“The Summer of George”

Though we’ve had enough time to write lately, we just haven’t had enough time to do any projects TO write about. (I did manage to finish the basement stairway a few weeks ago, but that mostly just looks like it did when it was halfway done. I’ll post pictures of that soon this week.)

But that’s all going to change, starting now. Because it’s the Week of Steve.

Rachel and Lily are in Atlanta for the week at her parents’ house in Atlanta, and I am on my own here in the house and just  sitting around drinking beer and watching baseball and playing video games….and…um…no, not really. While I might be watching some baseball in person at least once Monday-Wednesday when the Braves are in town, I’m spending every moment I possibly can trying to wrap up what’s more or less Phase One of renovations on this house. Because the half-finished projects are Driving. Me. Crazy.

We will of course always be renovating to some degree, like doing the bathroom or finishing the basement one day. But on the list of immediate projects in my head from about a year or so ago, I’m hoping to wrap up the last few things and work nonstop on the weekend and late into the nights while I’m here alone — just like the heady old days of November 2010!

So here’s what I’m hoping to finish before this Friday.

  • Trim out the sleeping porch windows upstairs. Paint.
  • Trim out the windows on the sleeping porch downstairs. Paint.
  • Install shoe moulding in the downstairs sleeping porch.

Once these three things are done, the downstairs porch will be finished, save for trim around the door, which I need a table saw to finish. But that can get knocked out later.

  • Finish stripping all of the wallpaper in my closet, patch the plaster, skim and paint and build all new shelving from scratch.
  • Swap out the shite Lowe’s fans in nursery and second bedroom for two of the fantastic Hunter fans I found for the living room and upstairs porch.
  • Finish sanding and prime/paint the spindles on the stairway. (We stained the mahogany railing, but left the cheap pine spindles bare to paint.)
  • Rip off the ogee baseboard caps that are slathered with paint and the remnants of an embedded telephone wire, replace with new ones.
  • Paint the yellow dormers and top fascia on the front of the house white to match the porch.
These are the last really glaring things hanging over my head. I know we’ll repaint things and strip more trim at some point and find some other things to do, but this is more or less the last of the “must-do” jobs we had in our head when we looked around after we moved in in December 2010 and imagined what it would look like when we got “done”: the kinds of things that make a room feel unfinished. But after this, every room save the bathroom will have been renovated and reached a point of completion.

Readysetgo.

Some pics of some of these to-do’s, as they are now. Rachel is banned from reading the blog this week so she can be surprised when she gets back, so hopefully I’ll have some photos and stories throughout the week this week.

Pre-closing: closet
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