Catching up

Well, I think it's safe to say the last two months have kicked my a**! I wish I could have made more blog posts to keep it real in the moment but things got a wee bit crazy. Looking back now it all seems like a bad dream. I think I've actually blocked parts of it from my memory ::shudder:: 

I didn't take many pictures because I barely had time to brush my teeth! I did take a couple before things got super crazy though!

Here is the garage as I tried to organize all the many many tools we have. Having a hubby who can pretty much fix and build ANYTHING comes with a price: a tool cluttered garage!

   

Of course my helpers were with me every step of the way (special thanks to the many friends of mine who were willing to take them for a couple hours here and there while I worked!!) They were troopers the whole time but it sure wasn't easy on any of us!

                                                

                                              

 Thank goodness for awesome friends! 

Everything happened all at once. The counter tops were installed the day before we moved. The carpet was also installed that day. Baseboards were still being installed the day we moved in. It was CRAZY. Totally not ideal for a control freaky type person such as myself. If you look in the picture you can see a door just chilling against the wall. Needless to say my plans of having every detail finished before moving in didn't happen! 

                            

After pics coming soon!

paint chip hell

I mentioned this on Facebook, but man oh maaannnn!! Picking paint colors for the house was torture!

It's pretty hard to see in the picture but every paint color I painted looked YELLOW. In the end I went with Benjamin Moore Gray owl tinted 50% lighter and it is perfect! Totally worth the $50+ I spent in paint samples🙄. For the kids rooms and the master bedroom I kind of just picked the paint colors off the chip and went with it. I got lucky with those because all the room colors look just how I wanted!

I don't actually have very many good pictures showing all the paint colors because I suck at blogging. 

Anyhoo. Everyone keeps asking me what the progress is on the house. Basically what is going on there is about 5-8 different projects all at once. It is chaos. It sucks. Too much to do still! Too many choices! Save me! Here is a glimpse of what we've got cooking right now:

And this is where my kids hole up while Sean and I try to get all the things finished by JANUARY 29!!

Poor babies. They are over it. If you ask them if they are excited to move to the new house they will say no because to them the new house means sitting in this room and fending for themselves all day. 

For a while there

it felt like NOTHING was getting done at the house! The drywall guys took

It's kind of a sore subject for me. Let's just say Rony (the drywall guy) and I are not BFFs. I mean he got the job done. I guess. He left a HUGE mess and took way longer than anticipated. Honestly the work is... I don't know. Just ok. 

BUT we now have flat textured walls so in the end it was worth it. We went from this awfulness

to this

At least we are moving in the right direction now!

it's beginning to look a lot like

a freaking hurricane hit my house.

We have officially reached the point in this process where things look a whole lot worse before they get better. The good news is we finished moving the plumbing to the island in the kitchen!! 

Sean has been hard at work trying to fix the atrocious electrical situation we inherited. It's bad. Really bad. 

So many wires everywhere! We are adding a lot of lighting to the house because there basically isn't any currently. It has been a real pain but hopefully worth it. I never knew how hard it would be to determine where to place lights but it's not easy! These are the times I wish my budget was twice as big so I could hire all the designers.

This week we should be able to get the drywall work done. The drywall in this house is really a wreck:

 ::shudder::

There is water damage, missing drywall, tape peeling up, and that funky texture. I am very excited that we are to the point in this project to fix the walls!! Hopefully by next week I will have some much prettier pictures to share!

help me pick some lights

This is the vanity I bought for the kids bathroom:

Isn't it cute? It was delivered yesterday and the actual color is a little bit more sea-foamy green. So now I need to pick some lighting for the bathroom. Help me decide! Here are some options I like:

option A

Option B

Option C

My first choice would be to actually have a can light above the vanity and then add two sconces on the wall flanking a mirror, but that would involve extra time and work sooo I'm settling for an overhead fixture. Which one do you like the best?

This is where it goes...

new windows!!!

When we first took possession of the house one of the first things we noticed was how unbelievably HOT it was inside. All those windows giving us that beautiful view of the lake were not doing us any favors. I even had the AC guys come out because I was sure the AC was not working properly. They say the AC works perfectly (I still have my serious doubts), but the single pane windows were really the culprit.

This is probably hands down the most expensive surprise to our budget. This is me when I got my first quote for $16,000:

Eventually I sucked it up and ordered the damn things. I found a company that manufactures the windows locally saved me $4k. Score.

And now feast your eyes on my new super expensive and hopefully totally worth it windows!!!

Before:

After:

Now to pick a paint color for the house to make this look a little better. And maybe some siding? So many choices! 

Kid's bathroom progress

We have hired Carlos and his dad to help us get all the work done. In a perfect world we would have all the time to DIY but with how busy Sean is with work and life we will only be taking on certain portions of the remodel ourselves. Carlos is awesome. He always says yes to me which is pretty much the best thing ever.

Carlos working on the tile

We picked out all the tile for the bathrooms after hours of negotiation and compromising between Sean and I. At the end of the day we ended up with this beautiful marble tile for the back of the tub surround. I adore it. So pretty. The walls of this tub surround, however, were not so pretty. They were super unlevel and took a long time for Carlos to fill them in and make them somewhat square. I think this is a problem we will continue to see in this house.

The bathroom is still far from finished but here is a sneak peak:

This picture is kind of blurry but all of the tiling is done!! We did go with a marble tile on the floor also. Hopefully that doesn't end up being a mistake with these crazy kids of mine!