September 2014 – nicole.groudasfamily.com

Deck Stained

(Edited to add pictures!!!)

With the rain every weekend really messing with plans and cold weather coming soon I decided a week ago to just do the deck anyway, it’s a covered porch so the majority of it would be just fine and hopefully the rain would hold off anyhow (spoiler : it didn’t).

Well I spent all day Saturday sanding the deck while Chloe watched Alex and Ryan painted the red molding on the porch soffit (and the tops of the posts). That came out awesome! Finally about 6pm I had finished sanding and cleaning up and started staining. By 7 I had to quick for a few min to give Alex a bath and then finished up while Chloe read books to Alex. I was done in time to do the rest of bedtime!

Old to new – hopefully the new darkens over the winter!

The red molding under the soffit was painted all around

Up to this point (it got dark) – and notice the vertical frieze boards installed on this side of the skirting – there is only one more piece by the stairs to add and that will be done!

There wasn’t any packing to do because our truck was filled with our new bed (king size bed!) so we just relaxed after bedtime. Of course at 6am I woke up to pouring rain! Our windows were all out upstairs too (getting painted by our neighbor) but luckily the rain was really coming straight down so everything was fine (except the ends of the deck that got soaked!).

No idea how it really faired, it stopped raining for our drive Sunday and I’m heading up there tonight and I’ll get to see how it looks after a week of drying.

This past weekend we stayed in NY and I got the built-in doors primed finally. They still need paint but the primer I could spray on since it was sanded after anyhow. I really need to set up a better spot to paint – the primer had tons of bugs stuck in it 🙂

No pic weekends

OK so the trouble with driving out to work on the house for a day and then driving back – means I always forget to take pictures! Arg! 2 weekends in a row now! I don’t want to forget what we did so I’ll update anyhow and hopefully next weekend I’ll remember pics.

We’ve been driving out Friday nights then Saturday Ryan is doing errands with Alex (dump runs etc). The weekend before last I sanded the railings and got them stained after we went and bought new stain that actually matches this time 🙁 Then I went up on the roof over the porch and painted the red molding that was left and the green siding – and just as I finished it started pouring. So the last 5 boards that weren’t dry all have to be re-painted as the paint washed off – yup!

We waited for the storm to pass before hitting the road and coming home Saturday night that weekend but last weekend we stayed until Sunday morning which worked better (rain again too).

So this weekend it was planning to rain again so i still couldn’t sand and stain the deck (UGG!!!). But I had the morning rain free so I painted the soffit around the porch yellow (part of it that needed one more coat). So the porch soffit just needs the red molding painted next.

After that Ryan and I worked on installing the last trim around the skirting of the porch (I believe there’s 1 piece left that needed an angle cut and hence a different saw) while Alex napped. I got the nail holes all filled and caulking done while he installed those. Georgia came over to play with alex for the afternoon/evening so we then built the small 1/2 railing that goes by the side door and got that ready to prime/paint before installing (so we brought it back home with us). We’ll install it next week!

We took the doors off the built-ins as well, hoping to have time to paint those this week and bring them back to install. The more we can do here in the evenings like that (painting big doors is next on the list) the better!

That’s it. Next weekend Chloe is coming over to watch Alex (getting lots of cousin help!) so hopefully the rain will hold off and we can get the deck stained already!!!!

Sheetrock

Been a while since I updated! We were just very busy with working on the house, moving, vacation, moving some more. The week after insulation we spent prepping for sheetrock. The first day of our vacation I spent the first 1/2 the day finishing the electrical (wiring smoke detectors, washer, dryer, last light). All the sheetrock prep we hired my neighbor to do, just filling in corners with nailers, fixing fir strips, removing nails etc. So there wasn’t much else for us to do except the last bit of wiring.

While on vacation my neighbor and our contractor hung the sheetrock in the master bedroom, the hallway and the back bedroom. It took 3 days to hang everything (and we lost a day because the sheetrock didn’t show up the first day even though I was guaranteed it would be there by 8am!) Not a good way to start our vacation 🙁

Our neighbor spent the rest of the week/weekend taping and when we got back on Saturday he had just finished taping all the seams. He had 3 days the next week to spackle and he got the hallway and master bedroom all done. The back bedroom is the only thing left (needs a bit of spackle) and it will be ready for sanding and painting!

The list of what to do next is long. We need to focus on finishing up the bit of painting we have left outside, finish the porch/deck (stain the deck!) before the weather gets cold. The rooms need to be sanded and primed, then trim installed, doors installed. Lots of painting etc.

We’re going to get really good at the 3 hour drive on weekends to work on the house (out friday night, back sunday). That means with someone watching Alex we’ll get 1 person working all day saturday (2 during naptime) and sunday morning. We’ll probably drive sunday naptime so we get a little time to relax on sundays before it’s back to work. We’ll see how this goes in September, by October we may be leaving Alex with the grandparents to take a weekend out alone and really make good progress. Until we start to go out, it’s hard to say how long this will take us but our goal is by spring to be done! Until then we’re living in 2 places 🙂