And so it begins

We've been in the house for almost a full week, and the work has already begun. I'll leave it to Chris to do the official recaps, as he has done the lion's share of the renovating work, whereas I've done more in the "unpacking" and "lawn mowing" and "wire fishing assistant" areas instead. But since I'm the one taking most of the pictures and also the one who has them on my computer, I thought I'd give a quick photo recap of what's gone down in the first six days:

We closed on the house at 1:00 last Thursday. By 4:00, we were removing carpet - wall to wall in the living room, dining room and upstairs hall, as well as large (and dusty!) area rugs in all three bedrooms and of course all the really, really nasty padding that was underneath every last, square inch.



Fortunately, we were relieved and delighted to discover that the hardwood floors underneath the carpeting look like this on the main level:



and are only slightly more worn in the bedrooms, where it appears someone once polyurethaned only around the edges of the area rugs instead of, you know, removing the rugs and doing the whole floor.

The next big project was rewiring the house. There was cable in the kitchen and family room, and an internet connection in the office, but that was about it. We wanted cable, internet and phone accessibility in every bedroom, the living room, a different place in the family room and in the office. Chris busted out some mad wire-fishing skills and managed feats like this:



finding teensy-tiny holes and spaces in the basement from which to run wires up to the upper three levels of the house. Well, not all the holes were teensy-tiny...



It's okay - these are all in the closet in the office. We need practice with patching drywall, anyhow.

Once he got the basic wires pulled throughout the house, the next item on the list was wallpaper removal. We have what seems like miles of wallpaper in the house, so Chris tried out the WallWik system we'd seen on one of the DIY shows and discovered that it worked really well. Whew.



The biggest concern is keeping the solution off those hardwood floors we uncovered... down in the office it wasn't that big a deal since the floor is just asbestos tile that is going to be carpeted over, anyhow. For the rest of the house, it will require more careful floor protection.

Tomorrow, I am going to pick up a gallon of "Garden Moss" colored paint - it is a fairly neutral green. We're going to test it out for the family room and office, and if we like it, that's what we'll be putting up on the walls this weekend for the lower level. If we don't like it, we'll be back to the Soft Ecru (now called Soft Linen, apparently) that we used and liked in our old house.