Extreme Makeover - Molly's Home Edition

Hopefully I won't get in trouble with the people at Extreme Makeover for stealing that title. No one tell on me, okay? So here at our house, we currently have several home projects going all at once. This is usually the case as that's the way I tend to be. Random, haphazard (not sure on that spelling, but it's a rather fun word so I thought I'd try it. I think it means all over the place.) projects. Kevin gets a little irritated because his rationale tells him to COMPLETE one project before going onto the next. Mine tells me that I am bored with this current project and I would like to start another one now. So I do. And that why the house looks like it does right now! A disaster! But I swear to you it's going to look so super nice when it's all done!

Here is a little tasty taste of all the randomness in its superb glory....

The stairs. One day in March I just got sick of their bootiness. (yes, it's a word and you're welcome to use it.) Gross, dirty, matted down carpet that would never come clean. The eyesore of the century. The bain of my existance. Here is what happens when you rip the carpet off the stairs.....



Not too bad really?? Think again. After sanding, using goo gone (WTH is in that stuff?) to take the paint off of the treads, sanding some more, cleaning and cleaning some more.... I finally was able to stain the treads. I had to mix two different colors of stain to get the color right. We are trying to match this flooring we're going to be putting in the whole house (another project - are seeing a pattern here). So I finally got it right. It took three coats of stain - had to do every other stair so we could still get up and down them without walking through it....



Not too bad??? THEN came the painting of the risers. I decided to tape off the stained part so as not to get white paint all over it. Good call, except when I did start to take the tape back off of the stairs it left this weirdness on the part I had worked so hard to stain. But with a little cleaning, it looks better...





Piper (fluffy yellow lab) is super thrilled with my progress. I am almost done with the white paint part and then I will get to move on to put poly on the stained treads. The question is how many coats will that take? Not enough and it will look bad. Too much and we'll all be slipping down the stairs. Stay tuned for how the finished picture of the stairs project!

Wine Rack



After searching for cabinets to fit over the fridge and turning up with empty hands, Kevin decided it would be way cooler to put a custom wine rack up there. I thought he was genious! So using scrap wood from the very disorganized garage, he started to build. This is how it looks so far! It will eventually have crown molding around the top, be painted white to match the cabinets and hold lots of wine!

Tiling the laundry room





This little project turned out to be more than we bargained for. I will post pictures once I'm finished decorating the room, but for now here are a couple of when it was just finished. We had to disconnect the washer so we could take it out to put the tile down. The valves had gone bad, so you couldn't exactly turn them off. No worries. Kevin got these caps to put on the part where the hoses were. Fast forward to evening time. I am upstairs giving Olivia a bath when I hear ALL this yelling downstairs. And water sounds. Lots of water sounds. I get her out and RUN downstairs to find Kevin in the laundry room with water shooting out of the wall right into his face. He couldn't get it turned off and the water was rising so fast. It was like something you'd see on a sitcom. I am slipping all over, trying to get into the closet under the stairs to turn off the main valve. Which you apparently need a wrench to do. After what seemed like forever, we finally got the water shut off. And spent the rest of the night shopvaccing instead of tiling. We can all laugh about it now. And the floor looks great!! Lesson learned - when disconnecting any sort of plumbing, it's best to shut off the water main to avoid flooding the house.

More pictures of other projects to follow!!