6 Month Checkup

It's January, and that means that we have officially hit the six month mark of remodeling our house. In some ways it doesn't seem like it has been that long, and then in others it seems as though it has been six years!

Lots of things have happened since my last house update. We processed our first batch of turkeys, and also managed to survive the holidays. Go us! Oh, and did I mention I was also featured on the Huffington Post twice?  I even had an offer to be quoted in Good Housekeeping, but wasn't timely enough with my response. But, I digress...

The house has really changed since my last update. The last time I wrote about our electric being installed - which was a huge step. In order to go any further with insulation, drywall, paint, flooring, etc. we had to get our heat up and running. That is finished, and our system is pretty neat - I'm just excited because it tells me the outside temp as well as the inside temp. Jeff is excited because now (so he thinks) I won't always ask him "what's the temp outside?"

Since we now have heat, we were able to install the garage doors. They aren't completely finished yet, as they still need the handles, and some tweaking, but most of the work is done.

We chose a carriage house style door and the windows match the style on the front door of the house. The barn lights are new too, they are a little smallish, but we won't need a ton of light since the front door is to the immediate left. If the garage was further away we would definitely need more light.

The door installation helped with the heating situation for the drywall. Even with the doors being up and the heat being on, the crew still needed propane heaters to insure that the drywall mud dried properly.


When the drywall was delivered, it went right in the loft window and through the front door. Cool, huh?

The crew was able to install the drywall in one day, and then came back to mud the next day. This happened the day before Thanksgiving, so the holiday put the sanding part of it on hold.

This is what will eventually be the kitchen area. The door is for my pantry, and you can see the plumbing for the kitchen sink - as well as the 12ft. ceiling.

When they did come back to sand, boy oh boy was it a huge mess!! There were days of vacuuming involved to get the place "dust free".

When the majority of the dust was cleared out, we were free to paint. We thought that painting would be so much fun, when in reality, painting sucks folks. Jeff started the priming brigade and worked a little each night - we also spent just about one entire weekend priming and another whole night to finish. When it was all said and done we went through about 25 gallons of primer.

Jeff got ceiling duty, while I got 'low to the floor" duty. He didn't tell me until our last room that he had a knee pad. Yeah, let's just say that I had sore knees and leave it at that.

We also put the little man to work in one of the closets - that lasted about 5 minutes.

Then I was left to the task of picking out paint colors. Who knew that Sherwin Williams has over 8,000 colors?!

Since we are still in the process of picking out colors and painting, I'll leave off here. Next segment will include the painted rooms and info about the colors.