new floors

It's a good thing that this blog is not recorded, because my voice sounds ridiculous. I have bronchitis and have been home sick for most of the week. Yuck. The best part is that there are workers in and out of my house while I'm trying to rest and heal. :P Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

However, the mold stuff is done and today the flooring people are here. Today is the day that I have felt the worst. I should be feeling better, right? But it's getting worse so I'm getting antibiotics today. I will have to venture out and go pick them up.

Anyway, as I said, the flooring people are here. They're making a mess and it smells weird and they're very loud, but I just went in to see how they were doing and this is what I found:

How gorgeous is that?! That's our bedroom! It's so beautiful I almost cried. I'm not one of those people who can picture how everything is going to look, so I was so surprised...it looks prettier than I ever even imagined. It even made me feel a little bit better.

Of course, there's still a lot of work to be done. Here's a nice shot of the den and dining room:

I will post more pictures as they finish more rooms.
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OK, I'm adding more pictures - several hours later, here is the progress. Basically, my entire house is a mess again. *sigh* But I will have pretty floors! That's all that matters, right?

Here's the front hallway, the pad is partially down:
View from our master bath into our closet:
View from master bed into master bath (all the stuff from our closet is in there):
My office/scraproom, full of junk again:
Kitchen, with everything from the china cabinet and curio emptied out, along with other furniture and stuff:
The dining room, full of furniture earlier, now they moved it all into the den:

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OK, here are a few more pictures. It's 6:00 now and they have been here since 9:00 this morning. These guys are GOOD! I just want them to finish a room so I can start putting things away!

The dining room:
View from the den:
View from the front door:

latest pictures

The mold removal is almost done! (Well, as far as we know...there could still be some mold in the dining room, but there's still too much furniture in the way to check. I'm PRAYING there's none in there.) Today all the painters have been here: the guy we hired to paint the outside of the house, and two guys that the insurance/contracting company hired to re-paint the walls that were replaced. I think our bedroom is done, and they still have to do the kitchen, office, and piano room. Here's what it looks like today:

The kitchen (not great light in this picture, sorry):
The piano room (yes, the room I JUST painted a few weeks ago):
Our bedroom:
The office:
The huge mess that is still our main living area (this is seriously killing me):
You'll notice that the windows are covered. That's because of the painting that's being done on the outside, and here is how it looked when I got home from Kindermusik today:
You can see the different colors I painted on the front, LOL. Now the first coat is completely done. Tomorrow he'll do the second coat and the trim. Early next week the flooring people are coming to do the floors, and then I can spend the next several months putting everything back. :( It took one day to tear it all up, and it will take ages to put it all back.

And I just want complain about the drywall dust. The contractor said to me, "When we leave, there won't be a speck of dust." Well, he TOTALLY lied. When the light is on in the kitchen, you can SEE the dust all over everything in there. It hurts my heart! I am going to lose my mind! My house is always CLEAN, and can you see how it looks right now?! Ugh. This project can't get done soon enough.

OK, vent over. :)

Edited to add: I just ran out and snapped another picture of the outside - I LOVE the color!

Much different from what it was before (this picture was taken when we bought the house in August 2005):

the fungus that was among us

I'm laying on the guest bed keeping the cats company, since they have to be locked up in here when the guys are working. They're here hanging drywall today. I am SO GLAD that things are moving along. I'm seriously about to go out of my mind with the house being like this.

Also, we're having the house painted, but it keeps raining, so today the painter came and covered the windows. It's weird not being able to see out. LOL Our house looks pretty funny right now - plastic taped over all the windows and three different colors of paint in sections on the front. (I was trying to decide what color to paint it.) It's raining or I would take a picture.

When I came back from class, it was Grand Central here. The drywall guys were here, truck blocking the driveway, the painter was here, van in the driveway, and just as I was pulling up, I noticed that the FedEx guy was here delivering my latest KM order. Everything always happens at once!

Anyway, that's the latest. I will update with more pictures soon.

the hazmat house

Well, they found more mold, as I had suspected, in the piano room. Yes, that's the room that I just painted a few weeks ago. And they're going to have to check under the dining room window too...but right now all the furniture from the whole house is in there, so they can't check until all that is moved out.

Here's what the house looked like yesterday. Today they started putting up insulation and I'm assuming some drywall is going up tomorrow. Needless today, I've had more than enough and I'm ready to have my house back. But we still don't know when that will actually happen.

Here's my office/scraproom:

Here's the crazy zipper room that's set up inside our bedroom:
And our bedroom, behind the zipper:
And here's our lovely den, where all of our bedroom furniture is:

the mold patrol

Just when I got the house all organized, the office painted and rearranged, and the closets cleaned out...we're tearing up the house again.

For a long time we've been smelling a funky smell in our house, in certain rooms. We finally narrowed it down to the worst of it being in the 3 rooms that water came in last August during Tropical Storm Fay. To make a long story short, we have mold in the walls. Yuck! Thankfully, the insurance is covering the mold removal, cleanup, and repairs. They are also paying to replace the carpet pad in the 2 rooms and the entire floor in the kitchen. (It's in our bedroom, my office, and the kitchen.)

So today, the mold patrol came to our house. They have put up zippered plastic in all the rooms (just like you would see on "24" or the movie "Outbreak.") And when they are actually removing the mold, they wear HAZMAT suits. It's nuts. So we're without access to those areas for a few days. They started this morning. Unfortunately for them, my office (scrapbook room) is packed full to the brim with all my crafty stuff. They had to pack it all up and move it all out. They are also going to have to move everything out of our bedroom.

Before they moved anything, they had to HEPA vacuum it and get rid of all the dust. But the kitchen is already mold free! Now they just have to replace the insulation, wood beams, drywall, and baseboard in there, and repaint it. They have to remove all of that stuff in all 3 rooms, 4 feet up from the floor. It's craziness! There are also these huge machines that vacuum the air and they have to run 24/7 - so we'll have that going all weekend!

Today, when I came home while they were still working, they told me that it was REALLY bad in the kitchen - there was black mold, green mold, and yellow mold. GROSS!! I'm SO GLAD it's gone - but I really can't wait to get it completely out of the house! I swear I can smell it in the office I just painted too, so they're going to check in here on Monday.

Here are some pictures. I must say, all this does not make me fond of Florida.

Here's the kitchen. Notice that we have no access to the laundry room, so to do laundry I have to go through the garage! Haha!
Here's what you see when you pull back the zipper:
And here's a nice up-close-and-personal behind the zipper:
Here is my quarantined office:
Here's how the den looks with all the office furniture moved in there (in real life the paint is not that bright yellow):
And here's the dining room. Yes, the cats are loving it! They've been climbing all over the place:

more pictures

It's done! It's done! We still have some more things to put on the bookshelves, but the paint is done and the shelves are up and the piano is in place. Whew!

Here's the finished paint job:



Here's my car when I got home from Ikea:


And here's the finished product:

office space

Well well well, I'm not dead after all!

I admit that I've been horrible about blogging AND reading blogs. But I thought I'd give you a quick glimpse into my project right now...it's the "What Miss Kerri does between Kindermusik semesters" project. haha. We're turning our piano room (AKA the room where we put all of our leftover junk that doesn't fit anywhere else) into Brian's office. It will also still serve as a piano room. :)

It had a little boy-ish baseball wallpaper border, which I tediously scraped off yesterday, and it has a chair rail; above the chair rail was dark tan and below is navy below. I have just finished painting the top half a nice aqua color! And after I shower I'm headed to Lowe's to get the teal paint for the bottom half. Anyway, this room had the piano and all my piano and Kindermusik stuff (that's a lot of stuff!), some of Brian's stuff on a tall bookshelf, a huge futon, and 2 file cabinets. Plus other odds and ends.

Brian is on a MAJOR deadline at work, but he got off at the normal time (7:00) on New Year's Eve and we worked ALL NIGHT taking everything out of there and moving it to various other places in the house, as you can see below. We also completely rearranged and organized the closet, and I will take a picture at some point. It makes me VERY happy!




(No, I haven't taken the Christmas stuff down yet...I just jumped right into this project; it's been on my mind for weeks! Plus I like the lights.)

In fact, we worked so much that night that we completely missed midnight and at about 12:30 Brian said, "Oh...happy new year!" That's the first time we haven't seen the ball drop since we've been married, I think! Oh well. Anyway, here you can see the beginning before I started painting, but after I had taken down the stubborn border (ugh!), repaired the wall with spackle, and started taping. Isn't it DARK in there?? I hate it!

When I went to bed last night, I was about halfway done with the upper half of the room, first coat only. I also had a ton of paint in my hair from where I carelessly leaned my head against the wall while working on the trim. *sigh* Anyway, it looked like this:
And today I have finally finished the entire upper half of the room, TWO coats, even! Here it is:



I don't guess you can see the color that well, but it sure is bright and cheery. I'm going to finish the bottom half tonight and then tomorrow I'm headed to Ikea to get the new bookshelves. Brian has to work tomorrow, and he had to work yesterday, too. :( But the good thing is, he gets to see the progress when he comes home at night (at 11:30) and he loves it! I'll keep you posted. And I'll also update you on Christmas sometime. Cheers!

the sink debacle

All I wanted for my anniversary was a new kitchen sink. After all, the old one was boring and ugly, I could never make it look nice no matter how clean it was, and the faucet leaked. After much trial and tribulation (we bought one sink, it didn't fit right, so we bought another one, same thing again...) and paying the plumber for hours of work with nothing to show for it, we finally have our new sink. I ordered it Thursday morning from a place with a nearby warehouse, and it arrived Friday afternoon. I rushed over to pick it up and the plumber came on Saturday to put it in. Yay! So, without further ado...here's the old sink:
And here's the new sink still in the box with Sam testing it out:
And finally, our new sink:
Yay! I'm so happy with it! Happy anniversary to us. 8 years. Wow!

and...i'm up.

Right now I'm so mad...I want to destroy something. It's after 3am and I'm STILL awake. What I want to know is this: why do I have insomnia on the nights before my BUSIEST days???? I'm going to need energy for tomorrow!!!! It makes me SO MAD!!!! Does anyone know of a good cure for insomnia? This is seriously affecting me this semester. And there's no reason I should be awake. Today was busy and I spent over 5 hours on my feet without sitting down once. AND I taught a class. And did a million other things!

What a great way to start our anniversary.

>:(

a great day

I am blogging from my brand new adorable TINY laptop that I got today! It's so small, it's really hard to type on. I have to type slower than usual, but I think I'll eventually get used to it. It's the size of a portable DVD player! Insane. Here's a link: Eee PC

Brian also got a new 22" HD flatscreen monitor today - he's been wanting one forever and now that he's making games for the iPhone, he needs something bigger than his laptop to program on. He set up a temporary workspace in the kitchen tonight - we will be re-vamping the piano room after Christmas so he can have a workspace in there. When I came in to see what he was doing, here's what I found: How cute is that?! It was nice to put the dining room back together...he's had his workspace in there for awhile and it has gotten messy!

So we had a great day today. It's been awhile since we had a whole day with nothing on the agenda. I can't even remember when the last one was. Anyway, we stayed up late last night playing cards with Tim and Christi (girls won both rounds, yeah!) and after they left, we stayed up even longer, just getting things cleaned up and lounging around. We turned off the phones last night and slept VERY late this morning - it felt great! It has been nice just to be together.

Tomorrow we're going to Disney after church. We want to ride Everest - every time we go, the line is too long. But tomorrow we're just going to tough it out! Our anniversary is Tuesday, so it's perfect timing to have a non-stressful weekend together. :)

For our anniversary, we bought a new kitchen sink and faucet today. I cannot WAIT to have it installed - the plumber is coming on Wednesday to do it. Our sink now leaks - it's the faucet, it leaks all over behind the sink and we constantly have a puddle of water there. It drives me nuts. So I am really excited about my new sink!

Well, I want to get a little more work done before bed. Kindermusik is awesome and I will give an update on that soon. Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend!