Plowing through the Checklist

While we are trying to bust out this last amount of work, my posts are probably going to become less focused and more random in nature. There is your heads up, proceed with caution.

Last night we went to a community meeting regarding the neighborhood directly next to ours. We live very close to Lincoln Boulevard and the neighborhood on the other side of Lincoln is about to receive $1 million dollars in improvements in set aside grant funds if they meet some qualifying criteria by the time May gets here. I'm not entirely sure you heard me right. ONE MILLION DOLLARS. And were talking about 4 streets here. It's a tiny neighborhood. I want them to get every cent of that money. Lincoln Terrace has already become a much more stable neighborhood and while there is still plenty of room for improvement (cough neighbor cough) the individuals and families moving into our neighborhood seem to be making quality improvements to their homes on their own. But across Lincoln, that is not the case. But the City of OKC along with some other neighborhood groups have determined that this little neighborhood could be incredible and they are willing to invest in it with them. I agree with them, wholeheartedly and am hopeful that this tiny little neighborhood/community can pull together to make it happen too. If it happens, starting in July they will start funneling money into this neighborhood, so pack your bags folks, it's time to get moving. They're going to be replacing sidewalks, rehabilitating 10 existing houses, offering reduced loans to homeowners who can afford to take on a rehab loan, planting trees, etc.

After we attended the SNI meeting, we grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed back to the house to get into the work mode. We were moving at a snails pace last night. Maybe we are exhausted. Maybe we are just over it. I can't even pretend to be able to analyze it anymore. But by the time we finally crawled into bed, we had actually accomplished a couple of tasks which surprised both of us.

 

Paul grouted our master bathroom floor. Now it's ready to be trimmed out and cleaned which will make this room about 97% complete until it comes to the whole "making it a home" part.

 

 

I spent the majority of my evening on the french doors. It took me hours to scrap the other 10 windows front and back on just that one door. As I mentioned before, these things are in bad shape. But I love them. I love falling asleep looking at them and I love waking up looking at them. I love knowing that there is a private room on the other side of those doors that belongs to only Paul and I. It feels grown-up. It feels luxurious. It feels old school. So I scraped two windows at a time. I used Goof Off and a window razor and once the front of the two windows was complete, I moved to the other side and did the same thing on the back for the same two windows. Then I used Windex and cleaned those two windows from the back, would go to the other side and would clean the two windows from the front. Needless to say, by the time I was taping the last bottom window with perfectly straight tape edges I had had enough of the door. The rest of the trim in the house I plan to paint carefully and then take the paint on the glass (accidental of course) off with the razor after I'm done. But since I have spent the time to get these in good shape, I wanted to save myself the chore of cleaning these twice. Door number two is getting the treatment tonight and then it's on to bigger and more accomplished tasks. Like actually painting the trim. Also, this is the most prep I have ever done to any item before painting it in my entire life. No wonder perfectionist people hate painting. It's a pretty awful task when you put forth this much effort. But they are going to be gorgeous. Hopefully I like them a thousand times more once they've been painted to make it all worth it.

Paul, once the grout was done, started trimming out Addison's bathroom. The trim in this room was either damaged badly or rotting so the entire room had no existing trim in it until last night. Where we have existing trim, we are trying, where it makes the most sense visibly and financially, to match the existing trim. But in rooms where all the trim is missing entirely, we were willing to use new trim and this is one of those rooms. We've set up the miter saw and the nail gun in the upstairs hall to make it easier to finish out all the trim upstairs. Paul will finish putting up the other door casing (leading into Addison's room) and will install all the base trim in this bathroom tonight so after I'm done cleaning my door, I can prep it for paint (filling nail holes).

Tonight's work order is pretty daunting (I only mentioned a few of the tasks). We'll see how far we get.