6-Month Anniversary of Home Ownership

It's official! We've been homeowners for 6 months! And while time, money and energy have prevented us from being complete with our renovations, we've definitely gotten a lot done. Today's blog will show off our successes, and admit our shortcomings. Let's start with the Master bedroom...

Before

After: new carpet, blinds, wall paper removal, and popcorn ceiling removal (retexture pending)

We still need to retexture the ceiling, hang a new fan, and paint, but it's not too bad in here! Our bathroom has improved too...

Before

After: Good-bye wall paper, and hello fabulous head band and bow displays!

We still need to paint, restain the cabinets, replace the light fixture, frame the mirror, replace the faucets (which have been sitting in our garage since March), and nix the sexy pink counter tops, but I think the wall paper removal alone made a big difference! But the bathroom renovations didn't stop there...

Before

After: new toilet, paint, and window film (because I highly doubt our neighbors wanted to see us on the potty)

We (like how I keep saying "we," yeah. Well picking up the materials, and saving to pay for them needs to count for something!) still need to replace the shower faucet (which is also in our garage), get our shower working, and do jumping jacks in it (because it's that big). But I probabally spend the most time in this room...

Before

After: new carpet, scraped ceilings, and a whole lot of stuff

We (yup I'm not stopping with that) still need to retexture the ceiling, put in a light fixture that isn't a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and maybe one day I'll get that fancy custom closet I was promised. ;) The living room is looking more liveable too...

Before

After: not much to be honest, we I (yup I did that) just cleaned like no other, added our junk and hung blinds.

Before

After: added our junk, hung some things, and tested paint on the walls

We still need to scrape the popcorn ceilings, replace the tile, paint, and hang curtains. Now we've moved up in pretty much every room... except the office...

Before

After: new carpet, ceilings scraped, blinds hung, holes made in the wall (for plumbing), and... my junk

Yeeeah. So the office was nice, and then I got laid of and my stuff came here, and then I got rehired, but in a different grade, so my unneeded things stayed, and then I offered my lower level books to a new teacher, who sorted them, and left before she had time to take any with her. It'll be a while before this room is truly photo-worthy. The guest bedroom, though, is much more worthy...

Before

After: new carpet, blinds hung, popcorn removal, and furniture addition

 This room is actually semi-presentable (by the way it looks like we painted, but it was just different light), and until the office is ready, the desk and book shelf are in here so I can work on my masters. And the guest bathroom has improved as well...

Before

After: shower curtain, window film (because I would end up with paparazzi if we didn't cover that window), and a new tub handle (the rest is yet to be replaced, but it's with the rest of the stuff in the garage)

 We still need to replace the toilet, the faucets, the shower head, the pink countertop, the mirror, the medicine cabinet, and repair the holes that were repaired by the previous owners using duct tape, sand the cabinet, and stain it to it's original wood glory. Yeah, it's a project. 

The front bedroom hasn't changed much...

Before

After: some wallpaper removal, new carpet, blinds, and holes in the wall from the plumbing

Now to the kitchen...

Before

After: new island countertop...kinda, and blinds

Before

After: countertop, and our junk :)

So Derek got a sweet deal with this countertop from work because it was FREE!! He just needs to  seal it and install it. The kitchen also needs new tile, and paint. Last but not least, I shall kick you out so you can look outside...

Before

After: booger bushes were hacked out, trees and hedges were trimmed, garage door was fixed, and drainage work began

So there's still so much more to do, but we're impressed with what WE'VE ;) been able to do so far. And since we have a minimum of 29 1/2 years left here, I think we'll get it done.

A New Place to Pee

Another week at Casa de Goodfriend of me working on my computer screen educed tan (a spray tan would be much more effective), but fortunately Derek didn't follow my lead in the working around the house department. Two weekends ago we bought paint...

Yeah, that face is me trying not to cry about how much money I just dropped on paint.

We're not quite ready for a painting party yet because it's kinda hard to paint around these...

And those aren't the only ones. Plus, we still have this...

We've kind of pretty-ied it up, but let's face it--you can put an AMAZINGLY AWESOME collection of gnomes on a piece of crap, and it's still a piece of crap. But fortunately there was one area that was ready for paint. In fact, in order for things to move forward (or should I say down the drain), it needed to be painted. That room is the master bathroom. And not only did my FABULOUS husband paint it, he put our new toilet in too!!

Now you might think to yourself, "But Simone, you had such a sweet deal with the toilet in the shower before. It was the ultimate answer to laziness," and to an extent, you'd be right. But to a bigger extent, you'd be a lazy hillbilly. We now, for the first time since we lived in Cambridge (our first place together), have 2 toilets in the SAME house!!!!! We will no longer have to ask anyone if they have to pee before we take a shower! It's very exciting. Perhaps next we will have a working master shower too, so that 2 people can shower at the same time (another first since Cambridge).

...but maybe not, because that just might be too mind blowing, too soon. Perhaps we'll go back to drainage for a while.

Drainage and Gator Shopping

As it turns out, my $16 Target purchase originally intended to help keep my feet dry as I travel from my classroom in trailerville to the main building, was my most useful hurricane preparedness purchase. You see, hurricane Isaac might not have hit us directly, but it's rain bands did. And if you remember my previous posts about our yard flooding, then this picture won't be a suprise to you...

I have never seen our front entryway so flooded. It even wrapped around the side of the house...

So, I went alligator shopping...

Her name is Snuggles!! I had already told her she would be our new pet/guard, when Derek insisted that he try to fix flooding the problem himself first. Needless to say, Snuggles didn't take the disappointment well...

Her handler will be missed.

Derek started his drainage solution adventure by digging up our front yard, locating the not completly useful pipes under the driveway, and putting in some new pipes...

This was quite a feat, and now he just has to get it to work.

 To help with the side yard, he came up with a temporary solution to drain the water from the gutter into the back yard where there is apparently some form of drainage...

Fortunately it's been relatively dry here since Isaac left, and by the looks of the size of this project, it's going to have to stay dry for a long time... or Snuggles might be the newest addition to our family after all!

50 Shades of Beige

Another wet week, which means more flooding. Our moat now comes with protection.....

See all those areas of movement? You might think it was raining when I took this photo, but upon closer look...

Yup, we've started a tadpole farm. I hear selling frogs is a big market, so we decided to 'hop' right on that.

In other news, our moat is getting closer to fully circling the house...

But Lucy doesn't seem to mind. In fact, she loves mud and nastiness so much that she decided to roll in it... riiiiight before I had to leave for work. This is after I baby wiped her...

 
And with this on it's way...

I'm going to have to start looking into the cost of a gator and it's food and compare it to the cost of our security system.

Unfortunately because the rain just won't stop Derek's plan to attack the drainage project was put on hold. So Derek chose to do his other weekly project, the lawn. The lawn has quickly become a large problem. You see, we have a quarter acre lot, which we love, but Derek has a $50 craigslist push mower, and as a result, it takes him an entire day to mow the lawn, and by the end of it he's exhausted. I think a $150 craigslist self-propelled mower will need to be in our future.

On the inside, it looks like our office will soon look a little less...

...cluttered. My former, and fabulous, intern got a job! Since much of it will be useful for her, I'm letting her borrow it. It's a win-win! She'll get stuff to use in her room, and I'll get it out of my house!

But that's not all that will get improved in the house. We've been experimenting in an attempt to find just the right shade of blue for our bedroom, and we found it! ...Or so we thought. When we painted another sample where it will actually go, it looked totally different. So we went back to the drawing board...

...and we went with option #1, the one on the left.

So, that's our story, and if you don't see us at work in the morning, look in the moat, we might have drowned.

Have you missed me? I've missed you...kinda

Ok, I get it. It's been a hot minute since I've posted, but we've been busy bees. And because we've been busy, not much has been done around here. So, unlike most posts where I try to avoid telling stories of our lives outside of this home (because its a blog about our home duh!), I will include some other happenings. Afterall, if I only wrote about house happenings, this post would be over already!

The main reason things have been so darn busy is school. This past week was my first week in a new grade, but before all the madness began, I decided to have one more summer weekend. So, I went down south with my friend Cheryl, and met Stephanie, and we did the Sun of  Beach ultra-marathon. Yup, I ran (and sometimes walked, and sometimes drank and yapped, and for an hour slept) from 7:30pm to 7:30 am. It was good times...

Good Morning Sunshine!

Cheryl was mostly awake in the morning

 
While I was away, Derek was productive. He hung our night stands up. He even put a power strip on the side of mine so I can plug in all my electronics at night...

Then the craziness of preplan started.I decided on a Monster themed classroom this year, and it's pretty bad-a if I do say so myself...

But why, you ask, was no progress made in the house while I was busy? I mean, afterall, I'm not the one doing the work around here (at least not the bulk of it). Well, now that I'm in 3rd grade, I'm in a portable... a closetless portable. SoOoOoOoOo, I had my handyman husband who conviently works in a cabinet shop make me a storage unit. And he sweetened the deal by adding dry erase doors. Yup, you read that right DRY ERASE DOORS... SCHWANG!!!!

And because of their size, Derek had to enlist the help of his co-worker, and his work truck...

 
All my co-workers are hella jelly!

So, while we slacked on the house,

Charlie enjoyed the fact that we haven't gotten around to tearing out the built in entertainment center. But eventually, the delight of slacking around this million project home, had to come to an end.

First we picked paint colors with the good 'ol swatch on the wall method.

Master Bedroom Colors

Colors for everywhere else

Then Derek recaulked the tub, and repaired some of the grout...

He even replaced the pink toilet seat, and trashed the toilet that used to live in our shower. Then he refined his texture gun skills, and re-textured the wall he repaired from the plumbing and primed it...

So there ya have it. Progress has been slow, and posting has been even slower, but we're back in action!