Archive for ‘Living Room’

January 26th, 2009

Slow progress is still progress

Kevin and I have been slowly working on getting the house squared away. He’s mostly been concentrating on getting the basement in order and the pool table put together, and I’ve mostly been working on keeping the dishes clean and the making the most of the living room. After moving our IKEA Expedit bookcase out of the way of the front door and into the actual sitting area, we decided that its placement just didn’t work but weren’t ready to decide where to move it, which meant I was not busying myself figuring out what would be going on all the shelves. Last night, we finally got it moved to where I think it is going to stay, which is in the middle of the large expanse of wall at the far end of the living room. Now, I can get busy putting things away!

We spent some time shopping over the weekend, and got some items for the house, so I’m going to call that productive. One of the things we picked up was a table and chairs for the kitchen.

New table and chairs

The table is perfect because it’s large when you use the leaves, but they can both be lowered to take up less room when it’s not in use. This is perfect for the little nook in the kitchen under the glass-doored shelves. The chairs are kinda gross, but we’re going to de-grease them and use them until some time in the future when we’ll recover them with something cuter.

At the same time, I picked up a lovely little Zenith bakelite clock radio for $15. I love it.

Zenith clock radio

Kevin has done some fabulous work in the basement. I’m really amazed at how wonderful it looks.

Basement

Organized basement

Compare those photos to this and this, which are basically taken from the same angles when we were working on cleaning it out.

December 15th, 2008

Boo, hiss

Unfortunately, we didn’t get as much accomplished over the weekend as we’d hoped we would. I guess we’ll be spending the rest of the month making up for lost time, although Kevin nicely padded some of our projects so that we’d have some wiggle room in terms of getting things done.

On Friday, AmeriClean came in and cleaned both our HVAC ducts and our carpets. Because of the nature of our HVAC system, we actually had a greater than normal number of ducts to be cleaned. We also had our living room, hallway, and three bedrooms with all closets cleaned. The jobs were done by two different workers, and both actually used the word “gross” to describe their respective jobs to do at our house. Yikes. The company was able to cut us a 10% deal on cleaning our carpets since the house was vacant (usually the fee includes the worker moving your furniture around to clean the carpets), so the total for both jobs that day was $497. That kinda seems like a lot, but the difference it has made in the smell and air quality is pretty profound, so we figure it was well worth the cost. Eventually, we’ll be tearing up all of the carpeting, and we’ll probably continue to get the ducts cleaned once every few years.

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Some of the concreteboard hung for the tub surround

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The craft room

This is what this room used to look like. Progress!

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New 50s lamp on a tension rod from Artifacts

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Table lamps from Artifacts

On the docket for tonight after work will be finishing hanging the concreteboard in the tub surround, starting to tile, and continuing to prime the walls for painting.

December 2nd, 2008

Into the abyss

So, we had our first night of working on the house yesterday. We ended up plugging away at going through and sorting trash from treasure from about 6-9:30pm, and even though we weren’t at it long, I think we honestly got a lot done. The basement is over halfway empty, and Kevin’s dad worked on getting the rest of his belongings out of the upstairs. Here are some pictures:

Living room

The living room

Living room

The other side of the living room

Doorbell/phone nook

Doorbell and phone nook

Bathroom

Bathroom

Tub

The bathtub we both want to save

Soon to be craft room

What will eventually be my craft room

Piles

Piles of stuff in Kevin's old bedroom in the basement

Basement

Shelves filled with who-knows-what

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More piles of crap. You should have seen it before.

Moldy bedroom

Check out the creeping black mold in the corner!

More updates to come!