Saturday, March 22, 2008

Darn cold...

The darn coughing crud finally caught us, slowed things down for a day or two. Why is there carpet in the vents? Sara and I just had to take a picture, it is interesting! We finished up the tack strips and removing carpet from upstairs - that leaves the "master" bedroom that we are still debating on leaving.

And just in case you were wondering how much work it is to remodel a house...the kids were in our bed to watch a 15 minute video before bedtime- I came in to tell them it was time to go to sleep and found this - two very zonked out kiddos LOL! Apparently they had done their fill for the day :-)

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

No more Green Grass :-(

Well, maybe it isn't really such a sad thing...it definitely changed the look quite a bit all in one swoop! We have almost all of it pulled up and the pads pulled out. Now to the ever so fun task of pulling up staples and tack strips. I lost count somewhere around 500 staples, and that was before we started on the stairs!


Charlie and both kids had to get in on the action this time around- Sara actually does a pretty darn good job of pulling staples, as long as they aren't in too hard- and she did a bang up job of gathering the little bits of carpet padding left on the staples and putting them all in the trash can. Alex, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to climb on our backs every time we were sitting down somewhere ;-) We still need to finish de-stapling the upstairs room and carpet and all in the "master" bedroom, then we'll be ready to do some sanding.

Might be a day or two, though, because the weather is good enough this week to work on the outside - yay! My dad started tearing out the coop area on Sunday, we are planning on building the shop out there -if all goes to plan it will be somewhere around 16x32'- I don't know how I will function will so much space- WOOHOOO!!! I'll post up some pics of the progress on that tomorrow - for now, happy March!

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Here we go...

A new place, a new blog to celebrate the craziness that is! Just because we can't seem to resist- we only had one or two projects left at the Zurich Ct. house, so of course, that seems like the PERFECT time to move into someplace and start all over with remodeling. This time we really are going for the gusto - the Green Grass House is a 60 year old farmhouse in Lakewood, complete with horse and chicken zoning, a half acre yard and all sorts of personality :) The real reason for the move is to build a shop, someplace to have Flutterby Designs that doesn't involve trooping people through half of the house to get to the office. The added bonuses are two fireplaces, a ginormous garden plot already fenced off, a cute little attic room that Sara has dubbed "the Hidey Hole", well and ditch water (woohoo!) and the cutest sconces in the front room. Some of the bummers include teeny bedrooms, interesting but outdated kitchen and bathrooms, fences that Charlie may or may not be able to jump (that remains to be seen...), being way closer to a major highway than we would really prefer and gobs of flooring that needs to go.

Which brings us to the name. Why the Green Grass House? This should help clear it up:



When we were house hunting, Sara had names for the places we looked at - one was the Cat House because they had two cats there, another the River house because the yard was right on a little stream - this one just happened to be Green Grass House- I would say for obvious reasons. Alas, the green grass is coming out- with our allergies, hard floors are so much better for us, and this beautiful house has plenty of hard woods under almost everything from what we can tell so far. We were really hoping to save some to make a bound rug for the Hidey Hole, but there isn't any section long enough that isn't also pretty worn, so we will have to find another choice for there. We pulled up about half of the carpet and pads yesterday, two rooms to go today - whew!