Our House, Part Three: During

(Parts One and Two can be found here)

We started out this home improvement adventure with, what else, a trip to Home Depot. And then Lowe's. Because, what home-related project would be complete without visiting both? Multiple times, I might add. In addition to renting the huge floor sander, we also bought plastic (I use the term Visqueen--it's like BandAid), tape, hand sanders, sanding pads, mops, polyurethane, spreader thingies (technical term), more tape, knee pads, eye protectors, face masks, extension cords, lights, sandpaper and probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting. Luckily, we had two Shop Vacs on loan, so we were set there.

We put plastic up over all of the windows and light fixtures and created a plastic curtain to separate the kitchen from the rest of the house. And we went to work. We used the large sander for the majority of the floor and hand sanders for the corners, edges and really tough spots that needed extra work. Years and years of grime, old floor finish and who knows what else had really taken their toll on our floors. Like any home project, it took longer than expected. There was sawdust everywhere. I spent a lot of time vacuuming every surface to keep it from building up.

When the floors were finally sanded down, they really did look much better. It was expected that there would be parts that we couldn't make perfect, but overall we were pretty happy with the end result.

The timeline of what happened next is kind of fuzzy in my memory. I'm really not sure what happened first or how everything played out.We were still debating about the kitchen and whether or not we should just do it.

We couldn't finish the floors until all of the dust was cleaned up. We wanted the house to be as clean as possible when we spread the polyurethane so that we wouldn't end up with crap stuck to our floors. We mopped and vacuumed, mopped and vacuumed. I also think we started to paint before we sealed the floors. Our reasoning being that if we did happen to get paint on the floors, we could still sand it out. Actually, now that I think about it a little more, that is exactly what happened.

I was upstairs, prepping one of the bedrooms for painting. Matt and Jayme were downstairs. I heard a loud bang come from the kitchen, followed by a crash. I ran downstairs to find part of the kitchen counter ripped off. And so began our kitchen remodel. Apparently, Matt had decided that he couldn't live without a dishwasher and made the move toward getting one installed. Part of me thinks that the boys were just really antsy to do some demolition work. I really wasn't too upset. In all of our debating back and forth over whether to do it or not, we always came up with many more reasons why it would be better to do it sooner rather than later.

The next few weeks, we spent every waking hour working on the house, thinking about the house or shopping for stuff for the house. We were on a first name basis with the staff at Home Depot and Lowe's. We felt we didn't really have time to eat and spent weeks eating junk. Junk on paper plates and with plastic utensils because our only sink was in our powder room and I wasn't doing dishes. We ate sitting in our camping chairs in the middle of our torn up house. It was nothing if not glamorous.

For some reason, everyone we ran across seemed to feel sorry for us. We got a lot of "you look tired"s and "oh, how's the house going?" in that tone that makes it seem like someone died. But really, we were tired. It was hard work. Thinking back on it, it doesn't really seem like that much, but at the time, I know I was overwhelmed and everything seemed to take much longer than planned.

I had painted rooms before, but I don't remember it being so much work. I HATED it. I thought it would be so much fun, but it wasn't. It sucked. It doesn't matter if I like the colors I picked or not, because I don't plan on repainting anytime soon. (Luckily, three years later, I'm still happy with them.) This was where we really cracked the whip on Jayme. He's about 2'6" taller than either Matt or me, so he helped with all of the high and hard to reach parts. Instead of dragging my ladder all over the house, I just called Jayme. It worked out much better that way.

When I was (finally) done painting, we got to refinish the floors. That was a glorious day because it meant we didn't have to work the next day so that we could let it cure. I'm pretty sure we celebrated our day off by going to bed at 7PM that night. The floors turned out great. Even though we'll always have scratches and portions that couldn't be sanded out, I am amazed at how much better they looked afterward.

After several hours at the Lowe's Kitchen Design Center, we ended up with cabinets that we love. Although the jerks posing as delivery men and I had obvious difference in opinions on how my cabinets should be handled, they made it into our home with little trouble.

Fortunately for us, the stove in the home was brand new, never used. We weren't horribly excited about having to buy all new appliances, but we absolutely did need a new refrigerator. When we moved in, our original plan was to spruce up this unit and then in a year when Helen's lease was up, kick her out and move to her unit and remodel it as well. Her side is a little bigger, with a better kitchen layout. We were planning on buying matching appliances (duh), but when we found an awesome stainless fridge for a great price, we couldn't pass it up. We decided to buy it, live with it not matching and then take it with us when we moved across the hall. It is really annoying to me that our appliances don't match, so I constantly feel the need to explain why.

Matt also took it upon himself to surprise me with a brand new washer and dryer for Valentine's Day. You know you're getting old when this is exciting. I don't even care though because I LOVE them. My clothes have never been cleaner and supposedly they save water and energy. It's nothing short of magic that it uses less water and gets my clothes cleaner. Oh, W&D, I can't wait for the day that you can be showcased in your own beautiful laundry room and not a dark basement.

And then there was Helen. Bless her heart, she was so sweet, but we really found ourselves trying to sneak around so she wouldn't know we were there. Every time we showed up at the house, she had a honeydo list for us. Could we help her reach this? Could we help her do that? She couldn't walk in the snow to the garbage, so if she left her trash on the back porch, would we mind taking it out for her? She was having out of town guests come and would we mind tidying up the front entry area? Would it be okay if she took it upon herself to do the tidying since we seemed to be so busy? I know that this makes me seem like a witch. I really had absolutely no problem helping out our elderly tenant. Taking her trash out for her was really no problem. It was just the way in which she seemed to rely on us so much that made me slightly nervous about the next year of living next door to her.

Somehow, we managed to get it all done. I don't know how, but we did. Of course, it wasn't 100% finished when it was time for us to move, but it was livable. And, by livable, I mean we had a working kitchen. There was still a little bit of painting I needed to finish, but I figured I could take a weekend and bang that out.

This house project turned out to be quite the adventure. We had several arguments and a few emotional breakdowns, but we also shared a lot of laughs and it really was a learning experience. I can't say I would ever want to do it again, but I'm glad we did it.

We moved at the end of February. On what is otherwise known as the day that I froze and died all at the same time. Jayme happened to be moving the same day, so we had the brilliant idea to load up our trailer at our apartment, take it to the house and dump it, go to Jayme's house, load up the trailer again, take it to his new apartment and dump it. Somehow our friend Abby got roped into the deal as well. However, it seemed to work out just fine until we got to Jayme's new apartment and that's where we all fell apart. It was a third floor walkup. At the end of the day with heavy furniture. Need I say more? Several of us would lose stuff on the way up and we'd find them on the way back down. I am sure Jayme understood when we all said we'd never help him move again.

We took a few more days to move the little stuff and get unpacked and moved in.

And suddenly, it was home.