Sunday, December 14, 2008

Catch up and house pics...

First I want to say thank you all so much for the warm welcome back! It is so nice to know that I was missed. On August 7th Dave's mother passed away, then 2 weeks later his brother also passed. Needless to say, that was a very trying time. We received friends here in our home during his mother's funeral. In this post which was July 9, we were painting, clearing out junk, moving furniture upstairs and just general cleaning, so we had just finished when we opened our home to over 60 visitors! We actually fed 60 but had many more coming by to pay their respects.

I also promised to show some after pictures when everything was done. Since the living room and stairway was the only actual "finished" areas, that's all I'm showing right now! LOL The first pics are the stairway before and after. There was carpet on the stairs and landings so we pulled that up. We started at the top landing and it came up so easily I was amazed! Nothing has been easy here in this old house! Well, it didn't let me down because when we got to the stairs the carpet had been glued down!! Here's how it looked when we finally got it all up:

stairs before

We tried everything we could think of to remove that yellowed glue, even a heat gun and scraper. It was coming off but very slowly and Dave was uttering a few choice words! :) I wasn't much help because of my bad back. It was such a mess we knew we couldn't just paint over all those lumps and bumps! Then he happened to think that he had some adhesive remover in his shop and tried that. Believe it or not..that glue rolled right off. It still wasn't an easy task but much faster. There were also a gazillion carpet tacks to be pulled up! Then came the paint which we matched as close as we could to the original, and the stair treads which we had bought about a month earlier! The results:

stairs with treads

After a couple of weeks we started moving things upstairs to reclaim some much needed space in the living room.

living room 1

living room 2

living room 3

living room 4

Our next project is to do the downstairs bedroom and take out the ugly ceiling tiles which some previous owner had put in to lower the original high ceiling. We want the high ceiling back!! Maybe in the spring!!

So, that's just the highlights of what has been going on with me. Maybe you can all forgive me for not being around for so long! :)




Friday, December 12, 2008

Little Bits of Christmas at our House

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Yes, I'm still alive and well even though I've been a real slacker when it comes to blogging. Life does tend to get in the way sometimes. I'm sure most of you thought I might be "buried in junk" after my last post months ago. A lot has been happening but I'll fill you in later. I just thought a little Christmas cheer was in order for now. You can also see that we have been getting some snow this year. Have a great weekend!