An unblogged adventure, part 1

For the last 2 months, I've been unable to share with my reading public the most important features of my day-to-day life.

We have been redecorating (thoroughly!) a bit more than half of our house, but since I wanted the finished product to be a surprise to our globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law , I couldn't blog (or tweet) about it! I was about to go nuts!

Finally, they arrived Sunday and were suitably amazed and impressed with our efforts. Here they are, along with Austinite daughter, playing an insanely complicated BSG board game in our newly elegant and luxurious dining room—to what better use could it be put?!

So now I can share the saga with the world!

To give you an idea of where our starting point was, here is a picture of our "grand" entry hall before the project started. The cool LOTR poster was covering up a hole in the wall. Note peeling paint around the archway. Paint was peeling all over the downstairs. But this wall was especially bad because of damage caused by overflows from the bathroom just above it.

And here's the downstairs powder room, complete with non-functioning sink (the drain pipe had rotted away—note the "do not use" sign). Getting this vital space fully functional again was a major objective of the work.

Amazing things happened during this project. For example, on the left you can see Henry actually mopping the living room floor after he and his brother moved out the furniture. "Henry" and "mopping" were two words I never thought to have seen directly connected in my lifetime, at least outside of the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this photo the baseboards have already been removed to allow new wiring to be put in place.

He really got into things, especially in the living room, where his dreams of a home theatre system have yet to be completely realized. But the wiring is in the wall!

In the background of the photo on the right you can see that the damaged wall below the LOTR poster has been removed. Here are some better looks at it.

with poster still in place over the hole...so long, Aragorn!...

...and with hole made bigger for repairs. Sound insulation (to keep embarrassing tinkling sounds in the powder room from disturbing diners) has been added to the wall

Here's the work a bit further along, with the walls in the entry all patched and ready to be textured. You can imagine how yucky they must have looked before when I tell you how beautiful they appeared to us at this stage!

To give you an idea of how thoroughly our lives were disrupted, here are a series of photos showing how various rooms looked at various points in the process. The guys that did the work were very accommodating and—given what all they were doing—friendly and easy to have around. But I can't believe now when I look at these pictures, how we survived with (mostly) sanity and marriage intact.

living room full of building materials, painting supplies and other implements of destruction construction

guest room full of stuff from my study while study was being worked on (bed is still in garage)

my study full of stuff from guest room while guest room was being worked on

dining room full of supplies (the giant buffet eventually had to be moved to refinish floor but here is only covered for protection)

that's how you paint a ceiling! note cheerfully-colored scaffold. That's my piano, well-covered in front of the fireplace; it eventually also had to be moved out when we decided to do the floors

half of the garage made unusable for cars (although boats & bicycle stayed at home) while used for storing non-essential furniture

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As you might be able to tell from the photo at the top of the post, things are not yet completely back to [the new] normal. Nothing's been hung on the beautiful new walls, since I don't want to be as cavalier about such things as I used to be with the crummy walls. I need to give these decisions more thought. And some of the furniture has yet to be moved back from the garage.

But we can actually inhabit all of the rooms of the house, and sit down in the living room, which are simple pleasures I had no idea were so precious.

In my next post you'll see some of the secrets of 1930's domestic architecture that were exposed in the course of the project, and then I'll show you what the rooms look like now.