So it begins...

So, we closed on our new house on Wednesday afternoon. The last few nights we've really not done anything over there. We moved a few things into the garage but that is it. The main reason for that is the work we are doing prior to move in.

1. New carpets in the basement. One room only had linoleum and that wasn't going to work. The other room, well, I'll explain that in #2.
2. Opening up the main basement room. There are two large rooms in the basement. One is going to become a bedroom, the other is going to be my theater room. However it was apparently a bedroom in the past, with a closet and door. Since neither are really right for a living space we started taking them out. There will be some drywall repairs needed but the end result will leave the room feeling larger and more open. This needs to be effectively complete by Wednesday. That's when the new carpets are going to be installed.
   The carpets need to be installed this week so we have some place to move stuff. Why not upstairs? That's #3.
3. New hardwood floors through out the entire upstairs (minus the kitchen). We are having bamboo floors installed through the entire upstairs. We elected to do the carpet removal ourselves. I'll have to get jumping on that after #2, but I think that'll be ok as we have a couple weeks before the floors can be installed.
4. Last but not least is the kitchen. It's not as significant of a remodel as our last kitchen but it's still pretty big. Luckly the cabnets are perbuilt this time so I won't have to spend so much time building them first. Even the doors are prehung so they should go up pretty fast. We'll be tiling the floor. The bamboo seemed a bit too soft for a room where metal objects could potentially fall.

So there is a LOT of work to be done. Today we started. We painted the bedroom downstairs. It wasn't bad but it was a rather cold and boring gray color. It's now a nice cheerful pale blue. We used the same color in our master bedroom as well.

The master bedroom was a bit more work. We had to remove all the base board (for the bamboo floor) and reove the carpet, carpet pad, tack strips and staples. It was actually easier than expected.

Finally, in addition to all the painting, we started removing the closet from the basement 'den'. That was nearly completely removed when we left for the night. I still have about a 4 foot wall section to remove (don't worry it's not load bearing) and I have to relocate the light switch. That is for tomorrow.

I have tomorrow off so I'll finish opening up the room and then get the drywall and mudding going. Wall patching will go easy enough, but the 'pop corn' ceiling will be a pain to repair. I need to do some homework on that. Then I should be able to pull that old carpet and prep the room for the new carpet. I probably won't get to paint, as the drywall mud always seems to take forever to dry and of course there is the sanding, however, I'll probably pick up some paint. I saw some returned paint that might work in there. If any of the colors work, then I'll be set. If not, meh, paint is cheap.

I'll try to remember to take pictures tomorrow.