Well it certainly has been a busy couple of weeks. On top of the home renovations, I had a work trip that I had to travel to Chicago for, and we had an event at church for some of the teenagers that live in the area. All of that added to the stress of completing the house. But, this too shall pass.

The house is really starting to come together nicely! It’s going so well that we were able to host some of the teenagers at our house this past weekend to spend a couple nights.

I think it’s safe to say that we are 100% done with the drywall hanging and finishing at this point. The living room is done and painted. We still have baseboards to complete. Some of the original baseboards that we were intending to keep and reinstall got thrown out, so we are on the hunt to replace small sections. Hopefully we can find something at least similar.

Now, to what was one of my least favorite things to do on this project: crown molding in the kitchen. I’d always heard that cutting crown molding was a difficult thing to wrap your head around, and that it was the most difficult part of installing it. That was certainly true that it’s tough at first to visualize how it’s going to be installed and cutting the angles correctly. But the most difficult thing about installing it was installing it into a 100-year old house with wall studs and floor joists that were pretty uneven at this point. Eli and I did the best that we could as amateurs, but in the end, (insert bold statement here) I’m not sure it could have been done any better by anyone else given the condition of the walls and ceilings. Pro stock tip: invest in companies that produce caulk, because we’re about to be using a lot of it!

Tuesday, March 5th was a pretty busy day with errands to run, kids to pick up, and picking up the flooring! What was thought to be a “just run by the flooring place and pick up the flooring” turned out not being that simple. Luckily I’d bought this little trailer, which has come in quite handy during this renovation. The pallet was loaded onto the trailer, like a glove, and the rest of the supplies fit into the back of the CR-V. Flooring gets installed in the living room, dining room, and kitchen on March 21.

We had a little visitor in the attached garage last week. I pulled up to the house that day and heard some scratching coming from the garage. After some investigating, I found him huddled up inside at one of the corners next to the garage door. I left the door open for him to get out and he was gone later on that day.

Lots of progress on the back wall! We got a surprise call from our GC telling us that the windows had come in about a week earlier than they were expecting. So the crew came back the next day to get a plan together for installing them, along with the French doors. Since the weather was nice that day, they ended up installing them right then and there. They got to a point that evening where it was weather-tight and good enough to leave overnight. The next day they came back to finish up.

We did get a call from our GC telling us that the French doors that we picked out weren’t going to work. 😦 It was going to end up being more expensive to custom make a door jamb and threshold to fit the doors than it was just to buy new doors. So that’s what they did. No big deal, other than we’d really wanted to have those cool antique French doors installed.

With the carpets down, the bedrooms are pretty much done, with the exception of installing some baseboards here and there. Last Saturday, the kids were anxious to move in. So, they started pulling their stuff out of the detached garage and started setting up their rooms the way they wanted them.

The church teen retreat this past weekend gave us a chance to show off the house a bit, even if it was to a bunch of teenage girls. They all kept to the upstairs bedrooms (with Seth spending the night with the teenage boys, just to be clear), but they did come down for breakfast before the day’s activities. Sonya was hard at work the few days before getting the house as ready as it was going to be. It was sorta comical watching her sweep and mob the subfloor deck boards, but if she hadn’t they would have all gone home with pounds of drywall dust in their clothes.

This week we’ll be continuing to move in permanently. Of course, work will continue for several weeks, but it’s finally starting to feel like home.