On a Roll

We are really on a roll, both in our schedule of making it up to Payson, and in working on the home improvements.  It is a good feeling after having so much time when nothing got accomplished.

Laurie went back up to the house on her own after spending her regular weekend in the Valley.  This gave her a few days to get more painting completed.  She was able to finish the base color paint in the den closet and three of the walls.  The fourth wall will get an accent color.  She also worked on the exterior trim around the front and back doors so Mike can install the security doors over the weekend.

Once Mike arrived for the weekend, the first order of business was to put the den back in order to clear out the family room, then off to Home Depot.  We needed to buy more blinds as we had placed an online order for them earlier in the week and immediately realized we did not take into account the standard 1/2 inch allowance which Home Depot deducts from the window measurement.  The order page does not state this and we forgot until we had already placed the order.  We called Home Depot the next morning to cancel and they said they would send it on to the company who makes the blinds.  We did not hear anything about the order being cancelled but, when we called again a day later, we found the order was already shipped.  So we had to return all the blinds we ordered and get new ones.  We cannot believe how bad their process was for this, but we were happy they allowed us to return the blinds.

So that we could get some of the the blinds up without waiting for a new online order, we bought four blinds in the store for the master bedroom, den and two back windows in the kitchen.  These were not much more expensive than the online items, but we did place another online order for the two blinds for the main room as those were significantly cheaper online.  Mike was able to get all fours blinds put up over the weekend while Laurie finished the accent wall painting in the master bedroom.

Our small window above the kitchen sink - had to take quite a few slats out of that one

One of the dining room windows

One of the newly painted walls in the den and its new blind

While at Home Depot, we came across a new item we had not seen before.  It is an attachment for the window in our back door that has a built-in blind (blind is inside the window).  We have built-in blinds in our master bedroom french doors that are very easy to use.  Laurie liked the idea of being able to close off this small back window and this insert allows you to, not only rotate the blinds, but to fully pull them up - just like regular blinds (cannot do that in our french doors).  It was a very simple install to give us a little more privacy.

Our new door window blind with the slats open

The same window with the shade partially pulled up

Another purchase at the Home Depot was a mirrored sliding closet door for the guest bedroom.  We were going to reuse the original closet doors (also sliding mirrors), but the brass trim color did not go well with our new Dapper Tan paint, so we bought some new doors and donated the old ones to the local Habitat for Humanity Restore.  Laurie was not sure how the mirrored doors would look in such a small room, so we bought one set to try before getting one for our bedroom.  It was a surprisingly easy installation with good instructions and the doors look great.  We think we will be getting another set.

Mirrored sliding closet doors in the guest bedroom - adds some depth to the room

Well speaking of Home Depot purchases, Laurie wanted to get a new toilet seat for our guest bathroom.  We replaced both toilets in this house and three in our other house and all of them came with plastic slow-close seats.  Using the seat for its intended use is not an issue, but if you try to sit on these seats like a chair, they are very flimsy and move all over.  Laurie did not like that since she likes to sit on the seat while working on the tub.  Mike did not have any real preference about the seat, except that if we replaced it, we needed to get another slow-close one.  So we did some research and found really good reviews on a wood slow-close seat at Home Depot.  The new seat has a great installation feature, with a quick release option that allows you to remove the whole seat for cleaning.  This new seat is much more sturdy and Laurie likes it much better than the old one.

The new wood slow-close toilet seat was a good fit

After years of having the security doors sit in our shed, it was finally time to put them up.  Mike started with the back door for a little practice, since mistakes would be less visible there.  He found some guidance online of how to use clamps to hold the door in place while working and that really helped (plus allowed Laurie to do her work).  The biggest issue he had was the one-way screws.  He did not buy the special tool for these screws as it says a standard screwdriver will work.  Word of advice - get the tool!  You need a really big (actually really wide) standard screwdriver, which he did not have. So, he tried other flat head tools (chisels, scrapers, etc.) and was able to get the screws seated, but it was a lot of effort.  Another tip he read after he got the back door up, was to coat the screws with lubricant to help them turn easier. Will be sure to use that idea when he installs the front door.  Overall the door looks good, but somehow his measurements were a little skewed and the door is a little off-center.  Glad he started on the back - a few lessons learned.

You can tell the door is slightly more to the right - better luck next time

Laurie spent much of her weekend painting the accent walls in the guest and master bedrooms.  We abandoned the original accent color pallet and found two new colors to use.  The color for the bedrooms is a cinnamon and the den and main room will be a variation of green.  For now, only the cinnamon walls were painted and then she started on the base color in the main room.  By the end of the weekend, all the edges were done in that room and she will finish the walls during the week.  To help her with her painting, we set up two of our foldable ladders and one of our ramps for our quads as a make-shift scaffold.  She found it too unwieldy to move on her own, but then came up with the idea of using the furniture moving disks (we love these things) on the ladder legs.  This allowed her to slide the scaffold around without taking it all apart. Quite an ingenious idea.

Cinnamon accent wall in guest bedroom - touch-ups still need to be done

The master bedroom, with its new blind though it does not have its base color yet

Main room trim mostly done with our make-shift scaffold

Furniture moving disks used to help slide the ladders

Now that the guest bedroom was complete (walls painted, blinds up, closet door hung), we could set up the room for our guests.  We removed the old piece of siding headboard (did not want to scratch new paint), replaced the rug under the bed, removed the bed from the risers and cut down a king-sized egg-crate bed topper to fit the queen mattress.  We had an old topper we used for the bed we borrowed for the master bedroom after we first bought the place because the bed was very hard.  We have had a few people tell us the guest memory foam mattress is also a little hard, so we thought the topper might help.  In order to make the sheets fit, we had to cut the topper to the mattress size.  We had enough of the cut topper to beef up the padding in one of Zena's beds.  The room is now ready for visitors.

Our completed guest room just awaiting 4th of July visitors

Zena's pumped up bed

Before Mike left on Monday, we took some time to visit the Payson MVD to change the truck to the Payson address.  Since Laurie will be up here with the truck for most of the time, we decided to have the truck reside at this address as Payson does not require an emissions test.

It was quite a busy weekend, but it is wonderful to see the changes being made and how the house is finally coming together.

Just to keep you up-to-date, the mini rose bush Laurie planted for Mother's Day in May is still thriving.  Each time we come up, it has some new blooms and showing new buds.  This one just may live awhile, though it does need to make it through next winter.

Just one of the many blooms we have seen since we planted this bush

Stats: 3 Home Depot trips; 2 Walmart trips
Remodeling expense 6/10/14-6/23/14: $617
Remodeling expense to date: $41,021

Three Weekends in a Row

This was the first week Laurie has spent at the Payson house on her own in a very long time.  She is hoping to spend many more days up there and get some of the painting done.  We are trying a new schedule where she stays up in Payson most of the time, but comes down to the Valley for 4-5 days on Mike's two day weekend.  That, combined with Mike's schedule of coming up for his 3 day weekends every other week, gives us every weekend together either in the Valley or in Payson.

During Laurie's first week, she was able to paint the hallway and the closet and three of the walls in the guest bedroom.  The fourth wall in the guest bedroom will be getting an accent color and that will go on at a later date.  This was her first time painting on her own and she learned quite a few lessons during the week.  Just a few were: newspaper is not good as a floor protector (esp. with a dog), paint when it is cooler in the day, take a little more time and not do too much each day, those nifty trim brushes do not work as described (AT ALL). She also got a good tip from her sister who is an old pro at painting - rather than taping off the ceiling and ending up with ragged edges and peeling paint, use a good brush to do the cut-in (trim) work and just hold your breath.  Her work turned out very nice for all the effort and time she put into it.

The hallway from the master bedroom to the family room

The short hall to the guest bedroom

The south wall of the guest bedroom and the wall behind the bed will be an accent color

The closet and other two walls of the guest bedroom

Usually when we come up on a Friday night, we do not have any real plans except maybe dinner and a movie at home.  We have not made time for our Payson friends lately, so we decided to schedule an evening with Bob and Denise.  We have not seen them for quite some time due to our crazy schedule, plus Denise has been working out of town.  Mike grilled some steaks and we had a great time eating and catching up. They like to take their two dogs everywhere and brought them to the house that night.  The three dogs got along fairly well and Shaka (the younger, smaller one) had a great time running around our family room trying to get Zena to play.  At first Zena just nipped at her, but after Shaka kept at her, she actually got into it a little.  Luckily Shaka is very quick and Zena was not able to catch her. It is the first dog we have seen Zena interact in a playful way and she was very pooped the next day. We think we may borrow Shaka now and then to wear Zena out.

The plan for the weekend was to get the guest bath and laundry room painted.  As with the kitchen, these rooms required heavy items to be moved and plumbing connections to be undone.  But come Saturday morning, we did not get started as planned.  Instead we had a lazy morning and then hung our first set of window blinds.  We had been to Home Depot the previous weekend to scope out blinds for the house.  We settled on the 2 inch white plantation blinds, almost identical to what we have in our house in the Valley.  The blinds are cheaper to buy though Home Depot online, but we decided to buy two sets at the store as a test. These would be for the east kitchen window, as it lets in a lot of heat in the morning, and for the guest bedroom, since it faces the street (do not want people looking in while we are gone).

We did an inside the window sill installation (all the blinds will be this way) and the install was fairly easy. There are two end brackets that get screwed into the sill at the top and, depending on the length of the blind, there are extra brackets that connect to the top of the sill for support.  The first time through it took some extra time measuring and re-measuring for the brackets.  Home Depot cuts the blinds to the width needed for the window based on our measurements, but they are always a standard length - 64 or 72 inches.  All of our windows are 48 inches or less, so we had to remove a lot of extra slats from each blind.  When we order the rest online, they offer 48 inch lengths so there will be a lot less waste.  Shortening the blinds is not too difficult, just time consuming.  First you must cut the drawstring lines which allows you to remove the excess slats.  Then move the base slat (the larger bottom one) to the position that sits on the window sill. Next cut off the excess string ladders and run the drawstrings through the re-positioned base.  The next part was the toughest and that was re-securing the drawstrings so the blind was level when drawn all the way to the top.  We had to re-do the knots a few times on the first blind to get it right.  On the 2nd blind, Mike realized we had to pull the drawstrings taught and then mark the spot for the knot.  This worked well and we were able to finish the job much quicker.

The first set of blinds are hung and extra slats removed

The finished product on the east wall of the kitchen

The south guest bedroom wall blinds - it went up in half the time of the kitchen blind

Laurie had re-arranged the kitchen during the week, putting all the appliances in place and filling the cabinets. The new setup works much better than before, but we still needed a better place for our microwave. Previously it was on top of our white shelf unit which was really too narrow for the microwave, but, in the new setup, it was on the counter next to the sink and was taking up a lot of counter real estate.  We thought a nice small table or cart on the west wall (currently where Zena's food dish sits) would be perfect.  So off we went to the thrift stores in search of such an item.  We found something at the senior center thrift store and, to make it even better, it was discount day.  The unit is a computer desk on casters with two sliding lower shelves and keyboard rest.  We removed the bottom sliding shelf to make room for Zena's food and water and then we used the shelf above that for microwave accessories. Laurie likes that setup because the keyboard rest covers that shelf and hides the clutter.  Mike took the shelf at the top of the unit off (it was heavily scratched) and cut it down for a shelf for our printer in the den.  He then cut down the sliding shelf we removed to be a replacement for the top shelf as it is in much better shape.  Laurie now has all sorts of places to put kitchen items.

New (at least to us) microwave cart and Zena's food/water station

Saturday night we joined Bob and Denise, and some friends of theirs, at a public concert in the park.  The group was called MC6 A Cappella and they did mostly Do Wop, with a couple of current songs.  They did a wonderful set of songs for the armed forces just before their break.  It was fun meeting new people and the singing group was great to hear.  We ended up leaving at their break as the temperature dropped more than normal and we did not have a jacket for Laurie to brave the coolness.

Just part of the crowd at the concert in the park

The group MC6 A Cappella

We got home early enough to start disassembling the bathroom so we could paint on Sunday.  The breakdown went easy except for the toilet.  The old wax ring was like nothing Mike had seen before.  The wax seemed more like tree sap and required a lot of scraping and a lot of "Goo Off" to break down what was on the toilet and floor. Mike remembered later that, when he bought the ring, it said it would never leak or need to be replaced.  Now he knows why and he made sure we bought a normal wax ring for the re-install as the other was a mess to clean up.  The next morning we were ready to paint and, apart from being in tight quarters, the painting went well and only took a few hours.  These rooms were painted with the same semi-gloss paint and color used in the kitchen, which is the same color that will be used as the main color in all the rooms in the house.  Except for the accent walls, only the master bath has a different wall color.

Laurie also took some time this weekend to touch-up the paint on the trim around the front door and then paint the trim around the back door.  Originally all the trim was white, but we decided to paint it all brown. The front door trim had been changed, but not the back door.  She will need to do some touch-up on the back door trim before Mike comes back up so he can install the security screens on those doors.

We had not ridden the quads in a few weeks, so we took them on a trip Monday morning for breakfast at the 260 Cafe and then to get a few items at Home Depot that were needed to re-assemble the bathroom and laundry room.  Mike used his new GoPro camera and head mount he got for his birthday/Father's Day to record part of the trip.  It was nothing exciting, but kind of fun to watch later on (esp. the part where Laurie got stuck because she forgot to release her brake).

Mike's GoPro camera on a helmet strap, but it would not fit so he put it on his head

We finished our time at the house reconstructing the bathroom, doing some work on the drip systems (found our back timer is leaking) and then loading up the washer/dryer on our trailer to take home.  We decided to replace these units that were given to us by Mike's sister and found she wanted them back for her son's family.  Laurie went back to the Valley with Mike this time since she had not driven herself to Payson a couple of weeks ago as she would normally do.  She will be back up in a week to work on more of the painting.

The completed guest bathroom

The finished laundry room - without a washer/dryer, we are putting the paint tools in here

Stats: 4 Home Depot trips; 3 Walmart trips
Remodeling expense 6/02/14-6/09/14: $175
Remodeling expense to date: $40,404

First Full Week Since July 2013

Due to many different reasons, the two of us have not spent a full week at the Payson house since our July 4th vacation in 2013.  We finally took some time to do it again over the Memorial Day weekend.  We had plans to get back on our upgrade path and start getting the house back in shape.  Little did we know, we would not get quite as far on track as we planned.

Usually we would come up on a Friday night, but due to some irrigation line issues we have been having at our house in the valley, we had to wait until Saturday morning.  After talking to someone in town later that day, we are glad we did as they said the cars were lined up for miles trying to get into Payson Friday night.  Dodged that bullet, but got hit by another.  Come Sunday morning, Laurie had the flu.  She did not feel too good Saturday night, but thought it might have been something she had to eat.  But then the chills and aches kicked in and our plans went on hold.  It was not until Wednesday that she felt good enough to start doing some work.

We began with our sheds in the back yard.  Two of them came with the house, a small wood one and a metal one.  We had a larger wood shed built for Mike to use as a workshop and it has extra space to store items in the attic.  We have always wanted to get rid of the metal shed (missing a door and very old and ugly), but it was storing some of the old kitchen cabinets in hopes we could use them in the workshop.  So this was the time to get the metal shed ready for removal.  In the meantime, we found that our neighbor would like to take the metal shed off our hands, which saves us a trip to the dump.

We spent two days re-arranging the sheds and installing the old cabinets in the wood sheds.  This allowed us to maximize storage in both units.  Now the small shed has yard tools, stored wood and some other items to be used for renovations on the house.  The large shed is for tools, both for work around the house and woodworking crafts.  After doing all the rework, Mike was able to easily get to his generator and table saw to cut a board for some of the kitchen rework.

The ugly shed completely empty and ready for the neighbor or dump

The small wood shed is packed, but much more organized than before

Old kitchen cabinets reused and workshop items re-organized for better accessibility

Largest of the kitchen cabinets in the corner, still need to organize items in the cabinets another day

Our next task was to get the interior walls painted, starting with the kitchen.  In order to pass our city inspection during our initial remodeling, the walls only needed to have primer over the new texturing, which we accomplished (January 2012).  We also painted the ceilings with a flat white paint, since that was an easy decision to make; however, the rest of the painting was held up until a proper color pallete was decided upon and that was accomplished in July of 2012 (see Babysitting in Payson).  Since that decision, God has taken us on many side journeys that have delayed doing further work on our house - all for good reasons.  But as stated before, we are back to get the job done.

Since the kitchen has so much stuff in it, it required both of us to get all the items disconnected and moved.  We also recently found that our vinyl flooring in the kitchen had developed a long bubble and, by moving everything out, we were able to straighten out the floor again.  The vinyl is free-floating, but we did not cut around the cabinets - as they are only temporary - and that is probably what caused the bubble.  Once the kitchen was cleared, the paint work could begin.  Awhile back we bought a Wagner power roller unit on clearance and we decided to give it a go.  The setup was easy, but once the paint started flowing, it was difficult to control and we had paint everywhere.  That idea was scrapped and, while Mike cleaned up the mess and the unit, Laurie started painting the old fashioned way.  Mike then took over the corners and trim while Laurie did the rolling.  A few hours later and we had our first completely painted room.  The next morning we put the room back together with all the switch plates and cabinetry, making some changes to the arrangement which we think will make the kitchen more functional.

Kitchen cleared for painting

Painting completed, adds a nice touch to the room

We used moving coasters for the heavy stuff - slides well on the vinyl floor and carpet

The kitchen mostly reassembled, Laurie would do the rest during the week

Come Sunday it was time for Mike to say goodbye to his full week in Payson, and make the long trip back to the valley, as Laurie was staying behind to do more painting and soak up the cool nighttime temps.

Stats: 3 Home Depot trips; 4 Walmart trips
Remodeling expense 5/13/14-6/01/14: $204
Remodeling expense to date: $40,229