this old house #2...

Woohoo!  The appliances are here!  Things are looking up on this basement apartment.

We're getting there.  We will get there.   

Eventually.

And then we'll have all the exterior and main house to tackle over the course of next year!  (I can't even begin to think about that.  Just want to get this part finished.)

Here's where we are now...

 

The kitchen!  We painted the cabinets black, (they look better black than they did white!) spray painted the middle section of the door with chalkboard paint, and finished sealing the floor.  

We still have several small details left to do, but our goal was to just get some pictures out so we could start advertising this place and find a tenant! 

In a rare moment of brilliance, I asked the appliance guys to let us have the boxes instead of hauling them away.

They became the perfect houses for the kids to play in while we worked inside.

After the fun of that wore off, they PAINTED their houses! 

(...and I learned I will never leave my two year old alone with a brush and a bucket of white paint again...)

Remember our flea problem?  One of our next strategies has been to seal the larger open cracks in the floors with black caulk, just in case any of them were entering the house from underneath. 

Next we began applying multiple coats of polyurethane to finish out all the floors.  Oh man, this is so tedious and time-consuming. 

The floor is actually not going to be this shiny.  (Let me apologize for that if you loved the shiny floor...)  I took the picture above before the poly had dried.  They'll have a satin finish to them, not glossy.  Shiny floors just didn't seem to be consistent with rustic 1820 style.

We've also been stripping these days.  (Stripping paint, of course.) 

The former owner had started the job, and it was up to us to finish it out.  I love the cool weathered and distressed look of this bathroom door underneath the black paint.

Here's a picture of the bedroom before the floors were sealed. (I'm pretty sure that floor was a gym floor at one time...)  Those blue window privacy panes have got to go.  And they will.  Eventually.

We honestly couldn't do what we're doing without the hired help of some folks in our ministry!  Mary spent hours working on stripping the paint off of the last bathroom wall so it would match all the others.

See that grimy old pipe in the corner?  Ewww...

 I painted it black and now it just disappears.

We took out the toilet (it's being replaced) and polyurethaned the walls and floors.  Looking nice, don't you think?

Here's where we have a discrepancy:  the cement shower with the copper piping.  

Some people seem to hate it while others think it's cool and brilliant.  Now, it may not be my first choice when it comes to a shower, but what else screams out a rustic, "earthy" style like cement and copper, right?  What do you think about it? 

Stay posted!  We'll be posting the final before and after pictures soon!  (And meeting prospective tenants!)