Finally getting around to the Laundry Room

Well, Brianna and Link are going to be in Washington this weekend for my sister's baby shower. Since I have the house to myself, I'm going to invite all my guy friends over and have a debauched party with lots of booze and music and HAHAHAHA, no. I'm going to paint the laundry room.

The laundry room is the last significant room in the entire house that hasn't been repainted or at least patched and touched up (there are two closets that are still in their "pre-Medema" state). There are quite a few holes in the drywall, and the shelves above the countertop are drooping under their own weight. Here are the "Before" pictures:

And here's under countertop. That's not dirt. That's after I scrubbed at it for five minutes. It's just that badly stained.

And here's some intermediary pictures:

I got the ceiling painted:

And the trim and window sill:

And I took the shelves down. Blasted things were only anchored in drywall - no wonder they were drooping.

And that's as far as I got on a Friday night. Tomorrow I paint the walls green.

Window Cleaning

The wall by the front door had developed an unpleasant brown streak from top to bottom, seeming to originate from the window above the door. Turns out the condensation on the inside of the window was picking up dirt from the window, then draining down along a specific path, leaving dirt streaks on the wall. So I got to clean the window today.

Some Windex and a few paper towels later, and the window is crystal clear again!

Thanksgiving Prep

Nothing like a combination of nesting instinct and knowing relatives are on their way for dinner to inspire some clean-up:

House Appraisal

After a very busy two weeks (after the baby class yesterday, I went in to the office and did an afternoon of work) I was pretty exhausted. I slept in til 10AM this morning. I missed church, but man, I felt great when I woke up.

Once I was up, Brianna and I did a couple hours of cleaning before the appraiser for the refinance came by. Unfortunately, this included putting away all the painting supplies, so it's going to be even harder to get up motivation to finish painting now. But! The house looks pretty great after that much cleaning!

Great Room and Stairwell Prep Work

Brianna is down in Colorado Springs for the weekend, so I can paint. Of course, since I've been procrastinating on doing prep work all week (partially to attend childbirth classes) I have to do that first.

Man alive, I hate prep work.

Just getting everything dusted (and man, the ceiling was filthy) took a couple hours. I had to use a swiffer duster taped to the end of a 20-foot pole to clean the ceiling. Not the easiest task I've done on this house.

Cleaning up the Basement

Pretty much since we moved into the house, we've been using the basement as a dumping ground for stuff we weren't ready to deal with. Honestly, I'm not sure it's been vacuumed since the first time we deep cleaned the house.

My goal for this weekend was to clean up and organize the basement. Here's what I started with:

And this is where I called it "good enough":

I also worked on the storage shelves in the unfinished area of the basement. I didn't take a very good "before" picture, but rest assured, the floor area of these shelves was also crammed with stuff:

By the end of the weekend, I had it looking much better, with the shelves on the left reserved for food, camping stuff all in one area, and everything just generally more organized.

I feel fairly accomplished.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Finally pulled up the rest of the plastic in this room, and moved most of the paint cans into the garage. Brianna vacuumed and mopped, and it looked fantastic:

Then we turned around for just an instant, and when we looked back, furniture was just swooshing into the room to fill the space:

It actually looks like a useable family room!

The couch and loveseat were a wedding gift from my my parents. Thanks Mom and Dad! We're still using them, two apartments and two houses after we got them! And they look great here!

Murphy's Oil Soap

Brianna cleaned and oiled the hardwood floor tonight. It looks like it is glowing now!

Second Furnace Filter Change-out

So, this is what a furnace filter is supposed to look like when it is ready to be changed out.

I'm guessing those clumps got knocked loose when we had the ducts cleaned. Still, looks a lot better than the filter I pulled out after we took possession:

Fish tank work

We have been in the house about 7 weeks and up until today I have only fed the fish maybe 4 times a week (Brian wants nothing to do with them).  I have been thinking about getting a sucker fish or a snail to help with removing the algae as I don't really want to fully clean this thing.  

Walked into Essential Pet, a specialty pet store on my way home and talked to a very talkative guy who grows his own coral in salt water tanks.  He was super nice, helpful and convinced me that I should bring some water in to get it tested/fixed before introducing any fish and killing them with shock.  The sucker fish that I was interested in was really cool looking and would cost $12.  He said the fish can handle a nitrates level of 150... went home and brought back a sample of the fish water... I would have killed any new fish.  Apparently, I need to do a 20% water change out every three days until I get the nitrates down to 100.  The scale ended at 400, so it may be higher than that and he said that I have some super hardy fish!

Before: boring background, only one working bulb

pH:8.7

Nitrates~ 400

I am really glad the previous owners installed a fitting to make the siphon into the drain easy and installed a fresh water hook-up only inches away.  It made the water change out process go super smooth.  They only installed a cold water hook-up so the 20% change out dropped the temperature from 78F to 68F.  The fish were huddled by the heater.  I added a pH buffer to help create a neutral environment.  I will bring a sample into Essential Pet after I do three 20% changes (400-> 320-> 256-> 205).  Maybe I should wait until the 4th 20% change out 205->164...

The water is murky after adding water stirred up the bottom stuff.

After: pretty background, replaced burned out right bulb

pH: buffered to 7.8

Nitrates ~320

Looks much cooler in the dark

Hey!  I got 4 of the 5 fish in one picture!  They are pretty little guys.

Whole-House Humidifier

The house has a humidifier built into the furnace. The inspector actually turned it off before we even bought the house, because it was leaking. I spent a little time cleaning it up and replaced the filter last night and turned it back on. It seems to be working fine now, and humidity went up from 25% last night to 33% this morning. It seems like I'll be able to tie it into the Nest Thermostat fairly easily as well, but I have not done that yet.

The Humidifier. It's ugly, but seems to work.

Speaking of the Nest Thermostat, tying in the common wire has completely solved the low battery problem, and the house has NOT in fact burned down. So there's that.

Finally, as a bonus for post without much content, here's a picture of Eva helping me clean up crumbs from this morning's toast:

Family Work Day

Phew, it's been a long day. Started with general cleaning and picking up, including two loads of laundry. Later, a window washer came by to honor a Groupon we have been trying to redeem for four weeks now. All the top story windows have been washed on the exterior, as have a few of the largest windows on the bottom floor. We'll have to do the rest ourselves. He did point out that the seals are broken on two of the windows - we had already heard that from the original inspection report and from Brianna's brother Sven, so at least that was consistent. The windows DO look a lot better now.

The dishwasher the sellers left us has seen a lot of use, with the rust stains to prove it. We took it out of commission today in order to clean off the rust stains, remove the rust from the dish racks, and fix the holes in the vinyl-coating with some ReRack Dishwasher Rack Repair.

Here's a picture of just some of the rust and pieces I collected while fixing up the dish racks:

The dish racks themselves are still in kinda ugly shape. The ReRack isn't the same color, they are missing quite a few posts and some places were rusted clean through and had to be snipped out. However, Sears wants $150 per dish rack for replacements, and these don't fit our dishes particularly well in the first place. I'd rather just put the money towards a new Dishwasher a few months down the road.

The other big thing was Lily, Annika and Ellie coming up to paint! They did a fantastic job, and got a lot of the Master Suite moved forward another 1 to 2 coats, depending on which wall we're talking about. I'll post pictures tomorrow, when there is actual light to take pictures by.

Groupon Cleaning Lady

Brianna found a Groupon for four hours of house cleaning a few weeks ago, and it was redeemed yesterday. Brianna had the cleaning lady primarily focus on the bathrooms, although she caught other things like the handrail down to the basement (turns out the handrail was white the whole time!)

I honestly thought this tub was supposed to be an off-white/grey before it was cleaned. Brianna also (very persistently) removed the old, cruddy caulking between the tub and tile. We'll put in new caulking today.

Groupon cleaning before/after

Here are some before pictures of the bathtub- gross!

And after the grouping cleaning and removing caulking:

Clean but the gaps makes it look dark...  I have a tool from HomeDepot that was very helpful to get the first layer of caulking off but had to use a box cutter to get the older stuff off.

Next up figuring out how to do a perfect bead. YouTube here I come!

Duct Cleaning

The Groupon we purchased for Vent and Duct Cleaning finally got redeemed on Saturday, after the contractors rescheduled on us twice. The ducts were scraped, vacuumed, and sprayed with some sort of chemical to kill off any spores or mold (hopefully). No pictures, but the registers look a heck of a lot better, and I can certainly believe the entire system is much much cleaner now.

Cars in the Garage

Muah-Hah-Hah-Ha! No scraping the windshield for us tomorrow!

Painting the Garage

Phew, we painted the garage last night, including the ceiling. Just getting the cobwebs and dust cleaned up took over an hour, and we kinda did a slapdash job of the actual painting. If we want to make it look nice, we'll have to do a second coat. But, for the purposes of cleaning up the smoky garage and getting it ready to actually store stuff, it's sufficient.

Man alive, painting 10-foot ceilings is a pain. I'm just so looking forward to the 20-foot ceilings in the living and dining rooms. :-/

Oh, yeah - we did an awesome piece of abstract art on the garage floor, as you can see in the photo above. Like I said - a slapdash job. We are in the process of taking it much more slowly and doing a better job with the rest of the house.

Window Blinds

We tore out the remaining window blinds today and trashed them. Pretty sure those were the last things in the house that were irretrievably dusty and/or smokey (aside from repainting the walls and ceilings).

Take a look at the transition from normally-open to normally-closed on this example:

Last "Half Car-load"

I'm consistently bad at estimating the last load out of an apartment.

Still, after three and a half hours of work, the apartment is empty of everything except a bucket of cleaning supplies and the vacuum cleaner. The bathrooms and living spaces are clean. The windows and some of the kitchen still need to be cleaned.

Chrysalis

I found about a dozen of these stuck to the rafters and wall studs, beneath the insulation. Anybody know what they are?

Update: Someone chimed in to say they were probably Mason bee mud homes. Any body else want to chime in?