Some updates…

I discovered that more people read this blog than I’d originally expected, as we have gotten several comments over the past few months about the lack of updates on here.  So finally, here’s an update post, possibly followed by some more specific renovating posts.

When we last posted about the house back in June, we had just finished creating a new banister and having our carpet installed upstairs.

In July, I finished painting the main rooms downstairs and Richard worked on laying about 1000 sq ft of laminate flooring.  The laminate was relatively easy to work with, but it’s not a very fun job.  The flooring really helped make the house feel more like someplace we’d like to live, rather than a poorly appointed and badly decorated motel.

The living room before…during…and after

We also painted and tiled the floor in our laundry room.  The tiling wasn’t bad at all – we were able to get through the whole process in bits and pieces over 3 days, and the end result looks way better than the crumbling (possibly asbestos) tile that was in there before.

Our furniture finally arrived in mid-July, due to some…issues…with our moving company.  This was another experience that confirmed for me that you get what you pay for.  But that’s another post.  In any case, having a real bed after sleeping on an air mattress for 6 weeks was such a relief.  And getting our TV/Wii/Xbox back also really helped – Lost isn’t quite the same on a laptop.   At this point, we sort of lost interest in working on the house.  Richard had started teaching his summer course and was working on getting his lab together, and I was trying to make some progress with my dissertation, so we took a bit of a break until August.

In August, we started work on the guest bedroom.  Richard wants to create an entire post on this, so I’ll just say that this room required more work than possibly any other room in the house so far.

In late August, we both started working at ODU.  Richard is enjoying the assistant professor gig, and I was lucky enough to get hired for two classes which have been keeping me busy.  We also bought Richard a new car, which he loves a litte too much.  Buying a car was actually a more unpleasant experience than buying the house, so hopefully we won’t need to do that again for a while.

We finally finished the guest room in late September, so we moved onto the kitchen.  We’re still working on that right now but it should be finished by early December.  We’ll post more on that once it’s done.  We’re also going to start working on the downstairs bathroom soon, which is currently in terrible shape.  Hopefully we’ll be able to take advantage of the semester break to get that finished before Christmas since both sides of the family will be visiting for the holidays.

Anyways, that’s what has been going on in Virginia Beach over the past few months.  We’ll try and post more about some of our finished projects soon.