Living room floors

This weekend our parents came up and helped us install new floors in the kitchen and living room. Here are some before and after photos.

Here's the way the living room looked when we bought the house.



















5 months later, it looks about the same. It does have new windows, heating, insulation, plaster, and the linoleum is gone.












We love the new floors

Kitchen before and after

Here are some before and after photos of our kitchen. We're still missing a few cabinets and other details, but it's come a long way.


The house as we bought it, and the way it's been since 1861


















The way our kitchen looked all summer














Most of our cabinets and the counter tops installed













New floors and some of our appliances are installed

Homeless

We found out on Friday that our landlord found another tenant for our apartment, so we spent most of the weekend and Monday packing and moving everything to the house. Our parents helped out, and we got some electrical work done and installed two new windows in the attic. We'll be living out of a suitcase for the next couple weeks while the house is made habitable. All of the blue board is hung, and the plasterers will be putting skim coat up starting tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll be able to start installing kitchen cabinets this coming weekend. We'll be staying with friends for the next couple of weeks.

Insulation is finished

We decided to have all of the exterior walls and the roof insulated with spray foam. Here's a picture of the kitchen with all of the electrical and plumbing work complete.











Two stoners came and sprayed the whole house with foam. It sprays onto the wall and expands to over 100x its original size. After it expands, one of the guys cuts away everything that expanded past the studs.




















Here's Greg pretending he had something to do with the installation.

Another inspection

We passed our building inspection.

We passed

We passed our electrical inspection! This weekend we worked on getting the house ready for the framing inspection.

Lowe's vs. Home Depot

Convenience - Home Depot wins because it is about 5 minutes from our apartment and 15 from our house. Lowe's is 30+ minutes away.

Kitchen design- We had layouts done by both, and the kitchen designers were both friendly. Lowe's had a better price on cabinets and the designer knew more about kitchen design. Lowe's designers work on commission and Home Depot is hourly. We ended up going with a local kitchen store that carried Wellborn Forest cabinets, they are about the same price as the Shenandoah or American Woodmark, but the people we purchased them from came out to the house to measure and we got a good deal on granite (we picked it out by looking at a slab, not a 4" sample). So I would award a point to Lowe's for price and knowledge.

Deals- We have run across some good deals at both. Last week we picked up some pendant lights at Lowe's that were normally $30 for $5. Our back door was a deal from Home Depot $100. Tie.

Helpful staff- Home Depot definitely loses on this one. When we go to Lowe's there is someone who offers to help us within a couple minutes and if we need to go look for someone there are actually people around. Home Depot, good luck getting help.