Thursday, July 8, 2010

Vacation... With a Twist

My shop is on vacation mode until further notice. We are hoping to close on the house we just bought within the next week or so and with that and packing and moving and all the work we will have to do on the house, I have no time to maintain my shop right now. Don't worry, though. I will be back up and running in no time with new inventory.

The house was a foreclosure. It's in a small development on a golf course about half an hour from where we live now. The builders never finished it and then they went bankrupt so the bank now owns the houses and is trying like mad to get rid of them. It has never been lived in.

Now, by "unfinished" I mean it has no floors (they're bare concrete) and no appliances. The electrical is run, the plumbing is done, and it has light fixtures, faucets, and toilets already in it. So before we can move in, we have to put down floors and get the appliances. Not a big deal, we already have price quotes. Lowe's will be installing the floors and delivering the appliances for us to install. I'm cheap and am NOT paying $100/appliance for them to install. Nope. Not when I can damn well do it on my own.

Since this house was incomplete, we have that much more room to add our own personal touch to it. I have been sweating over paint chips for WEEKS now. I never thought picking out paint would be so difficult. I have three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and dining room to paint. I mean, wow. The open, high traffic areas need to coordinate together so they're cohesive. But my husband's dad's house is all "sand and sea," so it's very high to tans and teals. I have been forbidden to use those colors on our house. This cut my options from wide open to half throttle and threw a monkey wrench into my vision. It doesn't help that the outside of the house is minty-freshness green and blinding white. I think I got a concession on the guest room, though, since it will double as an office for me. I can't sit in a neutral room all the time. I need color and inspiration. However, I do have a fairly neutral color for the kitchen and living room, and a slightly different neutral for the dining room, and a dark red for an accent wall to pop in both areas.

On top of all this, we will have to replace the studs in one of the garage walls. The garage on this house is roughly 12 feet tall because of the slope of the land. On one wall, the builder made a 4 foot high concrete wall and put 8 foot studs on top of that. perfectly to code. However, on the other wall they put 4 foot studs and then a 2x4 and then 8 foot studs on top of that. NOT to code and so not cool. So we have to take down the drywall and replace these mismatched studs one at a time with 12 foot studs. This is the part I am not looking forward to. But once it's done, the dear husband knows how to hang drywall. I think after that he'll just put peg board over it for all his bigger tools. No need to paint, which saves me one more headache in that department. Maybe I should tell him to paint it green...