Home remodel status update

Wow its been a long time since I posted an update. So the last post was that we finished laying the tiles and just got a carpet quote back. We decided to pursue other quotes further because the quote was very high. True Value had a nice carpet at a nice price too and when they measured, they were only going to need 102 square yards (the other place needed 120). I even called to make sure they didn't screw up the 2 and the 0, but they said they needed that much due to the layout of our house and the seams. We decided to go through True Value and saved almost $1400.

Since finishing the tiles we have also grouted and sealed the bathroom and entryway, finished painting all of the walls and ceilings, replaced the outlets, switches, and plates to white (instead of almond), painted all the trim bright white, replaced the rusty vents, moved everything in the carpeted areas of the house to the garage, had the carpet installed, and we are now currently installing new baseboards and moving stuff back into the house. Yeah that was a long sentence, but we've got a lot done in the last month. By the end of today, we'll be completely finished with our master bedroom and our 3rd bedroom, which is now becoming our new office. We'll finish the old office next week.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we were having troubles picking our kitchen paint color because of the red wall in the living / dining room. We also had a lot of issues picking the neutral color we used in the rest of the house. We wanted a khaki tan and thought we found it so we bought a 5 gallon pale. The problem is that it kept looking peach; It was really bad. Michelle was worried that we wasted all that money on bad paint, but I begged the guys at Home Depot to take the peach out. One of their specialists (used to own the paint store until Home Depot came in and he had to close up shop) figured out how to fix it. He said he added a bunch of yellow to kill the red. I can see that the colors are different when you look at two color samples, but I can't see that one is more red and the other is more yellow and which one would look better on the walls, but we tried the fixed paint and it looks good. It is a nice color and strikes a nice contrast with the bright white trim.

Here is a link to photos to show the progress on the house recently.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/RemodelUpdate

Finished laying tiles!

Yesterday I finished cutting the tiles for the guest bathroom. For some crazy reason, I thought I could quickly cut the tiles for the entryway and tile them all at once. Of course cutting the tiles in the entryway took way longer than expected and the thinset started drying out on me before I finished with just the guest bathroom. I had to work really hard to get the thinset to spread out properly for the last few tiles in the bathroom, but I got them set. The rest of the batch of thinset was totally wasted.

Today my flight back home was 2 hours early so I had the entryway tiles laid before Michelle even got home from work. Tomorrow the thinset will be cured enough for her to grout both sections. Tonight we have to clean up the garage and start moving stuff from the bedrooms into the garage so we can paint them. Gotta keep moving when the momentum is rolling.

The carpet quote came in today, I was hoping to get a better price, but they did not come down much on price. It's the nicest carpet, but they are almost double that of the other carpets we are looking at. I think we won't end up with the really nice soft carpet, but any new carpet will be WAY better than the crap we have now.

There are some updated pics on the tiling photo album
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/TilingTheKitchen/photo#s5157436591087299458

Last of the linoleum

I finished scraping the linoleum by the front door and started the guest bathroom. I pulled the toilet and Michelle finished the last of the linoleum in the guest bathroom! Now we just have to tile the guest bathroom, front entrance, and front closet and we are finished with the tiling!

Michelle finished painting the kitchen and dining room ceiling and I finished the trim behind the stove and fridge so we finally put the kitchen back together today. I still have to finish the rest of the trim in the kitchen, but that will probably wait until after the carpet is in since we have to wait for the carpet before doing the trim in the rest of the house.

Painting

Here's the link to the painting progress. We were having some problems picking the right kitchen color, but I think we're set and will start making progress again. We need to finish the kitchen so we can put the fridge and stove back in there and stop having to eat out everyday.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/Painting

Tiling

I have a Google Picasa web photo album of our home improvement projects. This string of projects all started because we need to replace our carpet (really badly). Since we wanted to also replace the linoleum and paint at somepoint, it only makes sense to do it now while we don't care if we spill paint on the old carpet. I also want the carpet people to butt the carpet to the new tile instead of me trying to butt the tile to the new carpet, so the tile has to go in first. Go here to see the progress on our tiling project.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/TilingTheKitchen

First post

This is the first post of my first blog. Life today was pretty normal, slept in since it's the weekend. We did a bunch of housework. I finished installing the new garage door yesterday and prepped the dining room and kithcn walls for painting. We also got around to putting the first coat of paint on the kitchen (tan) and dining room (red). Hopefully this round of home improvements will be finished by the end of February. We still have to paint all of the interior rooms, then get everything into the garage to have the carpet replaced. We won't get much done yesterday because the Packers are playing!

I had been planning on flying back to WI this weekend to fly my airplane back to CA, but that didn't happen because the weather wasn't that great. When the skies were good, it was too cold (-4 deg) and windy. I'll try again in a few weeks.