Weekend One - House

This was our first weekend working on the house. Our friend John came down to help us. He's worked in construction, so he was able to give us some pointers, and he did some manly stuff with Kyle that I can't do.

Like tear down cabinets:



Note the big white wall of cabinetry hanging over the breakfast bar, blocking the kitchen view to the den.


Ta-da! John and Kyle had that thing down in the time it took me to run to Home Depot to not pick up new drawer pulls.

(Turns out our kitchen drawers have oddly-sized screw holes and I'd rather order pulls that fit than putty in the existing screw holes and drill new ones.)

They also hung cabinets in the garage (no photos), and much more, but this was pretty impressive - to me, at least.

What did I do? I tore down that hideous striped wall paper. All of it, including the huge panel behind the refrigerator. This would have been easy as the paper peeled right off. But (of course there's a "but") whoever put the wallpaper up then put moulding up - over the wallpaper. I'm not tearing perfectly good moulding down, so I had to slice the wallpaper off right under the moulding.

We also prepped the living and dining rooms for paint. This takes longer than you think it will, what with the dusting, cleaning the walls, taking down blinds, testing the colors, fixing the wavy chair rail (thanks John!), repairing the moulding (whoever put it up didn't caulk the seams where one piece of moulding gave way to the next!), painting the moulding. . . and so on. We worked all weekend, and there's only a test-sized patch of color on the wall.

Tomorrow: what we're missing out on