Week 1 ....excited and ready!

We finally closed on the house Friday the 22nd...about 2 weeks after final negotiations were done. Probably the fastest closing ever! 

We still have our rental apartment lease till the end of May, perfect...we have some time to make all those changes to the house before we move in. Except that our list is a little long and we have time restrictions considering we still both have full time jobs. So we decided to break it up and get some things done before we moved in and tackle the rest later.

So we decided to finish painting the first level of the house and get the master bathroom renovated before moving in....

 

Picking colors was hard even though we had a good idea of what we liked - who knew there were that many different greens and grays and browns! Then we did a lot of online research before deciding on the brand of paint and the finish etc before choosing to go with the 'Ben' line by Benjamin Moore.

 

We also made a list of all possible supplies one would need for all the painting we were about to undertake - they say preparation is key :) So we have everything we need!

I got a glass of water to drink from the dispenser in the fridge door - OK no big deal. We hear this water flowing noise shortly after - think nothing of it. 10 minutes later Grant goes to the basement to check out the water noise that had still not stopped. And OMG water was gushing out of some pipe in the utility room onto the ceiling, deflecting on the wall and then the floor. So the previous owners had the water filter for the refrigerator line just tucked in the string binding the insulation in the unfinished wall. It fell when i got a drink of water, the tubing was short hence tearing it off at the joint = water all over the place.

After running around the house we finally located the water main and shut it off!

Then we had to go buy a shop vac and Grant vacuumed up about 10 gallons of water.

 

Now that the whole emergency situation has been taken care of. We bought some colors to try out. Two for the wall and two for the ceiling. Primed a square on a couple of walls including the dark red wall they had and tried them out. The first two colors were options for the ceiling, we liked the first one (White Dove) the second one has a lot more pink in it (we were not expecting that). The next two were options for the walls - didn't like either! :/ They looked very different on paper. We are looking for a dramatic change from what the walls are painted in now....and these looked really similar.
 

 Here are the two ceiling paints on the textured ceiling....can tell which one had more of a pink tint in it. We don't want to take out a red wall just to add a pink ceiling.

 Next we decided to tackle the wall paper strip they had in the kitchen to match the red wall i guess. Anyways it had to go.

 We scored it (or made holes) so that the wall paper remover would get to the glue easier (bad idea - will tell you why soon).

  Then sprayed on this gel wall paper remover we bought at the store. And let it sit on it for the recommended 20 minutes.

 While that was happening we decided to try trimming this big tree by the garage door with our new hedge trimmer.

 

  It was awesome....although not the right tool for this job apparently. Need something else to cut those flimsy branches.

 

 Came back to find out that the gel does not really work, just made an ugly mess. And the scraper took off unnecessary pieces of drywall with the wall paper.

Then I had to leave for a few days of work related travel and left Grant to figure out this whole wall paper mess.