Phewy!

Wally's parents came and helped this past T-F. What a HUGE relief for us all! Home cooking and help with baby, chores, and renos. I don't even know where to start. We put up crown molding in the dining room, bought and painted all the shoe molding (kinda like quarter round) and baseboard, Wallace mudded a bunch of holes in various closets, mowed the lawn, sprayed poison ivy and the trumpet vine, helped Wally with carpentry stuff, and who knows what else. Ruth cooked, cleaned, took care of Rhi, and painted and caulked, and who knows what else! Wallace pulled the huge bookcase off to reveal a bunch of mildew. Thankfully it only was on the surface of the wall and not in the sheetrock, so we cleaned it and will seal it before painting. Wally used the borrowed nailgun to put up the molding in some rooms, and finally it convinced him to buy one!! YES!!! I am so happy. I have been trying to convince him to buy one for a month now! So it should come any day, and we'll get the molding up. (don't know how to spell it, sorry if it's wrong :)

Wally got up some more cabinets and began making a wine rack and shelves for the dinging room, and a sliding door for the pass through in the dining room. The sliding door will close off the dining room from the kitchen so if there's tons of dirty dishes on the counter, no one will see them :)

The pantry is painted, Rhi's room is almost COMPLETELY done! The only room in the house that is completed. We just have to put the vent on, rearrange her furniture, put up curtains and various decorations (the easy stuff). Hooray!

One wall of the family room is primed. The old washer and dryer are removed from the family room, and some of the outlets are in the outlet boxes in the dining room and kitchen! The kitchen is primed and one coat of paint is on. We didn't paint the whole thing b/c I want to use the white tile that we removed from the old kitchen to make a baksplash and buy some cool blue and yellow accent tile (Spanish or Italian handpainted) to give it "pop" as dumb HGTV would say.

And we are a little more unpacked! And the huge venetian blind is washed and hanging back up so our neighbors can't drive/walk by and think about why we are such slobs and lazy slow pokes b/c we haven't unpacked yet.

Funny story: I was off to Home Depot to get baseboard by myself. For some reason, they only sell them in 16 ft sections...can you say difficult? I had 1/2 h to get it out of the slots, cut it on my own, take it to the front, and buy it. First I grabbed and cut the wrong thing, b/c someone had put a piece of the stuff I wanted in the wrong section. I saw that piece was bowed, so I just grabbed one that wasn't not realizing it was totally different! Oops. So then I ran back to get the right stuff. This time as I was removing it, the entire piece fell apart at the joints! Wood cascaded all around me. I wondered what else could go wrong, but didn't have time to hypothesize. I did it with 5 minutes to spare! Wow! I just hope no one was watching on video camera.

And now for some pics:

Dining crown molding up.

Beginnings of cabinets.

Painted pantry and doors.


Oven in place, counter top underlayment in. (eventually, this may have laminate, or preferably, we'd got straight to some kind of solid surfacing).


Rhi's room painted.

And last but not least:

Watching Clemson stomp Florida State...a bit of relaxation...finally!