The Price is Right

I love Potterybarn. Maybe too much. In thinking about renovations they are my go to place for most items. But, frankly, I would like to buy then at 50% off. So, often I look elsewhere for ideas (knockoffs).

The hardest renovation/decorating plan I am currently having is how to set up the living room so I can have a place for the TV and some storage for books around it. Since the house is also pretty compact I cannot fit a 120" wide entertainment center in there. Then, I saw this:

It's the Farmhouse Media Stand and it runs about $2500. Yikes. However, in my travels at overstock.com I found this:

This is the Sevilla Six-Drawer Entertainment Unit and it runs $899. Great! I started looking at the dimensions and then checking the dimensions of my TV to see if I could squeak it into the space. My TV is 40.2 inches wide. The space in this media unit is 40 inches wide. Panic set in. IT HAS TO FIT!! Must. Have. This. Thankfully there is a helpful chat window on overstock.com that allows you to receive assistance. I frantically asked them if maybe they forgot to add the extra part of the measurement that was, I don't know, .5 inches more than 40 inches wide. They checked. No dice. It was 40 inches. So, unless I want to start shaving off parts of my TV it looks like I will have to start my search again.

Time to decorate

The guest room/office was the room with the least amount to do. Now that the hardwood floors are in, all we have to do it paint and decorate. "You know you're old if you are buying a trundle bed" were the lovely words spoken by my friend Julie when I told her she would no longer have to be sleeping on a futon during her next visit. This has some truth to it.

Now that the wood scraps are gone and most of the sawdust has been cleaned up, the place is filling up with boxes. We got the trundle bed and a new patio set and our new bedroom set in on its way. But, before we can set this all up we need to get the space where it is going put together.

The guest room needs to be painted and the deck needs to be . . . re-treaded? Is that a word? No idea, but we need to out new wood on the top because the current pieces were never properly treated and are not splintering and disgusting.

If we get cable in phone running in the house we can re-arrange the living room to make a space for the dining table. Since it's Dan's 30th birthday is this weekend, we won't be doing much around the house. I have high hopes for May!

** I know reading is no fun without pictures so I will try to put some up soon.

But, but, but . . .

After settling some of the house back in order (and scratching the new floor in the process - BOO!), I hunkered down on the couch to watch 'Dan in Real Life' that I just got in from Netflix. After about 15 minutes of boringness, the DVD player paused. . .and remained there. No button pushing could stop this. I ejected, replaced, it no longer read the DVD. I tried a new one. . . no dice. OK, well, that's broken. I headed up to bed that night to set up my alarm clock (which the floor guys had been using as a radio all week (read: uncovered). Everything was hunky-dory until I tried to set the hour portion of the clock/alarm. Nothing. Nada. Bupkus. I don't think this is a coincidence.

Well, at least I can rely on nature. The sun rises (directly in my eye) at around 7am thanks to the fact we don't have any window coverings in the bedroom right now. I will remedy this soon - for now, I rely on it. Hello Mr. Sun! Please, please don't make me go to work today. Oh, I have to so I can pay for someone to come in and fix ::ruin:: my house? OK.

Done, for now.

Well, the floors seem to have been cleaned up. Part of restoring a 100 year old home is that there are imperfections in the fundamental pieces of the house. The stairs lean a little and the upstairs hall seems to slope to the left. While the carpeting made that less observable, a flat surface provides a new climate.

I have also discovered the standards we all adhere to are very different. While my standards say any less than perfect is not OK, other get by with what they can get done in a reasonable amount of time and effort.

Roy called at 7am this morning and I greeted him in my robe and handed him a check in exchange for my house key. As a whole I am satisfied with the work he did. I suppose I was not prepared to supervise as much as I had to, but that is the role you play if you are contracting your house.

The next projects will include painting the upstairs and setting up the guest room/office, installing the new phone and cable jacks, replacing the front door and adding stained glass, and reframing the fireplace.

For now. . . I'm on a break.

If at first you don't succeed . . .

Roy came by this morning and told us he would personally do the work, and make sure it was done right. It should either be perfect by the time we get home, or he should still be there.

Looks like we'll be having dinner together . . .

Anger Rising . . .

I came home today and it seemed the floor guys only made things worse. Needless to say the owner is coming tomorrow, but I am not sure I even want him too.

This is a picture of stain on my wall:

They re-painted the shoe molding, but also painted the floor:

This is what the edges of the stairs look like, I am going to give this an F:
When I asked them to fix the stairs, I didn't mean make it look worse. Also, if you notice they took the banisters to "stain them" but returned them in the same condition they left - and installed them in a pretty shoddy way:

In the hopes of dissipating my anger, I will end this post with some lovely flowers:

Two out of Three

One of the contractors we received quotes from told us there is a saying in the renovation business "you can get two out of three of the following things: quality, cost, time". It seems in this project we got cost and time. Sort of. They did finish Friday and we were able to move our things back upstairs by Saturday morning. But, they weren't really finished. The shoe molding was covering in polyurethane stains, the molding on the stairwell was damaged and the vents did not fit back into the flooring as they did not cut it right. Oh, and the side of the staircase was not completed because "he's not that creative". Um. . . OK? Over all, the floors look great, the stairs look good. There are some areas of the stairs where the stain dripped and left darker marks, and they were certainly not careful with the stain near the walls. They are coming back today to finish up.

Oh, and the house looked like it was on a beach vacation. Everything. I mean EVERYTHING is covered in dust from the sanding. I packed all my things into the two upstairs bathrooms and the downstairs. They left the bathroom doors open, left and opening in the plastic, and did not fix the plastic around the closets when it started to droop. Oh, and they clogged our toilet. It was, um, unpleasant. They dropped by on Saturday and I asked them to unclog it. But, it's. . .well, dirty now. I don't want to clean it. I want to blow it up and never see it again. I have been hovering on it for two days. Hovering at home? Not fun.

Thankfully my folks were in town this weekend as they helped us for a while on Saturday moving and cleaning. The house is now in a livable state - it just needs to be polished up. When we dropped by on Friday to open the back gate for them, my Mom practically ran from the house. It was a zoo.

Oh, and in the middle of all this i had the outside of the house painted. Although the color was not was I was expecting it to be, it looks pretty good. Pictures to come later of that.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the floors:

Stairs Before:

Stairs During:

Stairs "After":

Side of Stairs:

Upstairs Hall Before:

Upstairs Hall After (from other angle):