We’ve got a whole passel of things that we need to get done, with a tentative deadline of July 23rd. Totally abandoning the “official list“, there a much more urgent roster of items that really needs to be done before we’re graced with Baby Smannon. Like to hear it? Here it go:

• Finish electricity in the garage
• Tear out house carpeting (gross and really old)
• Build a wall in the living room to close off the basement from the upstairs of the house
• Install wood floors
• Replace interior doors
• Insulate outer wall of basement
• Repair or replace basement exterior door
• Insulate floor of kitchen and bathroom
• Install smoke alarms
• Paint/decorate nursery

We also have a list of “things that would be nice to finish but aren’t as urgent”:

• Rebuild basement stairs
• Paint/prettify basement stairs
• Install ceiling fan in living room
• Paint office

There are a few items we want to buy, too, like a new dishwasher, but those will probably be at the mercy of the projects that actually need to be done ASAP. Meanwhile, we recently bought all of the flooring (goodbye, tax refund!) as well as a new couch and chaise lounge, which Kevin is modeling above, and which will probably become my nest during my maternity leave.

AAAAANNNNNNNDDD, GO!

Before

Aaaaaand, that brings us roughly up to speed!

We’ve got a one-level pillbox ranch house, so any dreams I had about lovely Newell posts, grand staircases, and whatever else are pretty much out. However! I do have one set to put my mark on, and that’s the stairs going into the basement.

even Saffron is a little creeped out standing on them

Up until very recently, I mostly tried to ignore them. They were rickety things, covered in the same shit-colored carpeting as the rest of the house, and always a little too shallow for my comfort. It was honestly an area of the house that I tried to ignore as much as possible. Vacuuming them never made them look any better/cleaner. They always gave just a little too much whenever you’d walk down them, too, and whenever I’d be carrying laundry down, I’d try to push the story about how Kevin’s mother fell through one of the steps out of my head. I had to work even harder at not thinking about them when Kevin took a good look at the underbelly of the staircase and found that the treads were basically just flimsy boards held in place with nails on either side, and no supporting brackets or boards or whatever you’re supposed to use to keep your stairs from cracking under the pressure of anything that weighs more than a hot dog.

Sigh.

I was at clinicals (the nursing school kind) a few weeks ago, and Kevin sent me a blurry cameraphone shot of something indiscernible, although I thought it looked like carpeting. It was basically a crappy version of this picture:

Gross. And now, we’ve got this:

The improvement is obvious, although the amount that the stairs give when you’re walking down them is ALSO quite obvious now. And scary. Eventually, these stairs will be replaced with sturdy ones that we’ll never have to worry about falling through. Yay! As for design, Anna over at Door Sixteen has done a couple of posts (1, 2) on staircases from which I’m going to draw heavy inspiration. I’ll have to keep my eye on Ferm Living for the next time they’re having a wallpaper sale. Oooh, or Minimoderns (yum).

Just starting to frame up the walls

In order to install the shower stall we chose, he’s going to have to move the floor drain a little, which entailed busting up a square of foundation that hasn’t been touched in about 60 years. First, he tried using some sort of diamond-edged saw blade. Then he tried using a hammer and chisel. THEN, he Hulked out and just hammered away at the concrete like John Henry and that’s what did the job. Look at that virgin soil! I should snag some for the garden this year.

the results of a little John Henry action

I can’t wait until the basement is done and we can get to work getting Galaga and Space Invaders cleaned up and up and running again.

walls mostly framed

Can I tell you how happy I’ll be to get a rebate check from our electric utility for all the insulation we’re buying up for the basement?

walls framed, outer-wall insulation up, starting on the drywall

Hey, guess what! It’s hard to take pictures inside a tiny room. It’s turning into a legitimate bathroom, though! Yay!

DRYWALL!

When we moved in, we were so overwhelmed by projects in areas of the house that we use everyday, as well as how stinking awful that room was, that we basically shut the door to this bathroom and never used the room (except in extreme poop emergencies, since there’s only one other bathroom in the house). It was really easy to forget that the room was even there. It was a sort of time capsule, illustrating the overall effect of the state of the house when we took it over.

Welllll, Kevin got a wild hair up his ass last night and decided to tear it down, as a way of busting into our giant “To Do” list that we’re going to be covering over the next year or so. The list has been looming largely since we received funding to do some major renovations around the holidays, and it’s been difficult to decide where to start. Not anymore!

I think it’s time for a pretty major hardware store run, don’t you?

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?

In the meantime, here you go:

Kevin sweeping up the back sidewalk

Our pile of apple wood (great for grilling!)

The sidewalk, that I edged by hand with a hook knife

Our vegetable garden plot, about 4'x25'

Ahh, tulips

I promise to get some more current photos of the progress tonight.

Anyway, one of the projects we’ve got waiting in the wings is the kitchen. We’ve been smart about this room, though, and we’ve decided not to even start on it until we have all of the pieces we’ll need to finish it collected or purchased, so we can do it all in one go. It’s such an important room of the house that we can’t afford to lose use of it for longer than it’ll take to do the work. In the meantime, Kevin’s workshop has slowly been filled with bits and pieces that we’ll incorporate into the room. Want to see what we’ve got so far?

This is the sink cabinet that we picked up for free from the owner of the stove below. Metal cabinets with a sink in great condition.

Check out this fabulous original Chambers stove! It's in great condition, and I can't wait to see it installed in my house.

Remember these guys that we picked up over the winter? Original Youngstown Mullins kitchen cabinets from the 50s. We'll paint them all white and put on matching hardware.

Things left to collect for full kitchen assembly:
black and white checkered ceramic tile flooring
Formica laminate countertops referenced here
Dishmaster kitchen faucet referenced in the same post
Lots that I’m forgetting