Slowly But Surely...

Slowly but surely we are making progress. We are moved into the house.....sort of! We had an open house at the old house on October 6. We wanted to be living in the new house by then so we no longer have to deal with trying to get the house ready every time there is a showing on top of trying to work. So, we moved the weekend before the showing but we still have a lot of stuff at the old house. The floors at the new house are FINALLY done! We are not 100% pleased with the job but at least they are done. We are extremely pleased with the overall look of the floors but the attention to detail was horrible. There are lots of little things we are going to have to take care of ourselves. We are going to have a lot of their less than stellar work finished this winter.

We finally found someone to refinish all of the wood in the house. He actually builds house and does really great work. We called him just hoping for a referral. He said if we could wait until this winter he would do the work himself. We are so thrilled to have someone who does such good work. All of the paneling throughout the house is badly faded from the sun. It also has a blonde wash on it. We have been trying to decide if the wash is original. We don't think it is. He is going to refinish all of that. He will also strip our kitchen cabinets back to wood. Right now they are painted white. He is also going to put in new stair treads since the work the floor people did on them is NOT pretty. He saw them and said, "What are you going to do with your stairs?" What a sure sign that they need help! He is also going to make us thresholds going into the bathrooms and he will probably do a few more odds and ends.

Right before the move we painted the entire house. That is why I may appear to have dropped off the planet. The painting took about 10x longer than I expected. The whole entire house has painted molding which I decided to paint white. I am starting to think that may have been a mistake for several reasons. First of all, oh my gosh!!!! Who ever thought of painting trim white (or any color for that matter) is a crazy person. It takes for ever and a day!!! This is the first house I have ever lived in with painted molding. Why would anyone think this time consuming craziness is a good idea when you can have natural wood. There were some places were I could literally only reach by putting my back to the wall, bending over and looking under my right arm upside down!???!? I feel like my insides are permanently damaged from all of the contorted positions I had to get in while painting. I am now thinking it would have been in keeping with the style of the house to paint the trim the same color as the wall. It looks like that is what was always done in the past. All of the painting is pretty much done. I do have to finish a small amount of trim in the family room and both hallways. We decided to wait a bit on the kitchen and bathrooms. I am extremely happy with our colors. They are all authentic colors from 1960.  I will do another blog post later on the paint with photos. Right now there are still too many boxes for photos but they will come soon.

We are making lots of new little discoveries about the house now that we are living here. While we were painting my husband was up on a ladder and noticed that the top of the bedroom doors are labeled in pencil "Boy's Room" and "Girl's Room". I want to get a photo of that and post it. I am getting much more used to the pink and blue bathrooms. We think we will keep them for a while and decorate with ads of pink and blue bathrooms from the 1960's.  I already have a few picked out. I have been trying to decide if I should paint the bathroom walls white or blue to match the tile. I noticed just yesterday that I can see old paint around the windows and it looks like the walls may have originally been blue like the tile. There is a blue surround over the tile in the shower. I have been wondering if this is original. I assume it is not. I'm wondering why it was added. Someone thought maybe the tile underneath is bad. If that is the case I would like to look into replacing it someday. The den has a smell that I love. At first I thought it was the smell of wood. Then I decided there is a smokey smell. But, it doesn't smell like nasty cigarette smoke. Tonight I decided it kind of smelled like my grandma's church which would maybe be the smell of incense. I mentioned it to my husband and he said maybe it is the smell of the wood and someone who had smoked a pipe in there.

Our new dining room table and chairs. 

 

 

 

 

We have a long weekend this weekend and for the first time in ages we were able to have a fun carefree day with no painting or moving. We went to several antique shops and had a lot of success. Our greatest find was a dining room table for $100!!!! It has six chairs (Two of the chairs in the photo are not a part of the set.) and two leaves that can be inserted. It is not exactly what we are looking for. It is just laminate and not solid wood. The chairs are also not as "interesting" as we would like. But, it is pretty close to the style we are looking for so we decided that for $100 we could take it until we found exactly what we want because we think it's going to be a while. And, now we can have people over for Thanksgiving dinner!!! We are going to re-upholster the chairs. I am hoping I can find some inexpensive fabric and do it myself. I will try to make another post tomorrow on some more of our finds from today. Hopefully very soon we will have some more boxes out of the way and I can post some photos of the new paint.