Tackling the Last Ten Percent

It's been forever, I know! Since we moved in almost a month ago we have been really busy working on this apartment. We have been using all our spare time to get things done around here so I haven't had the time or energy to write as much as I would like, or write at all for that matter!

Recently somebody told me that, when it comes to renovations, the last 10% of it usually takes about 90% of the time. Unfortunately I have to agree with him. This last little bit  of "phase 1" has been taking a loooong time!!
On my last post I said all we had left was crown molding and baseboards, right?  Well, I forgot to mention doors too...and the laundry room/pantry! 

Early in the renovation process I saw these beautiful doors at a design website and fell in love with them. Of course , they couldn't be available at the Home Depot around the corner! They had to be custom made and due to some miscommunication with our contractor designer, they ended up arriving much later than we would have liked. 
So when the doors finally arrived the installers realized that the master bathroom one was the wrong size and had to be returned. And the laundry room pocket door was going to have to be cut at the bottom.  I could go on and on about little things like that that have been happening during these last few weeks, but that would be really boring, and to be honest I don't even remember everything that has gone somewhat wrong or off schedule. 

Bottom line is that, to save money, we decided we were going to paint the doors and trim ourselves. We spent the entire 4th of July weekend painting and painting and painting. 

"Naked" door

Our painting set up

We had to prime them...

And paint them...

So we did it! We primed and painted 7 doors!! And also painted door trims, jams and casings, which is so not fun to do!!!  But now they look beautiful!!

One of the guest bedroom's closet door

Master Bedroom door

Then once again the ceilings had to be touched up by the sheet rock guys. Jerry tried to encapsulate the area in our living room to minimize dust:

 And I think this time they finally got the ceiling right! So I am extremely glad to know that I don't need to worry about sheet rock dust anymore until "phase 2". 

Another project we got accomplished since we moved in was our closet. We used EasyClosets.com to design and order our new closet system. Here are some before and after pics:

Before

Before

After

After

Jerry fit all his clothes in there, but my side only has my "summer" clothes and shoes. All my winter stuff is still in storage. We also bought a bunch of those vacuum seal Ziplock bags to shrink a bunch of my clothes and store them under the bed. I promise I gave away bags and bags of clothes and from now on every time I buy a new piece of clothing I will donate an old one! That's the only thing that will keep my clothes from spreading all over this apartment and ending up in the guest bathroom's bath tub!!

Our bedroom is one of the few rooms in the house that feels almost completely finished. We still need something above the bed's headboard and a new TV to go on the wall. Oh, and crown and trim are not painted yet, but overall it has a finished"ish" look. Some before and afters:

Before

Before

After

After

After

 Jerry is currently working on our pantry/laundry room. It is turning into an amazing space with tons of much needed storage! But that will be the subject of my next post!
Just so you don't think we are just slaving away and not really enjoying our new home, here's some pictures of tonight's dinner. We went to the rooftop by the pool and used the grill up there for the first time. Jerry's steaks turned out amazing!
We feel a "grill out pool party with guests" coming up really soon!!

We moved in!!

I guess I broke my promise! Sorry!! 

We were gone on vacation from June 5th till June 9th. Earlier that week the laundry room floors were installed.

                                              

                                                         Laundry tiles "waiting" to be grouted. 

 The day we left to Orlando the hardwood floors were being put down. I went by the apartment and was able to capture this photo. 

                           

 I love, love, love the floors!! Even though the color is mostly light, it's got some dark variations, and I think that adds some character to it! 

While we were gone, our job site superintendent kept us posted through text messages, so we know that the floors were finished on Wednesday, the ceilings were mudded and sanded some more on Thursday and painted on Friday. Also all the can lights, ceiling fans, light fixtures and outlet covers were installed while we were away.

We got back Sunday afternoon and were ready to do some cleaning to get the place ready for our move on tuesday - June 11th. However, we were a little disappointed to find the place still kind of a mess. All the floors were still covered and there was construction materials everywhere. Also, the ceilings looked like they still were gonna need some more mudding, sanding and painting. All we could do that evening was clean the kitchen and the bathroom from all the awful drywall dust! I sealed the kitchen and guest bathroom with plastic so I wouldn't have to clean it again after the ceiling touch ups. 

  

Monday evening (June 10th) when we go to the apartment Jerry and I joined Will (the superintendent) in cleaning the floors. We swept , vacuumed and mopped them with PineSol. Jerry's little HEPA vacuum was so handy!  

                                     

We used Mineral Spirits to remove some of the glue on the floors, but there's still a lot to be "picked". 

Will "picking" glue off the floors

Jerry sweeping our Master Bedroom

Our Master suite. Love the tree out the window!

Dining Room

Tuesday (June 11th) was our move day! The moving guys brought all of our stuff from the storage unit in Karns into our apartment in almost exactly 3 hours! 

Although the move itself went super smoothly, the situation inside the apartment while the move was going on was a bit messy and crowded. The sheet rock guys were mudding and sanding the ceilings some more as the movers were bringing the furniture and boxes in. 

                                       

                                                                            Notice the dust floating around. FUN!!

 So as they were bringing our stuff inside, I was going around behind them covering our furniture with plastic. 

And the pictures below show a little bit what we were left with. Actually, there were way more boxes piled up, but I forgot to take more pictures. It's hard to turn your "reporter/documentarist" side on when you are worried about your furniture and dishes making it all in one piece!  

                                      

                                      

                                     

                                      

And on the same morning we had our washer and dryer AND our guest bedroom furniture set delivered as well!

                                                    

                                   There's still a lot to do in the laundry room, but at least we have our washer and dryer now!!

                                      

                                                                       Guest bedroom in all its messy glory!!!

As you can imagine we spent the rest of the week unboxing things and trying to place our furniture approximately at their final "resting" positions. 

We also started hanging pictures on the walls and that has really helped the place feel a little  bit more like a "homy" home. 

Here's a sneak peek of our living room now:  

                                                  

The only thing still missing now is our trim. For some reason (I really don't know why) the trim people have been really behind. They came for the first time yesterday (June 19th) and did all the measurements of crown molding and baseboards. They cut all the pieces and put up crown in the guest bedroom. I am hoping they can finish the entire place by the end of this week, so we can paint the trim, touch up the walls and start relaxing in our new home sweet home!

 

Time to paint!

And once again I find myself super behind on my updates! What happened was that for a little while nothing was going on in our construction site so there was nothing for me to write about. Nothing was done in the apartment on Monday May 27th due to Memorial day weekend. Then on Tuesday we had to have an engineer come in and give his opinion about what to do with the ceilings.And obviously he came right at the end of the day. So on Wednesday we got the OK from the inspector to go ahead and scrape the ceilings, but the sheetrock guys never showed up in the afternoon, so... another day wasted.   
Thursday and Friday things finally picked back up and a lot got accomplished. The rest of the  walls got put up  and almost ready for paint and a lot of the popcorn was scraped off the ceilings. 

So on Friday evening and all day Saturday and all day Sunday Jerry and I  did some more mudding and sanding on the walls, and painted away. That was the only part of the project that we could do ourselves and save us some money.  I wouldn’t say we had a blast doing it, but at least we will be able to look back and say we gave a small contribution to this whole renovation thing. 

Living room wall

Living room wall

Accent wall in the guest bedroom

Master Bedroom wall (hard to see it, but it's kind of a light mossy green)

Finished living room walls

Finished guest bedroom walls

Unfortunately we were so tired of painting all weekend that we didn't take too many pictures of all our finished painted walls. 

This past  week a lot got accomplished too, but that will be coming up on the next post, which I'll write soon, I promise!

P.S.: Special thanks to our friend Brad Ervin who came over Saturday morning and helped Jerry prime the walls. We forgot to capture that moment for posterity :-/

P.S.2: Also thank you to our beautiful niece Johanna, who helped with the Master bedroom. 

Catching up

So I am gonna attempt to catch this blog up to real time in this one  single post. We left off at the end of week one, which went as planned and almost smoothly. I say almost because of a little incident  that happened on Thursday (May 9th). As we got to the building that night to see what had been done that day, we noticed that the garage door was stuck half way opened. We thought, “well, that stinks, glad we are not staying here”, parked at the Locust street garage, checked out the apartment and then left. 
The next day Jerry found out that it had been one of our workers that had hit the garage door opener with a ladder that was sitting at the back of his truck . Ooooops! Thankfully the guy took responsibility and even took care of getting it fixed the next day.

Week two also went as planned. However it didn’t feel to me that a lot got done, mainly because all they did was electrical work. Physically the space didn’t change much. They cut wholes in the ceiling for our new can lights, ceiling fans , moved outlets around, added new outlets, wired the living room for surround sound and probably did a lot more than I know or care to understand. Jerry could tell you all about it!

By the end of week two we were given our estimated moving day - June 3rd! At that point it meant we only had two more weeks to go! I got super excited!!

On week three the HVAC guys came over and relocated and replaced our round vents with rectangle ones.  This one is in the master bedroom:

This one is in the living-room:

 Also, all the blocking got done during week three. If you don't know what blocking is, don't  you feel super ignorant.  You are not alone! I had never heard of it up until a few weeks ago. It is those pieces of wood attached to the metal framing that you see on the picture above and it's there to provide support for things we are going to hang on the walls, such as TVs, furniture, and (maybe) electrical fireplaces.  

This one is for the guest bedroom TV:

And here you see the top one for the master bedroom TV and the bottom one for an electric fireplace (if we can find a cool one):

The pocket door to our walk-in closet also got framed. That's right, we'll only have one walk-in closet for both of us. Originally we were gonna divide the laundry room/pantry in half and that was going to give us the ability to have 2 walk-in closets in the master. But, it turned out there was this huge, massive, metal pipe running in the wall right where we needed the door to the closet to be. So, Jerry literally went back to the drawing board and re-designed our closet configuration. This is the updated floor plan:

So this is the framed pocket door for the closet:

 And last but not least, the sheet rock arrived on Thursday. I was there and saw them bringing them up one of the elevators. I was so glad to see that they fit in there. We thought they were gonna have to carry them up 6 flights of stairs!! Those guys were sweating hard just bringing them from the elevators to the apartment!

       

                                                                       

So this past Friday (May 25th) they put the sheet rock up. Now we have walls!!!

Master Bedroom

Living Room

Guest Bedroom showing opening to closet on the left

Dining Room to the left, Master door opening to the right

Everything was going according to schedule until we had the inspection on Friday. It turns out that we won't be able to put new sheet rock on the ceiling to cover up the horrendous popcorn finish. We decided to do that because not only do we have "popcorn on steroids" ceilings, but also the previous owners painted over them, which made it impossible to scrape the popcorn off. So our plan was to just attach new 1/4'' sheet rock to it. However due to fire code the ceiling sheetrock needs to be fire rated and the fire rated kind only comes in a much thicker- and heavier-  size (can't remember exactly precise number). So mister inspector said "no, no". Now we are waiting to see what his suggestion will be, but most likely they'll have to rip off the old ceilings and put the new smooth sheetrock up. Bottom line is: we are not moving back into our place on June 3rd. We rescheduled our moving day to June 11th. 

Oh well, what's another week or two, right? We've only been "moving" since the end of February, when we started packing up our old house. 
No biggy! It's all good! It will be worth it in the end! (Repeat three times, five times a day!) 

So stay tuned for more updates! We are all caught up now!