a bench with storage underneath in that area instead.

He also purchased a microwave so we have now expanded our limited kitchen and our cooking options.  In addition to eating sandwiches every night or cooking bratwurst up on our mini propane grill, we can now heat up left-overs in minutes.  We bought the cheapest microwave we could find since we don’t know what exact size will go in our kitchen when it’s done, or where it will go.

Some cheap and free physical labor was done today.  Thor finished scraping the wall paper in the bottom half of the closet.  Unfortunately this is probably the easiest part since the rest is over eye level and on the ceililng.  Yes, they even wall papered the ceiling.

Thor spent his off hours this week stripping the wall paper off the closet in the front bedroom.  He has been painstakingly using a steamer and scraper to get it off.  By the end of the first day his arm began to have sympathy for mine after scrubbing down the door jams.  I sent a lot of positive encouragement his way.  Soon we may actually be able to put something inside it.

Thursday

On my lunch break I took a trip to Costco to stock up for the soon arriving horde (the Martin’s, Matt, my Dad and Granddad), the main essentials being snacks (dips, crackers), bottled water (even though the tap water in Chicago is very good), and most importantly Gatorade. Gotta keep the workers happy, otherwise they are running out every five minutes to pick this stuff up. After work it was off to the paint store. Thor and I were determined not to repeat our earlier mistake of just buying paint and putting it up, so we bought about 7 samples of paint for the living room. It’s actually pretty nice that our Benjamin Moore store sells tiny samples that you can put up and try out for only about 3 dollars. I wanted blues, he wanted greens, and we wanted to paint one wall a neutral color. I figured we’d put them up and duke it out. (more…)

OK I might leave the dramatic reveal to Liz’s post about work weekend 1.1, but the front half of the house is looking about 80% done.

Once I took off my cranky pants on Sunday after a frustrating start, a surprise call into work, and having to re-stain some trim that didn’t turn out, the Martin crew was able to wrap up the trim, crown molding, baseboards, and shoe for all of the doors and rooms in the front half of the house.

I was so happy with the way everything turned out and how much we got done.  I am so grateful to my family for all the work they did and the fun that they had doing it.  Sometimes rehabbing can become overwhelming because there is so much to be done just to start doing additional work.  Couple that with an unforeseeable completion and trying to live through the repeated cleanings and messings, cleaning and messings and your life quickly becomes on the verge of breakdown everyday. (more…)

I continued tonight stripping the door jams so we can meet Thor’s goal of putting the trim back up this weekend while Thor cleaned and got things ready for the Martin’s to come for a work weekend this weekend.  Finally when he seemed done, I looked over at him and said “whatcha doin’?”  I guess I didn’t say this casually enough because he replied with “Why, what should I be doing?”  The answer, putting our phone line back in so we can get our internet.

Since we had ripped out all of the walls with phone jacks, Thor had to reinstall one in the office.  Apparently this ended up being pretty easy because it only took him around 1/2 an hour.  After that It wasn’t too hard getting the internet set up.  I followed the instructions in the box and got connected to the router, but ran into trouble from there.  Called AT&T and the guy very nicely walked me through the rest of the set up — a good thing since there were no instructions for any of the steps that he took me through.  Another 30 minutes later and we were up and running.  Hello world!

Thor had fallen asleep by then, and didn’t get to appreciate the moment, or my dance of joy.