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Immediately after Labor Day it turned fall here in CO. This is very bizarre to us all. Its been in the 40s at night, and so naturally my Mississippi-born internal clock thinks that the holidays are just around the corner. 
I fully intend for our living room to look just like this in a few months. Okay maybe not, but there will be snow on the ground - what a nice idea huh? And there is a fabulous blue Christmas tree already growing in the front yard. Oh, and our fireplace has an on/off switch. We already fired it up once the other day, and I'm in love.
BD is so right! Check out the dimmer switch masterpiece:
We have had a fabulous Labor Day Weekend with 2 visitors - Wanda and Bill. We have done some of the usual tourist stuff - national park, Coors, etc - and also some house work. The recessed lights are DONE and the carpet is gone!! The recessed lighting turned out to be quite simple. Well, maybe not so simple for August who did all the work in the attic. Actually all I did was change the layout several times and screw in the light bulbs. The upgrade is really nice though, and the can lights are not that expensive.One thing we did learn: dimmable fluorescents may sound like the coolest thing since sliced bread, but they are not. Not yet anyways, we need to give them a few more years to refine the technology. They don't dim all the way, at about 30% they just flick off. The light itself is too "blue", and as you dim them it turns more blue. And, they cost $12/piece. This compared to the incandescents at $3... So, we took at $60 worth back to Lowe's and bought the regular ones...
Here are some pictures of our adventures:
For August and I, this whole house renovation process is basically about answering our own questions like:
- "Can we scrape popcorn ceilings?" (yes)
- "Can we install a whole house fan?" (yes)
- "Can we keep a landscaped yard looking nice?" (several things are dying... more on that later...)
So now we're at "Can we install crown molding?". We attempted it once before at my grandparents house. Including my dad, that makes 3 engineers, we didn't even get one junction to work right in several hours. We ended up paying to have it done by professionals. Later we realized that we didn't have the ideal saw, and on top of that, the one we had was broken and also missing a piece. This time we at least had the right tools: fancy Dewalt compound miter saw and angle measure. It still took us about 8 hours just to hang the stuff. Here are some tips we discovered:
- Measure corners, they are probably not square. Divide this angle by two for exterior corners. For interior, divide the measurement by 2 but cut the complementary angle... That's 46 degrees for a 92 degree corner, which we had several of.
- If you are going to have joints in a long stretch, make them near the corners, because its waaaay easier to manuever a smaller section into a corner. Of course, avoid joints if at all possible.
- Try fastening the corner pieces together on the ground, especially if you have wavy walls and out-of-square corners.
- Get a good stud finder and mark those studs before hand. Its hard enough to hold the molding and the nail gun over your head. Don't complicate the issue by trying to find the studs at the last second.
- Choose painted molding. That way you can make some mistakes, caulk and repaint them, and no one will be able to tell the difference. Case in point: Franken-corner. Here's a good shot of him:
We fought this corner for quite some time, as you can see. Definitely the worst of the worst. However, a little caulk, some fresh paint, and voila:
So the moral of the story is: yes, we can install crown molding, provided we can caulk the fool out of it. If you get right up on it, you can of course still see the mistakes, but from regular eye level, it looks flawless. We are majorly indebted to the inventor of caulk.
Let's take a look back at that check list. We are getting there! orange peel ceilings -> paint ceilings -> paint ceilings again? -> 2nd coat of paint on walls -> hang crown molding -> paint bay window -> install recessed lighting -> pull up carpet!! -> install new mantel -> install baseboards and quarterround
August and I are just back from a good long visit to Mississippi. We saw a bunch of people and overloaded on sweet tea and other fattening foods. We also attended August's 10 year high school reunion. Isn't he old??? Here are some pictures that I stole off Facebook, but they are just too good to be buried on there.
Dear Abby is officially two years old. Not that she acts her age or anything... What is that in dog years? 14? She may be a little bit developmentally challenged. We love her though.
I fully intend for our living room to look just like this in a few months. Okay maybe not, but there will be snow on the ground - what a nice idea huh? And there is a fabulous blue Christmas tree already growing in the front yard. Oh, and our fireplace has an on/off switch. We already fired it up once the other day, and I'm in love.
For August and I, this whole house renovation process is basically about answering our own questions like:
We fought this corner for quite some time, as you can see. Definitely the worst of the worst. However, a little caulk, some fresh paint, and voila:
