Christmas Lights

French Doors

Finally got the french doors in the living room stripped, stained/painted, and hung. These were removed sometime in the 1950s by the previous owner and have been sitting in the garage attic since.

I pulled them out this summer and slowly worked on removing the old pink paint and getting them ready for stain and paint.

Karina's dad came and helped cut the mortise for the hinges. Luckily they just patched the old mortise when the doors were removed so he only need to remove the patch and the old hinge fit back into place.

Sunroom side.

Landscaping!

We finally tackled some landscaping around the house. A couple weeks back my parents removed all the weeds around the house and dug out potted the good stuff. We put some edging blocks and then hauled in some black dirt to create some better slope around the foundation.

We were able to get all the dirt hauled in, plants back in the ground, and mulch covering everything in one day. Its a huge improvement and now at least part of our yard isn't an eye sore :)

Bathroom Remodel - draft plans

Been a while since I've posted an update.

We got some initial sketches back for the bathroom addition in the breakfast nook off the kitchen.

Our desire has been to redo the upstairs bathroom, but since this is the only functional bathroom we either have to redo the basement bathroom or add another. The long term plan was to add a bathroom when we redid the kitchen but we decided to add the bathroom now instead of redoing the basement bathroom.

We still have some tweaking on the layout but this should be fairly close to what we are planning. For those of you who've used our current upstairs bathroom, know that anything would be a vast improvement.





This would be looking in from the kitchen

Shoe Mould

We got shoe mould (quarter-round) installed this week to go along all the baseboards in the house. It had been removed when the house was carpeted, so I had to purchase new pieces to paint/stain. I hate finish carpentry because of my lack of patience so I hired out the actual installation.

Below are pictures showing the installed moulding, its nice to have the gaps finally covered between the floors and the baseboards.

I also got all the white ceiling registers back up. Brian also striped and painted all of these, they look great, and with all layers of excess paint removed they now easily slide open and closed.

We have also finally starting to hang things on our walls. My parents gave us this antique mirror which fits perfectly above our buffet.

I bought Karina a picture of Fargo's city hall from the 1926, this is a year before our house was built and in all likelyhood the builder would have gone here to get the building permit.

In the 1960s it was unfortunately torn down in the urban renewal era and replaced with a terrible looking fire station.

Below is a picture of current city hall which replaced the one above. The picture is from google streetview because I couldn't find any picture of it online...which isn't surprising since it would be hard to expect anyone to actually put forth the effort of taking and posting a picture of such an ugly "civic" structure.

Back Entry

We decided it was finally time to paint the back entry. The walls and ceiling were painted a cream.

We painted the ceiling white and used the leftover brown paint from the baby's room to paint the walls.

I also probably broke an old house cardinal rule and decided to paint the knotty pine white. I'm not a big fan of pine and this back entry lacks much natural light, so we thought a white would help brighten up the area.

Brown walls

White wainscotting