Our Travels (July to September)

Well, over the past 6 months, we have traveled quite a bit! Our friends Lance & Kelli's wedding, numerous concerts, hangin' out with the folks outside Ennis, and our anniversary. ! I'll start the photo journal chronologically....

At Lance and Kelli's fantastic wedding in Polson, MT


With the folks on the nightmarish 'Grizzly bear' slog to a lake in the Madison Valley. (Jenn's dislodged toenail and Sarah's 2" scar will haunt me forever, my fault of course, due to our challenging bushwack for the first 3 miles).


Flea loves sleeping in the sun!


She also loves the water!


Great paintbrush on our hike to a lake on the great Rocky Mountain Front!


Sarah at Lone Peak brewery in Big Sky, pretty tasty beers. Neat shirt huh? I got it for her in NYC!


Willie Nelson still hard at it in his early 80's. Good concert at the Big Sky pavillion.


Ryan on his favorite ride at the Billings Zoo


Our one year anniversary! Wahoo! At one of our favourite breweries, Red Lodge.

Recent Events

Dearest readers, I must apologize for my inexcusable behavior over the past few months. I know most have you have been fervently checking my blog daily, awaiting an update. Things have been busy. I know, poor excuse right? We have been working on the house. Things have gotten sidetracked a bit by a wedding, a visit to with my parents, two week trip to arizona and a four week trek in Nepal. I'll get to those in later posts, this post shall focus on what we have been up to with the ol' homestead.

We left off with us finishing painting our bedroom (and me coincidentally making a disaster of the drywall in the living room!)

We took down the big pine tree in our front yard in August, as its massive root system was causing some issues in our basement bedroom.



Poor tree. It was in fine shape, but it was just too close to the house. I wasn't there for the removal, but apparently I wasp nest resulted in Mr. Bucketman to retreat, poor guy. He should have got a bonus for dealing with our pesky wasps.

Here's a good action shot.



It only took a few months, but I finally mudded and taped the drywall that I put up in July, in September :).



We proceeded to paint the trim in the dining room..



And the resulting paint fight ensued. It took weeks to get all of the paint off!


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Sarah painting the dining room our honeyish color. Good work sweets!

Paint = Sarah's speciality

Whilst i was fooling around with the disaster going on in the living room, Sarah was plugging away on painting our bedroom and the office. She's definitely got some chops for painting! Check out her stained glass piece above, which we gifted to my bro and Sis-in-law for a housewarming gift.

Sarah in our bedroom, finishing the ceiling.


Our bedroom - Sedona reddish mud color, looks great!


Hard at work with her trusty paintin' buddy, going with a darkish purple gray in the office.

On to the living room!

Well, I blanked on getting complete photos on the floors in the three rooms, now they are covered with contractor paper. Oh well. We've completed the floors in the office and the two bedrooms. We did four coats of waterlox, waiting one day in between for cure time, and few days after the final coat to walk on. We moved all the furniture from the living room into the second bedroom.

The living room in it's natural state.


Our new living room, the second bedroom!


The dreaded popcorn/textured ceiling!


The room all prepped and ready to go for removal!


Mother&#$^#%, there's drywall under the popcorn/textured ceiling! And guess what, the only way to remove it is to take off the backing paper. This ain't good.


After hours of removal, and taking off the backing paper+ texture to get a level surface, this is the final product of the ceiling drywall with the gypsum face exposed. I did some excavation underneath and found that they had installed this drywall over plaster and lathe. Doh! After much deliberation and consultation with experts, I decided to hang another layer of 1/2" drywall over this, rather than skim coat or remove the old drywall and plaster and lathe.


Luckily, my good buddy Jason was able to lend a helping hand hanging some of the sheetrock. Definitely a bit challenging on the ceiling. When I was up in the attic, I found a box of books from the late 1800's and the name of the original owner of the house, which was pretty cool. I also put a crack in the plaster and lathe ceiling in the entryway, which Sarah so keenly observed. Oops!

Floors, floors, and floors

Well, we took a big step and decided to do the floor refinishing ourselves. We did quite a bit of research on exactly what finish we wanted on our fir floors, what sander to use and the techniques we needed to master. i poked around quite a bit to see how much a pro would cost. We were looking at around 2500 bucks for three rooms. We did those three rooms for about 600-700 bucks. We ended up renting a drum sander and an edge sander from the local rental store. I've heard horror stories about drum sanders, but it actually ended up being pretty manageable. The edger on the other hand was a little pocket rocket (at about 30 pounds), and took off on you pretty easily. As for the floor finish, we decided upon a product called Waterlox. We used this product for two coats of original finish and two coats of satin finish.Well enough ramble, on to the photos:

Ryan on his first pass with the drum sander in the second bedroom.


Removing tar from the cracks after the first pass with the sander.


The A-team!


Sarah on cleanup duty.


The floors after the final pass with the drum sander. We ended up doing five passes. Two passes with 40 grit, One pass with 60 grit, a pass with 80 grit and one pass with 120 grit. Pretty amazing how light they are!


Sarah on duty with the waterlox, first coat in the office.


Ryan edging in the office.

Our Bedroom!

After becoming Mongolian nomads and moving our bedroom into the formal dining room, we proceeded to remove the carpet, linoleum flooring, wallpaper, and popcorn ceilings from the room. This took a bit o' work, but see the shortened pictorial version below:

The move-in view of our bedroom, note shaggy carpet, wallpaper and popcorn ceilings.


Ryan beginning to remove the carpet.


What do we have here? Doh! More obnoxious and persistent old school 20's to 30's linoleum tile! Nuts!


Removing wallpaper is easier with the trusty wallpaper steamer.


A view of the old school linoleum floors.


The room taped and ready to have the blasted popcorn ceilings removed. As Sarah likes to say, whoever invented popcorn ceiling texture should die a slow, laborious death.


After some hours of hard work, the fir floors emerge!


Ryan removing tar from the floors with his trusty scraper!


About ready to be sanded!

It's been a while...

Hi all! We have been quite busy the past few months with various activities around the house and travels to assorted exotic destinations (not really, but we did go on a neat trip to Walla Walla, I'll get to that in a bit). Where to start?

After our last post, we finished taking remants of tar and paper off of the floors in the second bedroom and office. Then Sarah working on getting the paint off of our grates, a laborious process consisting of using very toxic chemical stripper off of four grates. See the final product below. Good job sweets!



Then we made the big move out to the living room! Feels like we are livin' in a one bedroom studio now :).



The work has begun on our bedroom! See the next blog for details...