Family room is Finished!

Well, OK, it was finished several months ago, but I never got around to posting pictures. Here are some images of our new room. We love it.

Scroll down to see what it looked liked before!

Our Move

A few quick shots, courtesy of my mom, an occasional commenter here. Here we are pulling the truck into our old front yard, my dad is directing me back. He did a fantastic job.

All magically loaded up, now the truck is at our new house. Here you can see our super duper friends that today, doubled as our moving crew. They were absolutely awesome and we owe them big time. We got our whole three bedroom house moved in under four hours.

And this is one of my mom's shots of our fabulous bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa). It is huge. Our house is two stories, a good 18 feet tall probably. She did a fantastic job of capturing the massiveness of this specimen tree. It mesmerizes me as we sit on the deck and look up at it. It is quite awesome.

And here is my brother and I last weekend scraping away wallpaper glue from our family room wall. This is the project that I've been blogging about so much. That same wall now has a layer of primer on it and several layers of joint compound. It is quite amazing for me to look back at this shot and think just how much work I've done.

We're in the house. My new blogging locale is in my basement, which several of our movers and even my aunt labeled "The Man Cave". I miss my little back bedroom that looked out on the backyard, but I think I'll be able to figure something out. Like getting the laptop to actually connect to our wireless router, and then I can blog from the backyard. That would be cool.

For those of you that don't know the Columbus area, we've moved about three miles north of our house in the beechwold neighborhood to the city of Worthington, which predates the city of Columbus, although now this little burb is mostly surrounded by Columbus. We're in the suburbs, sort of. Our house was built in 1966, really when suburbs were just starting to ramp up. I'm not a five minute walk from the river anymore, but I am a five minute bike ride. We'll be getting out and exploring more of the Olentangy as time allows. It should be great fun. And there sure is plenty of work around the house. Boxes to unpack, things to organize, and of course, I can't forget about that little family room project I started!

Tom

The Skim Coat

Megan and I are back from the house. Today, we put in a good eight hours working. My dad taking down wallpaper in the master bedroom, my mom removing old caulk from the bathroom tub, my grandpa and brother pulling out English Ivy, and Megan and I removing glue from the family room. We did it. All the glue is gone. Unfreakin' believable. It took us a good five more hours today. We scrubbed the walls with scotch-brite pads forever. It was such a feeling of accomplishment when we finished, I couldn't believe it was over.

Earlier in the day we stopped at Sears Hardware to get everything I would need to put a skim coat on the ragged walls. Joint compound, knife, compound trough thingy, tape, sand paper, more dropcloths, and uncountless other stuff. We even found a metal table on sale for $25.00. Crazy.

So after all the glue was gone, I could finally use the stuff we purchased. I began by taping all the trim and walls. Then I dug into the 5 gallon bucket of joint compound. I can now see why it is called mud. It really has a quite pleasant consistency and texture. I loaded up the trough, mixed in a tiny bit of water with a small putty knife, and finally dug in with the big knife. The first few passes were kind of rough, but after a while, I learned how to "feel" the right amount of mud to put on the walls. I bet the people that do this for a living could do it blindfolded! By 8:30, I was ready to quit, but I had covered the majority of one whole wall. Finally, our walls are starting to look like walls rather than an art project gone seriously wrong. I can't wait to get back at it. Skim coating is way more fun that scraping and scrubbing off glue.

Tom

Our New House

Megan and I are working quite hard to get our new house ready to move in. So far, we've tackled the family room by removing the wallpaper and residual glue. Zinnser DIFF has been a lifesaver for us. We started out by using a squirt bottle and moved up to a gallon jug applied with a paint roller. After rolling on, it seems to take about 5 minutes before the glue begins to come off using a putty knife. Hard work with a sponge gets the remaining bits of glue off.

The next question: To Skim Coat or Not?

Tom