Flip House 1...Part 2

Look Out Florida...here we come:):)

In order for Mike and I to go to Florida to work on the houses we have to shut down our house for the winter in TN. On September 29 we prepped our TN house and loaded up the mini motorhome(van). We left for FL in the wee morning hours on September 30. Woo hoo. We are so excited to get back to some sunshine. It was a rough year in TN this year. Mike promised that when we first got to Florida we would take a break and relax for a week or so before we start work on the house. Promises, promises. We arrived at the house at 6pm on September 30. The last time we saw the house was when we made an offer on it last April so it was very exciting to actually see, touch, and feel what we bought. the only difference is that the furniture was taken out by the previous owner's son. First things first. I have to clean up our new living quarters. We plan on living in the master bedroom and using the master bath as our bath and our kitchen. It will be a little awkward but at least we are on site to get this house done. I wash down the walls and scrub the floors while Mike unloads the van. Niki, our pug, is confused but I'm sure she will get into the swing of things real soon. She's been with us a long time now and she knows we are a little bit crazy, lol. She is also ecstatic because we are setting up here bed in the bedroom with us. She had "never" slept in our room before. We get the air mattresses set up and Mike turns to me and says "we need to call in a dumpster" I knew it. So much for a vacation. We are going to start work right away and we are actually both happy about it. We just can't resist work especially when the sun is shining. Mike and are nice weather workers. 10-1 Our first full day in Florida. Woo hoo. First we have to go shopping. Mike drops me off at Walmart to pick up kitchen supplies and food while he goes to Home Depot for tools. We didn't know how much stuff we could fit in the van on the way down so needless to say we need a lot of stuff. Let the spending begin. Mike bought the biggest Dewalt battery operated tool set. He said all of the men were drooling because he got the best toys of the day, lol. Woo hoo. We are back at the house and ready to work. This is our favorite thing to do. The first and most fun part of remodeling is the demo and we got a brand new sledgehammer just for this job. We start working in the second bathroom. We are going to completely gut this bathroom and update the whole thing. Here are some original pictures. and Mike takes off the shower doors and brings them into the garage. Next he takes the track off the wall for the sliding shower doors. Next we work on getting the old tile off the wall. This turns out to be a fairly easy job considering a lot of the tile starts to fall off as we hammer. Me taking out tile. Mike working on the back wall of the shower. After we get the tile off the wall Mike takes the sledgehammer to try and break up the tile on the ceiling. Now we have to be careful. We don't want the whole ceiling to collapse on top of us. So that part isn't as easy as the walls. This is going to take a little more effort and a lot more mess. I stay in the bathroom to clean up the mess that we made. As you will all find out I spend an awful lot of time cleaning up after Mike. Mike works his way around the house tearing anything apart that he comes across. Here he is taking down one of the ceiling fans. Then he starts to take out the original intercom system. Check it out it was an 8 track player. It was probably "state of the art" at the time, lol. Next he starts to work on taking a half wall and a banister out. Here is the original wall and banister. It's a good thing I had that picture from April. Mike is tearing things apart faster than I can get in the same room as him. Mike taking the rails out. Then he takes the base off. And finally he gets to use the sledgehammer to bust out the wall. That was our first full day in Florida. I think we did pretty good so far. We already have quite a pile in the garage. I may really have to call the dumpster in soon. 10-2 Our second day of work. I start off the day by going into the bathroom to take down the wallpaper. Thankfully it is coming right off the wall. That's a first. Shh, now I probably jinxed myself for the next bathroom. I also clean up the debris that is in the bathtub. While I am working in the bathroom I hear Mike out back banging away. I run out with the camera and see that he has already taken most of an old wood cabinet apart. Here he is cleaning up the last of the cabinet pieces. We both go back into the bathroom. Mike starts to take down the mirror. I hate this part. You can only hope it comes off the wall in one piece and doesn't smash all over the place. Yay, it's coming off in one piece. We carry the mirror out to the garage together. Next is the vanity. Mike using the sledgehammer on the vanity. We got the sink off and now Mike is tearing apart the rest of the vanity. And the vanity is gone. Not too shabby for our first 2 days of work. There is much more to come. Next week's story will be our Kitchen demo. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter and I will write again next Sunday night. Lisa

Chapter 39...Decorating And Glass Etchings

Off Grid...Chapter 39 Good morning everyone. I hope everyone has had a great week. Mike and I had a fantastic one. We started doing dome of the finishing touches and we did some decorating. Really, we did. Monday 12-1 This morning we got a call from our gas company. They are coming to hook up our dryer. Yeah. Mike finished working on the dryer vent and the young man hooked up my dryer. Woo Hoo. Now our towels won't be like cardboard. It's nice having soft clothes again. I haven't had a dryer since last spring. Although on nice days I will still hang the laundry outside. After that we went to town to look for pictures, frames, accessories, etc. We stopped at K-mart which we usually don't do because our local K-mart is horrible. Anyway, we actually scored there. We got frames, a mirror, bathroom towel bars, a clock, and kitchen canisters. Next stop Wal-mart to look at lamps again. We got new shades and 2 new lamps. We'll see how they work. We got home, unloaded the car, and started to play with all of out "toys". We changed the lamp shade in the bedroom. Mike installed the towel ring and toilet paper holder. Then we installed the mirror above the fireplace. If we can find something better we may actually change that out. Tuesday 12-2 This morning I got up early and started re-organizing my kitchen. Mike helped me by installing the 2 shelves that came with my pantry. Of course the factory drilled the wrong size holes inside the pantry and provided the wrong hardware. Good thing I have Mike to fix all these factory errors lol. We still need to get more shelves but it's a start. I have a 7 foot pantry and all they give is 2 shelves. We got a call from UPS. They are using some excuse why they are 6 days late with our package and they want to know of we can meet them at the road to get our package. Of course, so Mike runs down and gets our package. The etched glass transoms for above our door. I hope they aren't broken because they've been on the truck for awhile now. Mike brought them up to the house and we opened up the box which thankfully was packed really well. The glass was very cold and we could hardly see any etchings so we put them against the wall to acclimate to the house temperature. Mike gets the miter saw out and starts to cut the trim for the glass frames. First he measures the opening above the door front and back. Then he has to cut 8 pieces of trim to those measurements for each door. I help him install the trim to make the border, then he caulks it, and I hand him the glass. Mike puts the glass in place and then we add the next 4 pieces of trim and nail them in. Here is Mike installing the glass. Only two more to go. It's night time and we are looking at the glass. We are a little disappointed because we can barely make out the etchings. We are hoping they will look better in the daylight. Wednesday 12-3 Ah, daylight. Crossing our fingers as we check out the glass. We really wanted these 3 pieces to be a focal point in the house. They are not what we hoped for but they are ok and at least our openings are closed in. The bears(which is the lightest etching). The turkeys. The deer. Time to do some more decorating. Mike hung my kitchen clock. We may have to see if we can paint the hands black to make it easier to read. Mike also hung my bear above the sink until I can find the right sized mirror and my new kitchen canisters are in place. Next we put the generator on and got out the iron. Mike is going to install the end cap for my counter top. When you buy Formica counter tops they make a piece that can be ironed on and trimmed down to cover the raw edge. Here is Mike ironing the end cap on. And filing and sanding it down. While he is doing that I iron the new tablecloth we bought. It's much better than the sheet we originally had on the table lol. I love our glass table but we need to keep the top covered until we finish all the construction. We also hung some picture frames. We needed to find 6 pictures for the frames and believe it or not we had a really hard time finding pictures. We really need to start taking more "people" pictures and getting them developed. Now it's starting to look more like a home. Thursday 12-4 Today we head out again to look for more pictures. We are determined to get our house decorated. We drove to a different town a little farther away. We stopped in more than 15 stores and found nothing for the house. On our way back we saw another cabin store so we stopped in. We spotted a great picture for our living room so we bought it. It almost didn't fit in the jeep but we made it. On our way back home we stopped at Lowe's(again) to look around. We found an area rug for the living room that we both like. Now we are very happy. We found 2 big things for he house. We hate coming home empty handed. We get everything home and now we are really excited about pulling the house together. Unfortunately our walls need to be touched up before we can hang anything. Mike is determined to finish. Last week he filled in out cracks with spackle. Tonight he starts to sand and I clean up the mess. Then he paints. We will need 2 or 3 coats in some spots. Mike painting. We work our way around the main room sanding, touching up, and cleaning. Hopefully the walls will look great by morning. Friday 12-5 Woo Hoo. The walls look great. We move all the furniture away from the walls. I wipe down all the floor trim and clean the floor. Mike follows me and does the touch up on the floor trim. While we have the trim paint out I set up the new pack of floor trim in the kitchen and paint them. I did a much better job this time. After that I gave Niki a bath "before" we put the new rug down. We put all the furniture back and I clean the floors again. Mike and I hang our new picture and out the rug down. Now we just need a few more things for this room. So far we are very pleased. Our living room so far. Saturday 12-6 We tried the other cabin store again. We are in search of a new lamp, another picture, and something for the table between the chairs. They didn't have anything we could use but the owner's mother said she would check the inventory at their third store when she goes next week. Hopefully she will call us with good news. Not much else happened today. We "talked" about doing the closet in the bathroom but that's as far as we got lol. Mike did install the towel bar and the tp holder. Sunday 12-7 We did absolutely nothing on the house today. It was freezing outside, brr. Little by little the house is coming together. We are very excited that it is becoming very comfortable. That was our week in the Mike and Lisa world. Have a great week. Lisa