I've dropped, but still painting....

Today, we had a very productive day and we finally have some pictures of progress... The new stove and refrigerator was delivered and installed, Steve installed the kitchen light, excavated the electrical box for the porch light and installed my $5 Lowes clearance porch lantern. For some really odd reason, someone had taped off the live wires in the box, then filled the box with fixall and there was this weird lump in the siding where the light was supposed to be.

We also came up with a solution to a really big problem - floor covering. The original plan was to install wall to wall carpet throughout the house, an as time and money allowed, replace the damaged hardwood floor with the oak flooring I had gotten from the neighbor in Long Beach. The house has large sections of floor that we badly rotted and missing, so it seemed like a reasonable solution - until we actually started pricing carpet and installation on Thursday. The quotes we got from several places ranged from 1600 to 2000 dollars, for the bottom end stuff, which was way more than I had thought. I had a breakdown and called my folks to get some ideas - We talked through just painting the floors, to putting plywood over it, and the best we were able to come up with was to install laminate flooring in the two worst spaces - it would be easy to remove an reuse when I repaired the original floor since it just sits on top. It would be much cheaper and we could install it ourselves - although it was going to push us up to own Wednesday deadline. That was the plan until this evening when my darling husband got an idea - the dining room was covered 3/4 of the way with asphalt tiles over the original wood floor, and the remainder was the plywood we put over the sub floor to replace the areas earlier covered with plywood and the rotted sections of flooring from decades of water damage. He decided to see if the tile would come off, and if so, see how bad the floor was. He laboriously chipped off the tile and found that the floor was in decent shape, so as a temporary measure, we will paint the plywood similar shade of brown and in the coming weeks after we move, I will patch the floor with the salvaged wood, and since it has a finish on it that is similar, we can live with it until I can afford to have the floors sanded. So in the end, it was just the time and painful labor.
During all this, I have been painting, and now have the kitchen walls and ceiling, Living room and dining room walls and ceiling, bedroom walls and ceiling, hallway and entry ceilings complete with two coats of paint. I have one coat on the Entry and Hallway Walls, and still have not started the front bedroom or closets yet - the front bedroom is going to wait, since as my folks pointed out, we are moving from a one bedroom and don't really have anything to move in there till we get our stuff out of storage in a few weeks. I will paint that after we move in. However, I have also not done any of the woodwork yet, so I will continue to work on that over the next few days. I am going to get the living room and bedroom done first, then the dining room, kitchen, hallway and entry as I have time.
We also installed my plaster ceiling medallion in the dining room. I bought it several years in San Francisco and had it in my Long Beach apartment. It reminds me of the Victorian house I used to live in in the city (San Francisco) and I just love it. It looks very at home with the beamed ceiling. It will look stunning with my great grandmother's crystal chandelier hanging under it.






Finally, I installed the gorgeous fixture I won on Ebay a few weeks ago. It arrived completely rewired and ready to go - so up it went and I absolutely LOVE how it looks. The scale and design are perfect for the space, and as I had mentioned before, it matches some other vintage fixtures I had bought earlier. Isn't it pretty???




So tomorrow is a day of rest so we can get the rest of the stuff done and actually get moved, although we have to o some shopping for some area rugs to cover the bedroom and living room floors - there are some really nasty spots to contend with. Its now to the point that every bit of progress is making the house feel more and more like home...