Family is Back Together: Day 16 & 17

Something awesome happened yesterday!

These two crazy kids moved to Florida! Unlike her parents they found a cute apartment that is ready to move in tomorrow. No remodeling for them, they are going to be sleeping in their own bed tomorrow night! I raised a smart one for sure. 🙂

I’m also excited that their apartment is right around the corner from our house. We timed it this afternoon and it was less than two minutes from parking space to driveway. Hopefully my son-in-law is as excited about this as I am. 🙂

I’m very excited that our daughter and son-in-law have moved to Florida too. When we decided to move to Florida I wasn’t expecting them to move.. Our son-in-law has lived in the same area his whole life so this is a huge sacrifice for him and his family.

I have not-so-secret plans to get his whole family down here permanently in the next few years so everyone can be together.

In other less exciting news our dumpster is gone!

I’m a little sad since it was nice to have a gigantic garbage can in the front yard. However, I’m sure the neighbors are happy to see it go.

The good thing about the dumpster being removed is that it means most of our demo is finished and we are getting closer to putting the house back together.

I also realized that our 18 year old had never seen our house without the dumpster!

Yesterday our good friend and amazing electrician came down from Jacksonville to help wire the kitchen.

Remember the ridiculous bundle of wires that was hidden by the soffit? Well my dad wasn’t sure we were going to be able to get those tucked away and still be up to code. In fact, he sat me down and told me that he might have to put in another soffit.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I knew Russ from Impulse Electric could figure it out so I told my dad we would wait and see what he said.

Yay!!!! Tucked away and legit!

I have to recommend Russ at Impulse Electric to anyone in Jacksonville, Orange Park, Ponte Vedra Beach or St. Augustine who needs electric work done. He knows his stuff and is a honest guy. You won’t be disappointed!

What I cannot recommend is sanding walls unless you have no other option. The mess was RIDICULOUS. I spent most of Monday cleaning up the mess from the sanding.

Now if you are going to sand, close off the room and get a respirator, but seriously think twice before doing it.

This was after the first sweep. This photo isn’t blurry- that is all the dust swirling around our house!

Cora thought vacuuming was fun so I was more than happy to give her a turn. She chose sunglasses over googles.

Since the walls and everything else were covered with dust I used an oxtail brush to clean them off. Well at least that’s what my dad called it. I searched the internet to give you all a link and all I could find was paint brushes and pasta recipes.

I’ll try to find out more tomorrow.

We removed the light fixture in the kitchen and the ceiling will need to be cut out. The light had melted the paint. Definitely not good.

We have our holes drilled and wired for our can lights and I’m ordering LED bulbs for them since the lights I purchased have halogen bulbs and those things are ridiculously hot.

Today we worked more on the walls and had a friend from Vintage Decor come over to get some advice on our wallpaper walls. He recommended either knock down or orange peel.

Knock down is crazy messy and we would need to do the whole house since the current walls have an orange peel texture.

The nice thing about the knock down texture is that it covers everything. We have a dry wall guy coming tomorrow to let us know what he recommends. I actually like the knock down look, but I don’t want to spend money doing the whole house if I can get away with something else.

Another thing our friend mentioned was to paint our ceilings a color other than white. He suggested “mushroom” which helps a house look less broken up by a white ceiling and colored walls.

I’m going to research this more tonight.

 

I was really glad our friend could stop by because he has spent his entire career helping people decorate and remodel their homes. He loved our house and he said our backyard was amazing. I thought it was a little overgrown but he told us to get the amount of plants we have in our yard put into a yard it would easily be $60-70k!

I about choked when he said that! But it is always good to hear that we are investing in a good house and that all our blood, sweat, and tears will pay off in the end.

I actually love our backyard and am only planning on trimming back some of the plants that are really close to the pool. We have plans to resurface the pool and the deck next year. I try not to get ahead of myself, but I LOVE our yard and it will be exciting to tackle that project next year.

I got all our appliances ordered so I’ll share those with you all tomorrow.

It’s exciting to see everything coming together, but it is also so much work trying to coordinate it all. You definitely save a lot of money being your own contractor, but you need to have time to do it all.

I’ve been saving receipts so hopefully I can post a budget update soon.

Until tomorrow…

This is part of our ongoing renovation project for our new home in Florida.  Our goal is to be done by Thanksgiving or else.  Follow the daily accounts of our real life during this DIY renovation process here.