3/30/25

 Rick finished painting the house interior on Friday. For the rest of the weekend, Rick worked on wiring electric plugs & lights and installing lighting. I removed the paper and swept and vacuumed dirt and dust. 

The house is small, so we picked a light color for the walls (Swiss Coffee). The baseboards will be a white-white. It's definitely looking better and headed in the right direction. It's really nice to finally have lights in the bathrooms and back bedroom.

Our next few weeks will focus on electrical/lights and cleaning/repairing the floors. We'll sand the floors prior to putting on the baseboards. Rick will also start working on the kitchen and bathroom cabinets at home as time allows.

Master bedroom with new paint

Pretty neighborhood kitty sunning in the tree house

2nd bedroom

Living room

Kitchen nook

2nd bedroom wiring

2nd bathroom wiring and lights!

2nd bathroom lights and fan

Kamryn and Hudson before prom

Hudson, Kamryn, Jennifer (?), Addie, Everett, and Tallon before prom

Main bathroom with lights and fan!

Prepping for kitchen lighting

Forgot to get a pic of the light up--will put up the other one next week

Gracie (aka Barkley) checking out her future home

3/23/25

 We had to rent a texture sprayer to get the texture on the walls so decided to arrive Saturday morning and only rent the machine for two days. It went well, and we finished and cleaned up the machine on Saturday. Since everything is taped up for texturing and painting the walls, we were limited on where we could work, so we decided to tackle cleaning and sweeping the attic on Sunday in preparation for blowing insulation into the attic in the future. Thankfully, a cool front came in this morning which kept the attic from heating up too much. I don't ever venture up into the attic or under the house but volunteered to help in order to get it done more quickly. We cleaned out 16-20 five gallon buckets of 80+ years of broken shingles, dirt, etc. It was miserable, but we finished and are very pleased to have unexpectedly completed a large and dreaded project.

Next week, we'll paint the inside of the house and work on some other projects as time allows, such as possibly starting repair work on areas of the wood flooring or continuing to work on electrical rewiring. 

We left at 6:30am, picked up the machine in town, and caught the sunrise in Ralls.

 

We put on an orange peel texture

 

The attic cleaning project

3/16/25

 We were back at it this weekend after a 7 day cruise on Harmony of the Seas out of Galveston that took up the past couple of weekends. Friday was extremely windy all day, even by Lubbock standards, with up to 84 mph gusts at the Lubbock airport.  The conditions were terrible, but the winds were mostly at our backs, so we decided to make the trip. Rick averaged about 20 mpg in his van, and I got 46 mpg in my Rav4 even though the first 20 or 30 miles were not just a tailwind.

We finished touching up and sanding the sheetrock, sanded the living room and laundry room ceilings, repaired cracks in the living room ceiling, prepped windows/floor/electrical plugs & light switches for painting, put on sheetrock paint throughout the house, sprayed weeds in the yard, and cleaned up fallen branches and the old TV antenna in the yard. (We applied more sheetrock paint to some areas on Sunday after the photos were taken, and I never got a photo of the laundry room for some reason.) 

It was a productive weekend. Next week we'll texture the walls. All of the floor and window prep remains in place, and we'll have to figure out the logistics of renting an acoustic sprayer for next weekend. 

Cozumel (our ship is on the left)

Promenade deck at night looking up into central park

Repairing cracks in the living room ceiling

3 ceiling cracks repaired with first layer of mud

Starting to paint in 2nd bedroom

Guest bathroom prepped and ready for sheetrock paint

Master bed room prepped for sheetrock paint

Master bedroom

Main bathroom

 

Repairing a 4th sheetrock crack we found after painting

Kitchen looking south before last paint touchup

Kitchen looking north before final paint touchup

3rd bedroom with sheetrock paint

Hallway looking east after sheetrock paint

Hallway looking south after sheetrock paint

Working on the last (hopefully) sheetrock crack in the living room

Master bedroom after sheetrock paint but before final touchups

2nd bedroom after sheetrock paint but before final touchups

Guest bathroom after sheetrock paint

Main bathroom after sheetrock paint