Fix the bathroom

before/after.
pics
details, etc.

Paint the living room

Paint it
pics
proof of removed lighting
ugliness yellow

Paint the (main) Bedroom

Before/after pics

just show that we did it

Gas!

Two weeks in, and we started smelling gas.  Near an outlet.  That's no good.  We called National Grid, and, since it's their ass if something blows up, they sent someone out in under 30 minutes.  

The old gas meter

Well, not quite.  Two days later, we smelled gas again.  So we called National Grid, again.  This time, they were a little more thorough, and surprise!  They found some more leaks.  This time, more serious.  In order to fix it, they were going to have to dig up some of the street, and replace all of the pipes inside the house.

Call in the street crew

Which is exactly what they did.

They ended up replacing all of the pipes (the old ones were 100 years old!), as well as the meters.

The new meter

They also increased the size of the pipes (the old ones were 3/4 inch, the new ones are 1inch.  Which is good for when we eventually do our oil-to-gas conversion

The new entry point pipes

Some of the new piping.  shiny

It wasn't that bad of a leak, and "if they didn't know about it, it would've been fine", according to one of the techs on the job.  But we didn't feel like smelling gas for the next 5 years, so we called it in.

Paint the Red Room

The mid-hallway bedroom was a deep dark red, but painted splotchily.  It needed help.

So we got some primer, some paint, some brushes, some tape, and all the other good stuff, and got ready to paint.  I taped all the molding, ceiling and removed the outlet covers, and we were ready to go.

Since it was a deep red, we had to use primer to make sure that it wouldn't bleed through when we painted.

Turns out we needed two coats of primer.  Maybe overkill, but we wanted to be sure.  It wasn't the best primer job ever, but it did the trick.  We sanded some parts down to make it smoother, but there were still some sloppy parts (mostly my doing).

We got to painting, and things went fairly smoothly...until we peeled the tape off.  We used latex-based paint and primer, which, when dry, gets very stretchy.  The tape pulled some of the paint with it, and we were left with a bunch of uneven areas, around the ceiling and molding.  What a pain.




So we had to pretty much re-do all of the trim.

After a full 2nd coat, and some touch-ups we finally got the room to decent condition.  Not the greatest paint job ever, but I think the room looks pretty good now.  Now just to furnish it...

Yardwork

The left side of the house needs some help, to say the least.

First, de-weed it
Second, de-tree it
Third, figure out what will look good
Fourth, Do it.

It's on a bit of a slope, so we have to figure out if we want to level it at all

Fix the Cables

First order of business: Get the TV working.  Easy enough, just plug it into the cable drop.  Oops, not working.  Okay, let's try another cable drop to make sure that we're at least getting cable.  That worked.  So the cable drop we want to use is not working.  Let's go to the basement and see what we can figure out.  I don't have a picture of the original state of the cable, but it was ugly.  Especially since, after cleaning it up a little, it's still pretty ugly.

There was an incoming cable that was not working at all, but had been used to try to wire up some of the cable drops.  Since there were so many splitters going so many places, it was hard to tell what the original intentions were, but it was obvious that about 7 different people had tried to wire the place, each time pretty much neglecting what the previous person had done.

After a bunch of cable-tracking and and tugging and testing, I was able to get a good handle on things.  Turns out a number of the drops in the unit are not functional.  Which is fine, since we only own 1 TV. I have no intention of getting 6 more TVs to use all of the drops.

Here's a picture after the clean-up.

And the current state of the drops (9/30/2012).  No plans on changing anything.

Welcome Home

Friday September 14th, 2012, we got the keys to our house

'They' say not to close on a house and move into it on the same day: It's just too much.  Too bad we didn't hear that until after we closed on the house and moved into it on the same day.  It was a long day, but we eventually got all of the things we own into our new place...but not before handing over a giant sack of money to people I've never met before.

I doubt that there are many typical move-in scenarios.  Working out all of the timing of moving out of your old place, stockpiling cash, figuring out closing dates, physically moving to a new location and whole host of other things probably never lines up perfectly for anyone.  We were no exception.  We were living in limbo for a couple of weeks because our apartment lease ran out before our closing date. Which meant that, come move-in time, we had to rent the uhaul, grab our stuff from storage, unload it, return the uhaul, go to our limbo apartment to grab the rest of our stuff and bring it back.  All in all, not too terrible, but combined with an early closing appointment, a hangover, and a need to unpack all of our stuff in boxes, it was a long day.

We did manage to unload the Uhaul in 55 minutes.  I think that's a new record.