Hello Houseblogs.net

Cool. We've just shown up on houseblogs.net. Hopefully this will motivate me to update the blog a bit more often. Probably not.

I decided to take the rest of the week off as vacation, trying to get the dining room finished. I'll get some pictures up later, but so far I've framed in the window seat, run baseboards and started the plate rail base. Things are starting to come together and look "almost" finished....

Progress at the front

OK. So I suck at updating the blog. We’ve been getting plenty done, it just never seems quite finished enough to write about.

After priming the two front rooms in early November, we spent about two weeks trying to come up with colors. I really do understand why people paint their rooms white. It’s a whole lot easier. Colors that look really good on the paint chips are not so great when they’re covering 4 square ft of your dining room wall. Our plan was to try and pick some samples and “live” with them on the walls for the 2 weeks leading up to thanksgiving, at which point we’d paint. That was a good plan, except that everything we came up with either looked like poo or was just hideous.






Fortunately, one of our neighbors has a great eye for color and was able to help us out. Helen, we love you! We managed to make it through a week with the samples on the walls and no ill effects so it was time to buy some paint.



Between masking, the fact that we had three different colors for each room, and the fact that it was our first go at interior painting, it took us the better part of three days by the time we were done.

This is the dining room


And the living room


I’ll get some better/more pictures over the weekend. At the lower half of the dining room walls is the wainscoting, made of ¾ inch doug fir. This is the original stuff that we found under the drywall. Between the nail holes from the drywall, and the termite damage, they were pretty beaten up. This is part way through the clean up process



You can see where the baseboard was, and where the termites had been busy. The sandy residue over the rest of the board seems to be from insect tracks. The majority of the boards were in this condition.





The solution turned out to be pretty simple. I bought a planer and took an 1/8th of an inch of the top of the boards. The new walls, made from drywall with a plaster veneer, are slightly narrower then the old plaster – so everything works out.



We got the finish electric done (we added 19 outlets, switches and fixtures across the two rooms) which was an opportunity to hang the new light fixtures.

This is in the dining room


Its from the Torreon collection by Quoizel. I can’t get over how vibrant the colors are in this picture. AK really got a good photo here.

This is in the living room


It’s from the Dale Tiffany factory outlet just down the road from us. Half price, can’t argue with that.

I’ve just spent a ridiculous sum of money on doug fir battens, baseboard, plate rail etc to replace what had been ripped out. The big plan is to get that installed over Christmas with the hope of having these two rooms done by mid January.