This Weekend was a Doozy

(loooong sigh)

I now have Friday's off at work and this weekend was the first 3 day-er that I spent pretty much exclusively at the house. During the week, the last of contracted work was started and finished and on Friday, I met the crew and got to see everything they did. Their tasks were mostly boring things like some electrical work and installing CO2 sensors, etc., but there were a few exciting things. They got our new front door installed... it's beautiful and dying to be painted red. They also patched a few areas of our deck that were rotting and put in new railing in a section that was missing. And lastly, they primed a few spots on the exterior of the house where the paint was chipping and damaged... and they were also nice enough to prime the new section of exterior wall that Mikey put in last weekend!

Also during the week, Mikey put our new flooring in the two bedrooms and it looks amazing! Having the floors down really gives us a better idea of what the finished rooms will looks like, now all they really need is baseboard and paint and they are finished! 

 
So shout out to Mikey (again) and to Bolger Construction for their work, everything looked super clean and they finished their work super fast!  And while they were finishing up is when I started to really work on my kitchen cabinets... having spent so long getting the cabinets clean, they were finally ready to get there first coat of paint. So that's what I did all of Friday, got one coat paint on all of the upper cabinets and their doors. (I am going to expand on my cabinet adventures in another post... they have just been too "fun" to not get their own spotlight!)

Friday night we had drinks and dinner with our best friends and Saturday morning we were back at it... very early in the morning, I might add. Even after last weekend, Saturday was definitely our biggest work day yet... we had a huge crew of seven friends/family that came by to work!

Outside, James and Justin started getting to work putting up our new fencing. It wasn't long before Carl stopped by (to my surprise) to help out and luckily he was able to give the guys some muscle and a few pointers as he used to work for a fencing company. The boys pretty much fenced all day until they were appointed the task of finishing up jackhammering in the bathroom (more on that later)

Carl and Justin

 

James, Carl and Justin working on the fence

New posts for gates

 

Indoors, Annah, Garret and I slaved away on the cabinets, doing more layers of paint, as well as our first layer of wax... later on they helped finish up the fencing job.

The biggest project of the day, though, went to my dad and our family friend and my coworker, Derk... Project Bathroom! I made it very clear when searching for houses that I wanted at least the potential for a large tub, and since this house didn't have one, I knew that something was going to have to change in our one and only bathroom!  Since we couldn't go longer with the bathtub, we had to got wider and going wider would require relocating the tub drain rough-in as well as the toilet rough-in (seeing as the toilet is so close to the tub). So my dad and Derk not only demo-ed the entire bathroom, including the  old fixtures and most of the drywall, but they spent hours jackhammering out a TON of concrete to be able to shift the plumbing over.

They gelatinized the water in the toilet! Tricks of the trade!

Once they finally reached the end of the concrete, they had gone through over 10 inches of slab! A 10 inch concrete slab is almost unheard of... it was A LOT of jackhammering! So here it is, our totally empty bathroom, awaiting the next step!

BEFORE #1

BEFORE #2

AFTER #1

AFTER #1 (other side)

AFTER #2

Unfortunately, Saturday wasn't a burn day, so we couldn't finish our work day off ceremoniously like we usually like to... but we still had our traditional work day bbq dinner of hotdogs, sausages and potato salad. I also forgot to mention that its been unseasonably warm and dry lately... pretty terrible for the drought, but pretty much the best weather that DIY-ers could ask for!  Next weekend is supposed to be in the 70's (holy cow), so we have no excuses to not bust out just as much work as we did this week.

Although I am insanely sore and tired from all of this work, it has been so rewarding and we are excited to do it again next weekend!

So finally my home-makeover-heroes for the week: My dad (Lloyd), Derk, my sister (Annah), and her boyfriend (Garrett), Justin, Mikey, Carl and my momma, Colleen... thanks everyone!