A Crafting Disaster: And we are working again....

So we took most of the summer off from projects and had plans to become productive this fall. But the fall came and our lives were busy and the house projects didn't move. Then it was Thanksgiving and Christmas so we didn't do anything. Finally at the end of December I started a new job, got myself set into my new work schedule and found the motivation to start house projects again. Ben would like to summarize these last couple months as "sucky" but really that means productive.

We finally changed the paint the color in our hallway, stairway and family room. It was a cream color, but now it is a dark taupe. Overall painting was really uneventful. Except for a few slips of the roller onto the ceiling that had to be fixed (3 of them were from me), and when Ben finally messed up he yells at me "I just pulled an Ali". Funny to him, not to me. :) Last time we painted in our house, my dad came and did all the painting and wouldn't let us help (darn!). This time we decided to give him a break and do the painting ourselves. We had to do a ton of edging/cutting in which was a pain. Our whole painting project took about a week to complete. We painted all of the trim white, which took 4-5 coats but now I love it.

We also decided to replace the doors in our hallway. The challenge with this is, our truck has been broken since October, was sitting under 4 feet of snow. We had many discussions on how we were going to get doors from the store to our house. We also debated whether just to replace the door and get "slab" doors or to buy pre-hung doors. We were in Menards looking at doors, and I pulled up a video to see how hard it is to install slab doors. We watched the video, and at the end they rate the project a 4 out of 5 on difficulty. It is like the video was challenging Ben to prove it wrong. Ben right away decides on slab doors (It isn't going to be that hard!). I agree for 2 reasons, 1. They are way cheaper, 2. We might actually be able to fit one in the Corolla. We only bought one door that night, the 24" door for the closet and it fit in one side of the corolla with the seats down, no problem.

Ben got home worked on the door in the afternoon, and it actually went pretty well. So the next week we went back to Menards to get the rest of the doors. We needed two 30" doors, and another 24"door. Somehow I thought this would be no problem to fit into the Corolla. Well we get to the parking lot and figure out that the only way we can get all the doors in the car, it to put the passenger seat all the way forward in the car, and tipped forward., and have all the back seats down. At this point it is clear that only one person is going to fit in the car. But it is 9pm, it is dark, cold and we live 30 minutes away from Menards, so if Ben is going to take the doors home and come pick me up, I will have to kill an hour of time. Instead we decide to test my acrobatic skills and I squeeze into the passenger seat (which is shoved against the dash), and basically lay sideways in the seat. The whole time we are driving home I keep telling Ben to be careful because if we get in an accident my head will be blown off by the airbags. Lovely. Luckily we made it home and Ben spent the next week slowly working on the doors. Now we have 4 beautiful doors which look way better then the new doors.

For our next projects, we are installing new laminate wood flooring and a new back door in our kitchen. I am going to try to do more real time blogging so I can remember all the ridiculous stories.

Now for some before and after pictures: