^ Putting on the first coat of primer paint!
Well its official! We have been living in our house for a week now, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We were hoping to move in before Christmas but we just physically couldn’t make it happen. We don’t have wi-fi yet, we don’t have a heating system in yet, and we don’t have a proper kitchen- but we’re in! In the previous post about a month ago, we had just finished putting up the sheetrock, and were waiting for the taping contractor to mud and tape all the seams between the pieces of sheetrock. The order of operations for what was left before we were ready move in were the following: paint the ceilings and walls, tile the bathroom floor, finish the plumbing for upstairs, install tub and vanity in bathroom, install underlayment for the floor, install the floor, finish the electrical switches and lighting, paint and put in baseboard trim, install closet shelving, and put up doors. Once all those items were done, the plan was to move the major things to the upstairs area of the house (our sofa, bed, clothing, and basic appliances) and treat the space like a one bedroom apartment.
A week before Christmas, Brandon’s sister and a really good friend of mine came and helped us prime the ceilings and walls with paint. After the primer was up, we selected our paint from Home Depot and after several small paint sample containers, we selected our colors: ‘Statuesque’ for the main rooms in a flat finish and ‘Distant Star’ in a satin finish for the bathroom- both from the Behr Marquee line. My parents and younger sister helped with the rest of the painting. Once the paint was on the walls in the bathroom, we were able to begin tiling the floor. Since we are doing radiant floor heating, we needed a particular plastic tile underlayment rather than the traditional cement board. Once that was down and left to harden for 24 hours, we were able to begin tiling. After the tile was set and the grout had cured, we moved onto installing the underlayment for the main flooring.
^ Our bedroom before the paint and underlayment
^ My sister Hannah and I painting the bedroom
^ Shmeering thinset for the tile underlayment
^ Cutting tile for the edges, and the final sheet for the bathroom!
^ Grouting the tile
As I mentioned earlier, rather than forced hot air heating, Brandon and I agreed to do radiant floor heating for our home. Among many other benefits, we are excited about the advances in technology that radiant flooring offers as well as a major savings in heating costs over time. Radiant flooring works basically by heating the floor with hot water tubing beneath you and radiating the heat up through the air. Not all types of flooring work well with radiant flooring, especially hardwood and carpet. I’ll reveal our flooring selection in my next post, but for today I will tell you that in order for our flooring to go down we needed the proper underlayment to be installed first. Thanks to our amazing friends who spent the afternoon and evening with us after Christmas, we were able to bang out the entire upstairs at once. Oh, and do you see all the X’s on those sheets? Yeah, we had to put a staple in each one.
The photos below show the progression from the previous post when we put up the walls to the painting, tiling and underlayment for the flooring. I’ll have more posts coming with the next stages of what we have done coming soon.
^ The front room stairs before and after paint and underlayment.
^ The hallway before and after paint and underlayment
^ The bathroom corner before and after we painted and tiled (pre-grout)
I can’t even begin to express the gratitude I feel toward those of you who have helped us out over the past several months. The generosity of other people’s time and hard work to help us move in is really amazing. To my good friend I called on a Sunday morning asking her to help us paint and she came over all afternoon even though she had to work later that evening. To our family members who drove from out of town to lend a helping hand for the weekend various times throughout the past few months. To Brandon’s pals who stayed past midnight on several occasions to just finish the job for the day while their wives were at home with their children. To our friend who just showed up one Saturday morning without notice and helped all day just because he thought we would need it. To my parents and my sister who have brought us meals and helped with boring tasks on the week nights. To my best friend who drove here not once but twice from out of town to help with the demolition. To our friends who came all day to help with the underlayment instead of going out on a date when their kids were out of town. To Brandon’s grandparents who have been our on-call answering service for encouragement and expert advice each step of the way. And last but certainly not least, to our host family who put up with us and our ever-changing move out date that we kept pushing further and further out:
Thank you.
More to come…
