What's been did

I really wish I had thought to take 'before' photos of the house before we moved in and while we initially made it liveable. But I didn't, so you are stuck with just words to fuel your imagination. I thought I would briefly describe the few things we have already accomplished on the house, which doesn't seem like much after three years. Back at the beginning, I thought that in three years the house would be completely renovated and awesome and everything on my list would be finished. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ahh, well. Since we bought the house, I have graduated from college, started a career, ended same career, and began school again, which left little time for the one person who is actually handy (me) in this household to do much work on this household. Anyway, here's what we have done:

--Ripped up and replaced carpet in two bedrooms. The previous owner had had cats who evidently didn't know where their litter box was kept, and would wander around peeing in every other corner until the carpet was completely saturated. When we looked at the house, it seems there were strategically-placed air fresheners plugged into almost every outlet to hide the cat pee smell, and we must have been really stuffed up that day (or just really jazzed to be looking at houses) to have missed it. We had to rip it all up, pad and all, and paint the subfloor with Kilz to seal it. Turns out Kilz isn't the best thing at sealing away cat pee, one of the most determined smells there is, since every once in a while you can still catch a whiff when entering those rooms.

--Replaced carpet in the bedroom with hardwood and refinished the hardwood in the living room/dining room/entry. We did not do this ourselves, but instead hired out a contractor who in turn hired a real, live thug with no feelings to finish the floor. It was kind of a sloppy job, done without protecting or taping the baseboards, and now we have polyurethane all over the bottom edges, but was I going to say anything to the guy? Nope. Got to repaint the baseboards anyway, really.

--Painted the kitchen. Painted over the accent wall with its horrible maroon color. Ross picked the color, an equally horrible grey, with stark white for the other walls. I looked at it when we finished and decided two things: that we would repaint immediately, or we'd be stuck with a kitchen that looked like a mental hospital scullery, and that I would never trust Ross to pick any paint color ever again. The accent wall is now a light sherbet orange, that I now regret but won't admit because it was my choice, and the other walls are a popcorn yellow.

--Removed the hideously 80's style mirrored doors in the back room in the addition, doors which had converted a nook into a closet. Once the doors were out of there, I cut my wall-plastering teeth trying to cover up the exposed wood in the ceiling that had been the closet door jambs, but are really just ceiling joists.

--Painted the bedroom from sickly lavender to dark red. I thought it would be a nicer look for the bedroom than it actually was, thinking that a dark color, even for such a small room, would make the bedroom cozy and womb-like. I immediately hated it, after slaving anxiously away for a whole weekend while Ross was visiting his sister, and a few months later changed it to a light blue color, and I'm still not happy for it. I don't think I have a knack for choosing the right color.

--Repaired the bench in the entry with Bondo and caulk, and white trim paint. It is now awesome and no one can tell its flaws.

--Re-textured the walls in the entry. Something I will never understand is the popularity of orange-peel wall texture. My house has tons of it, in the living room and kitchen, and all I want to do is scrape it off. It looks like the wall has acne. So I smoothed the walls with joint compound and added a loose skip-trowel texture, then painted and antiqued the walls with glaze.

--Replaced the Home Depot concrete paver patio with flagstone on a gravel bed lined with bricks.

--Repaired the fence, leveling and straightening the warped slats and replacing rotted posts with the help of our neighbor, who happens to be an engineer and now we have the straightest fence on the block.


--Removed part of the back fence and fenced in the concrete pad that used to hold up a garage or shed at some point, so that now we have a built-in parking spot right off the alley. I don't know if this is legal, but no one has said anything yet. The gate still needs to be finished, but I need to replace one of the gate posts before I install the gate latch, because right now that post is cracked and leaning, the result of having two tons of flagstone collide with it when dumped carelessly out of the back of the delivery truck. In exchange for the damages, I wrangled another ton of flagstone from those guys, for free, so it wasn't all bad, but now I still have to fix the fence that I just built.

--Planting and landscaping. I don't think I even have the time to describe this to you right now, but I will detail what I have now become obsessed with in a later post. Suffice to say, there were a few scraggly patches of grass desperately holding on to life here when we moved in, a dead tree in the back yard, and several dead shrubs. I know very little of gardening and of what flora would thrive in my yard, so two out of every three green things I planted the first year died. But it's getting better and I continue to plug away, slowly transforming the bare dirt into a lush garden paradise.

That's all I can think of. I search my brain, thinking that we must have done more, in three years, but it doesn't seem so. Well, I am hoping to change that.