Paint progress report...

After much debate, days of scanning countless color wheels, and having multiple color samples painted on the house, we finally bit the bullet and allowed the painters to move forward with changing the colors of our home.  My, oh my, how color can change the way your house looks! I think a girlfriend of mine summed it up best when she said, "Love it! Make it your own, girl." It finally feels like we are making this house "ours" for real, especially now that our touches can be seen not only on the inside but now on the outside as well.  I'll post "after" pictures once the painting is finally complete!

PS: I am tying to figure out why people can't post to my blog entries.  For those of you who tried and emailed me your thoughts on the paint, thank you!

Pipes, eggs and sheet rock

Labor Day weekend is coming to a close and I don't feel as though we accomplished as much as we should.  We have season tickets for UGA football and sitting in the sun completely drained us (plus we are just getting old, let's face it)! We leave the house by 8:30 am, spend some time with friends pregame once we arrive, then sit in the sun for the duration of the game and afterwards, grab a quick bite before arriving back home by 6:30 p.m.  So Saturday was football and Sunday was recuperation and a bit of work in our home we are trying to sell. 

Today, we did spend some money at Lowe's (shocker) and did some prep work at the dream house which I have also lovingly named the "city house" since it is so close to town.  We ordered and purchased a waste overflow for the claw foot tub.  That should be delivered within 15 days and our plumber said he would come back out and install that at no extra charge.  We chose the one with the chain-plug since it felt more antique-like. Here is a visual aid:

We also picked out the paint for our daughter's room.  She loves pink and purple so we chose a light sugar pink for the main part of the walls and a light lavender for the space above the picture rail.  My husband spackled the walls and patched plaster while I scrubbed down the two bathrooms upstairs (I will spare you the before and after pictures of those rooms. YUCK).  Here are some pictures of her room in the prep stage:

Her room has an awesome old fireplace in it that will be great for decorating purposes.  Unfortunately, a previous owner capped all the chimneys so the fireplaces do not work.  One day we hope to reverse that as you can see the chimney tops in our attic.  That will be years and years from now but it is on the long term to do list.

Last weekend I was on a mission to shoo Miss Charlotte and her webs from the house.  I sprayed more webs outside than I care to admit.  I know spiders are good and they eat bugs and all that wonderful stuff.  However; I do not need a web every 12 inches on my porch ceiling complete with an egg sack waiting in the wings.  The spray did its job so this weekend I tried to knock some of the old cob webs down.  In the corner of our porch, an abandoned nest was perched on top one of the pillars.  I was able to knock it down and found these poor little things.  They were abandoned and hollow.  Speckled but not blue...maybe they belonged to a wren?  So sad...

While my husband was prepping the walls for the upcoming tape and paint job, he also decided to vacuum the vents which needed attention desperately.  The great thing about this old home is the original wood is as hard as a rock.  Petrified is a complete understatement.  The bad thing about this original wood is once something is nailed or screwed into it, getting said nail or screw out of it is quite a challenge as you can see here:

After much tugging, pulling, twisting, cussing and finally the location of the right tool, the grate came down.  We will not be cleaning this one. A new one is on the way. 

I can't end this post without showing off our new pipes one more time.  Here is the finished product.  The dry wall was supposed to go up on Friday but the contractor was told it would be a small job and well, it isn't.  The Friday before a holiday means yet again we are waiting for a project to be done but this one I will gladly wait on.  I will take exposed pipes over broken pipes any day.

The Big Chill Arrives

FINALLY! We have air conditioning on the second floor of our home. The task only took a month to complete but I got a text from my husband yesterday evening before I left work stating that the HVAC fan was running and the temperature was finally dropping upstairs. We’ve had ceiling fans running on the second floor since we took ownership of the house and thankfully it has kept it in the mid 80s up there. However, one day last week it was in the 90s while I was visiting the home. The compressor was blown out and the parts that were ordered were lost, then tracked down, and then the repair guys were backed up due to the heat wave that is beating down on the south.  But now that the AC is running on both floors, hopefully we can accomplish more cleaning tasks which will allow us to move in some of our things. I guess that means we really need to start packing up our things so we can actually get them from one home to the other!

For now, progress is slow due to working during the week. This past weekend we had a wedding that took up our Saturday and we decided to do some cleaning in the home we are trying to sell rather than play in the new house on Sunday. We did stop by Sunday evening to see if the AC was working (ha) and to check out a paint wheel in a few of the rooms. I am getting very excited about buying some paint samples this weekend and throwing some color on the walls. We are trying to pick historic colors for the house true to the time period for all the rooms except for our daughter’s room. She has picked lavender and pink for her room and I can’t wait to get started in there for her!  Friday can't get here soon enough to start working again! I am ready to move in!