We went to the house during the day to decide which paint we’ll want to go on the walls. Patrick thought it may be interesting to use one color in the Butler’s Pantry and another in the kitchen. We decided to have the dark for the Butler’s Pantry and the light one for the rest of the kitchen.

The workers were there installing the kitchen cabinets!

Where the sink will be.

Unfortunately one cabinet door has a crack. I called Home Depot and they got American Woodmark to send out a replacement.

We came back in the evening to strip paint off the kitchen built-in since the workers will be back tomorrow to finish the cabinets and part of the built-in so the granite counter top people can come to template on Wednesday.

They had gotten some of the wall cabinets up.

And in other good news: I called to schedule movers for the 30th. It’s all coming together!! It’s a little surreal. :)

Starting to prime the kitchen!

Patrick got the hard job…the ceilings!

My little artistic silhouette.

Look how nice it’s starting to look!

There appears to be one light missing. We can’t imagine we would have missed this prior to the drywall going up, so Patrick thinks that they just forgot to cut the whole for this particular one. Our contractor said she’ll get someone to go up in the attic to make sure a light is there like we think there should be.

I think you can always tell when we get excited because we post about a million pictures. Here’s another one of those instances. It was a beautiful warm winter Saturday (forecast said 70F?) in the middle of January.

“Provincial” stained living room and dining room.

Another living room view.

The new oak kitchen floor stained – definitely makes the color look different than the oak living and dining room. Makes us wonder if it is the aged oak that makes it look different, or if it isn’t actually oak afterall?

Stained back bedroom.

Stained middle bedroom (and office).

Stained dining room (and living room).

Happy homeowner examining the nicely re-done floor.

Our second storage facility while they’re re-doing the floors – the laundry room.

Working on scraping the paint off the other side of the bathroom door. Since it was such a gorgeous day we were able to do it outside (not that we had much of a choice). Which was nice anyway…no dust in the house!

Patrick was working with our newly purchased heat gun. He was very happy with how it worked out.

Close-up of the heat gun working it’s magic.

And our last project for this warm January Saturday: re-placing the mailbox. “Re-placing” as in we got a complaint letter from the Post Office informing us that they would not deliver any mail unless we placed the mailbox by the street. We thought we were smart when we originally placed the mailbox next to the porch like ALL the other neighbors did. I guess they were grandfathered in and we had to change it. Oh well, at least this time we actually got it in straight! Hahaha.

The floor sanding was started yesterday. When we visited today they were finishing off sanding and removing dirt. They were also in the procress of trying to move some items into the back laundry area (since it wouldn’t get sanded and refinished). Patrick and I were worried our large range would not fit through the relatively narrow doors into the kitchen. They struggled with it for a short while but got it through (to our joy). Interestingly something we never considered was the corner kitchen cabinet. It just would not fit through the door! Finally Patrick’s suggestion to take it through the back door proved to be the solution – after moving all the cabinets that had been blocking the door, and taking the door off the hinges! It was all quite a challenge, but we’re glad they got it in. The door from the laundry to the kitchen is wider and should be no problem – we’re just glad we got it into the area finally!

Beautifully sanded down back bedroom. Look how nice it looks!

Also the nice looking middle bedroom. The sanding makes the rooms feel so much different for some reason.

The dining room – the floors almost look new.

Even the hidden away hallway get’s a make-over.

Since the bathroom was one of the few places without wooden floors it is serving as a storage facility.

Since it is dark and we can’t walk on the floors anyway we decided to wait until tomorrow morning and daylight to visit the house again. We wanted to see the stained floors, but there didn’t seem much point tonight. I’ll post pics tomorrow of what they’ll look like – I hope they’ll look good! :)

The look says it all: not happy. Initially we liked a sconce from Rejuvenation, but decided for this one from Restoration Hardware instead, not only because we liked it, but also because of the price tag difference. Unfortunately the sconce has given us some major headaches. There’s more to the story, but let’s just put it at: this is the third sconce and it still has a fault.

After floor sanding has started at the house we were comparing wood stains in the middle bedroom. The bedrooms and hallway are made of pine (cheaper back then), and the entertaining rooms (dining room, living room and front bedroom, formerly a study/reading room?) have oak floors (more expensive back then). I’m not sure what our kitchen was, but we have replaced it with oak (today’s cheaper material).

Comparing stains on the dining room oak floor. This has been one of the hardest decisions! It’s one thing to paint a wall and decide you don’t like it and just paint over it. It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re paying big bucks to sand your entire house and have it restained. It’s one big decision that you better not regret later.

After difficult deliberations we have decided to go for a medium brown stain called “Provincial.” We hope it will be a nice contrast against light colored walls.

In addition the walls have been sanded down one last time, which means we’ll start priming this weekend! At least once the stain has dried from doing the floors.