House projects

Earlier this year we decided to put in a retaining wall in our backyard that would shore up a slight hill in our yard and become the spot for our eventual garden. Seann has worked hard to get it about 2/3 of the way done before the heat and some back pain got in the way. It looks great so far and we are really excited to get it finished (which will hopefully be within a couple weeks now the hottest weather has apparently passed).

Meanwhile, a friend of Seann's moved to town from Santa Rosa. We invited her over for dinner one night and after a good meal and some Wii she told us it was time to get rid of our pink walls. She was quite adamant that no one should have to live with mauve walls for 3 years. She left us with homework--pick out a color scheme. She even sent us the consumer report on paint. We couldn't avoid her; we had to paint. This has actually been a plan of ours since we moved in but we never really motivated on it. Our walls are really tall and some of them are tricky to get to. The idea of all that work was always outvoted by other projects (like painting our deck). But finally we decided to just go ahead and paint.

We looked at lots of different colors but eventually went with my first choice: yellow. It's a pretty light yellow and I thought it would look good with our white trim. Almost before we knew it we were at Lowe's loading up on paint and supplies. And about two weeks later it was primed and painted--with lots of help from some good friends (with a big ladder!). Here are some shots of the new color.

We just added these shelves. Still trying to figure out the best things to put up there.

This is opposite our large windows. We just bought some IKEA bookcases to fill this space. They are going to look great!

Ignore the mess. Nothing is in the right spot right now!

Now that the walls are done we have turned our attention to the next project: flooring. Right now we have carpet upstairs in the main room and all the bedrooms. The kitchen is wood. With two dogs carpet just doesn't make sense. It's a mess and requires a lot of extra cleaning. Read: it's a pain in the butt. We've been talking about getting bamboo floors for a while but again, haven't motivated. Again, Seann's friend Christy helped with that.

First off we had to see what kind of subfloor we had and also figure out what was going on with a squishy spot by the door in the family room. Seann pulled back some carpet and it revealed two things. One, we have particleboard on top of our plywood subfloor. Since we can't really nail into this we are planning on removing it and replacing it with more plywood of the same height. The other thing we discovered was that we didn't really have a squishy spot by our door. We had a live outlet. Our best guess is that at one point the door was actually a wall with a window. The wall likely had a plug underneath the window. When they put in the door they realized they had to do something with the outlet. So they just moved it to the floor and covered it with carpet. Not the right thing to do. So now we'll have to remove the outlet and replace it with a junction box and put it in the floor joist. Not a big deal but kind of annoying.

We then headed off to Lumber Liquidators to check out the different bamboo choices. We'd been looking at the basic stuff Costco has but we wanted to get the bamboo somewhere where we could also get the trim and stair pieces. Of course, once there we changed our mind about basic bamboo. Instead we chose this. It's a little more dramatic but we really like it. So we have decided to replace all of the carpet--including the bedrooms. We are setting ourselves up for quite a project but I think it will be a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to the end product! I'll try and keep you posted with pictures once we get started. We want to finish the insulation project we started in early spring first.