Monday, June 6, 2011

What came before

OK, admittedly this is a late start to the subject of Pam and Mike's House.  We bought the house just over 10 years ago, having it built to our specifications on a subdivision lot of our choosing.  A lot has gone before, and there are pictures, although I can't find any at the moment.  If I do, I'll post them eventually.  For now, I'd like to talk about our current projects, and throw pictures up as I come by them.

[8/18/11 - Here's a photo of the house... its about 7 years old at this point.  You can't see any of the front yard landscaping that we'd done in this picture because of the snow, but there's more than a little.]









This summer, we have three main projects lined up.  One is to convert Pam's office back into a guest room.  Another is to build a garden shed.  The third is to build a patio.

Office conversion first.  It sounds like a simple enough chore, but it isn't quite so simple as all that.  There is a possibility that her dad (retired) may come down to live with us (short term or long term), and we wanted to provide a suitable place for him if this happens.  Rather than sending an elderly gentleman upstairs, we decided that the down stairs bedroom currently being used as an office was a better choice, especially since it has an adjoining bathroom.

Pam works from home a couple of days a week, so she really does need the working space.  We decided that she could set up her office in one corner of the upstairs playroom, which wasn't seeing as much use as it had in earlier years.  Unfortunately, both her office and the playroom needed to be repainted, and the office needed new carpet (the playroom will too, but it isn't in as bad of shape).

To start, we shifted all the stuff (foos-ball & air hockey tables, exercise equipment, bookshelves) in the play room from one side to the other and patched and painted the first side.  Kind of a pink color.  Then everything was shifted back  to paint the other side.  Then things got shifted around again to allow us to paint the trim.  The paint job was BETTER than the original (contractors who built the house were kind of sloppy), but it made the adjoining hallway look bad.

Finally, after all the paint was dry, we moved things more or less into their final place, and started bring furniture up from Pam's office.  This was a real pain, since it involved about five large bookshelves full of books, a LARGE desk assembly, and a couple of very full and heavy metal filing cabinets, plus miscellaneous small stuff.   We got her office relocated, and the future guest room emptied, although the game room is still 50% disorganized... it can wait. 

We proceeded to patch holes in the walls of the guest room, and repeat the performance with paint.  Light blue this time.  We weren't so worried about drips on the carpet this time, since we planned to replace it as soon as the paining projects were done.

Remember how I mentioned that the upstairs hallway looked bad after finishing the game room?  Well, we were getting into the painting thing so much that we decided to paint more stuff (although the game room & guest bedroom were the original extent of the planned work).  We went ahead and painted the upstairs hallway and the back stairway using the same light blue as the guest room.  We also decided to continue the paint job into the family room (at the bottom of the back stairway, off of which opens the guest bedroom).  Colors are two tone:  Light blue above the chair rail that this room includes, and a medium blue below it.  A small study center between the family room and the guest bedroom will be painted entirely in the medium blue.

This is where the painting project stands right now.  We have finished masking the family room, and most of the study alcolve.  I have to finish sanding out my patching jobs, and we will be doing the first coat of paint this evening.

SIMULTANEOUSLY with the paint work, I am also in the back yard working on the projects back there.  Over the last few months, I've been bringing in cement blocks (Castle Wall style) to build a small retaining wall along one side of the back yard.  Friday, I had a load of crushed aggregate (gravel/sand mix) dumped in the driveway, and I spent the entire weekend wheeling loads of this stuff to the back yard and dumping it behind the wall.  I figure I put about 3 yards of material behind the wall, and it is just about there.  I have to level it out, and then I'll be ready to pour concrete for the shed slab (scheduled for delivery on Saturday morning).

The third project is the patio, which is just outside the picture, and to the left.  It will use up the remainder of my load of gravel (another 2 yards), about half of which is still sitting in the driveway.  After I move the rest of the gravel, I'll be ignoring the patio project until after the painting and shed work are done... probably sometime in late July.

1 comment:

  1. Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering... the fence in the background is a previous project from about 5 years ago...

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