The floor guy is coming Monday to start refinished the floors upstairs! Which means, we have to move everything we can into the one room that is not being refinished upstairs, and then move everything else down onto the first floor or the basement. If you remember, the front smaller bedroom (the room that we'll be moving everything into) had these "built-in" shelves on 2 of the walls. Over the weekend we removed the shelves - really just those laminated shelves, they were kind of falling apart and just took up a lot of space. We put them in our garage for now, we might try to set them up in there, or give them away.

Last night we started the moving process by putting together our ikea cube shelf and filling it up with boxes. We also moved a few pieces of furniture. Our plan is to focus on the 2 other bedrooms (that are basically just being used for storage) first, and then move our bedroom stuff last. I took some pictures last night, but blogger wasn't liking me this morning so I was unable to upload them. I'll try to post some next time :-) I'm very excited about finishing the floors so we can start to focus on the upstairs, it will be so nice to actually unpack these boxes instead of just moving them around every few months.

You might be wondering, like I am, how this will work exactly, with us living in the house. The floor guy is estimating that it will take 4 days to do the floors, start to finish. We have to basically live downstairs for those 4 days, plus probably a day or two afterwards. The dogs can't go upstairs for 2 weeks after the last coat of poly because the floor needs extra time to cure before they walk on it with their nails. We can't put down area rugs for I believe 30 days (although we don't really have any rugs to put upstairs, so that's not a problem). Our only shower is upstairs. Our downstairs bathroom has no door because I am still working on the paint removal. Our cats like to get into things, esp. things that they are not supposed to...

For now, our plan is to bring everything we need downstairs and sleep on the couches. Good thing we haven't sold that extra couch yet! The dogs will have to either stay in their cage or be gated somewhere so they can't get upstairs. The cats... I'm not sure about. Our first thought was to put them in the basement, esp. while the guy is there working, but he also needs to run power for his sander from our electrical box, which is in the basement... We told him that we'd like to shower before work, so he's going to try to come to our house first each day, that way if he gets the poly down by mid-afternoon each day, we will be able to walk on it enough to get into the bathroom to shower the next morning. Basically, I think it's going to be crazy and we're just going to have to see how it goes. Mike is going to work from home on Monday, so he should be able to work with the guy and figure out some of these details, esp. what to do with all the pets.

I can see why it's recommended to not try to live in your house while refinished the floors :-P

*all images from flickr

Well, I said we were taking the entire month of January off from working on the house, but tonight I gave in. I think I've forgotten what to do with my free time. Tonight I came home from work, went for a walk with Mike and the dogs, made dinner, ate dinner, watched some tv, and read a book... and it wasn't even 8:00 yet. Over 2.5 hours until I normally go to bed! So I took the downstairs bathroom door off the hinges and set it up in the basement. I probably haven't mentioned the bathroom door yet, but the interior side of the door is yellow. School bus yellow. You know, to match the rest of the bathroom? It's actually quite horrible, when you're in the bathroom with the door shut it's you are completely surrounded by the yellow.

Since I plan on painting the bathroom a color other than yellow, I wanted to strip the paint off the door. The rest of the doors in the house are natural wood, I would like this one to match. Luckily it's only yellow on one side, and it's the only interior door that has been painted. Of course the other doors are stained different colors, but that's another post for another day. Anyway, I only worked on the door for 45 mins (including almost a 1/2 hour of waiting for the stripper to set), but I have at least started the next project!The first pass removed most of the yellow paint, and the second pass removed most of the white primer. I need to go to Lowes to get some better tools, but I'm hoping if I just work on it for an hour here and there, it won't be too bad.

And don't worry, one of us is sticking with the no work in January plan. Mike is very much enjoying playing video games. He did help me carry the door into the basement though :-)

You may have noticed some new things in some of the pictures in the previous anniversary post. I've been a bad blogger lately :-) Mike got me a new camera card adaptor today though, so I decided to updated you on some new things we've gotten recently for the house. I'm really excited that we're finally at the point where we can start decorating and making this house more us. It's finally beginning to feel like our home.For Christmas, Santa brought us new white everyday dishes! I'd been wanting new dishes for awhile, we've just had a random assortment of dishes, so I was excited to unwrap these on Christmas morning. They look great on our new shelves! I got the little blue glasses on clearance at Anthropologie. I love that store way too much.

We finally planted some herbs in our white Ikea pots. I got this little greenhouse at Ikea too, I thought it would be great for our window to plant fresh herbs in, plus the cats can't eat the plants if we put them inside the greenhouse :-) We ended up just planting seeds cause we couldn't find any herb plants this time of the year. Beside the herbs, we also started some flowers for our garden. We may have started them too early, but we were excited about it. I've never started flowers like this before, so we'll see how it works out. Last weekend we started working on our picture wall in the living room. I've had this planned for awhile but was waiting on the keep calm carry on poster (I ordered in online, but I really wanted a gray one so I had to wait a little while until a gray one was available). I know that this poster seems to be very popular in the blog world, but I really like it so I got it anyway. Some of the frames still need to be matted, and I need to order some wedding photos for a couple of the frames, but they layout is at least started.I was going to wait until I was finished, but I like how it's turning out so far so I decided to write about it anyway. I can also add more pictures and frames to it over time. The sideways flower picture at the bottom and the statue picture at the top will be replaced with wedding photos. Today we got this new lamp for our living room from Target. Have I mentioned how much I am loving their Home Design event right now? I want almost everything. It's not showing up very well in the photo, but the lamp has a great greenish gray glass base and the lamp shade is very pretty.

After some back and forth, we decided on the woven chairs. I really liked the gray chairs, but the woven chairs were much more comfortable, and I liked how they have a low back so you can still see most of the window. Plus, I think that in the future, we'll be able to adapt the woven chairs for different rooms in future homes. I also really like how they bring a new texture and natural element into the living room. They didn't come with back pillows, so we also bought the light linen pillows and the small gray pillows at Target too.

Six months ago today, we closed on our house. We went to the closing in the morning, signed papers for what seemed like hours, went to lunch to celebrate, and then later that afternoon, drove over to our new house to pick up our keys. When we arrived at the house, Mom was already waiting for us on the porch (after driving for 7 hours!) and we started working right away. In honor of our 6th month anniversary of home ownership, I thought it would be fun to do some comparisons of where we were on closing day, and where we are now. So here they are, the before and now photos:

Downstairs bathroom - nothing. I picked out the new paint color, does that count?? I'm hoping to work on this room next.

Small front bedroom - nothing. This was our storage room for the first few months, but we've basically cleared it out. This is where we put guests when they come to visit (sorry guests!!). It will become our storage room again when we start clearing out the other rooms upstairs to have the floor refinished. Eventually this will be the office.

Small back bedroom - removed carpet and then also nothing. Started removing carpet pad that is stuck to the floor, but stopped. The floor refinisher will remove the rest when he sands. This is now our storage room, we keep the door shut at all times cause it's scary. Sadly, we've been making progress on unpacking boxes but it still looks like we have a lot left.

Upstairs bathroom - removed wallpaper, put giant hole in wall to find window, repaired window, drywall and trim patching around window, removed glass shower doors, removed closet door, removed medicine cabinet, painted closet, vanity, trim, and walls, and installed new light fixture.

We also cleaned the deck and put deck sealer on the entire deck and second floor balcony. It's dark outside so I didn't take any exterior comparison shots :-)

So that's where we are now. It's very easy to get frustrated at times with our progress. I'm getting very tired of having so much of our stuff in boxes still. It's difficult to always be living in a construction zone. All of our money seems to go towards the house. But, after seeing all of these pictures, we really have come a long way in six months. I'm really proud of us and it's a great feeling to have made so many improvements to a house that has so much potential. I can't wait to see where we are in another six months! I think that having the floors done upstairs will be a good start on the work upstairs. And in the spring, we have plans for the yard and some other projects outside. So happy anniversary house, it's been a great first six months!