Back in January, we got all exicted about a fancy Pegasus kitchen faucet we bought at Home Depot – only to find that the spayer handle leaked, persistantly, even with replacement parts. You can read about the debacle here. With budget problems mounting, we decided to leave well enough alone for a while and put […]

We are officially DONE sanding floors downstairs. It was the longest weekend in recent memory – the only other time I remember working this hard was when we were laying tile floor in preparation for our open house. We worked straight through the weekend, except for a quick run to the local townie bar to […]

Yeah, so you know that easy “repaint the dining room” project I mentioned a few days ago? Well, like any fixer-upper undertaking it tripled in size, turning into “repaint the dining room, twice, strip and sand all of the beadboard, and stain it to match the floor”. It added about 3.5 million hours to our […]

Once again, we spent the weekend painting. What can I say – we like color. Alot. This time, we took the dining room out of the pink and into something a little more natural. After much speculation and a few heated arguments, we decided to paint the top half of the room with Sherwin William’s […]

Well, it’s official – we’re waiting until next weekend to start sanding down the other 2 floors. I can’t say I’m excited about pushing our timeline back a week, since it means our house will be ripped apart that much longer, but I suppose we’ll survive. The living room floor’s last coat of varnish is […]

If all goes well, I will go home tonight and check the bedroom floor and it’s newest coat of varnish will be hard as nails. If it’s dry enough, we can move all our living room and dining room furniture into the bedroom, clearing them out completely. Then, this weekend will be floor-o-rama as we […]

Thanks to everyone for the great landscaping advice – I’ve got a running list of things to check out now. While we wait for the hardwood varnish to dry completely (STILL….will it never end?), we’ve been entertaining ourselves by fixing exterior annoyances. Yesterday the weather was beautiful (so rare in Central New York!) so we […]

When we took our first trip to a nursery last spring, we were shocked at how much plants and trees go for these days. Our dreams of a nice, lush yard full of trees, bushes and flowers quickly vanished as we looked at pricetags. We ended up settling for a spindley little crab tree from […]

We wait, and wait, and wait for the varnish to dry (and apply a second coat, and wait some more). While we wait, we sleep on a mattress on the living room floor, between a displaced radiator and a giant mound of STUFF. The floor is our new bedroom – here’s what the house looks […]

How much Advil does it take to dull the pain caused by 2 12-hour days of kneeling and squatting? And why the hell didn’t I buy my own set of knee pads??? Our weekend can be summed up in a few words – pain, exhaustion, and exilhiration. We rented an orbital drum sander Saturday morning, […]