ADD Home Improvement

It feels like I have been suffering from ADD (attention deficit disorder) when it comes to fixing up our new house.  I am leaving half started projects all over the place.

The first weekend we had possession, I started by trying to remove the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom. It was an awful plaid, and an affront to the senses. I couldn't remove any flooring or start with my kitchen plans until after the appraiser came back to the house and verified there was carpet everywhere and that we had kitchen appliances.

J wanted to have a couple functioning toilets and sinks. He discovered that the upstairs toilet was grouted to the floor and wasn't properly installed. Hmmm. Interesting. When he pulled it up to put a new wax ring in place, he discovered previous owners had installed the tile right on top of the vinyl flooring. For you beginners out there, this is NOT the right way to install tile. So, we knew we had to pull it up. He abandoned the plumbing so that he could pull up the tile so that he could properly install the toilet. At that point, we made the awesome discovery that there was mold on the floor around the toilet, due to improper tile installation. So, we cut out the subfloor in that spot so that we could replace it with non-moldy flooring. Well, since there's now a big hole in the floor in that bathroom, no toilet, and I quit with the wallpaper removal because I was convinced I would trip and fall in the hole.

We finished the flooring assignment and then J left on his business trip, leaving me with a shockingly little amount of supervision on home improvement.

I decided to begin by tearing out all of the flooring. The upstairs bedrooms and hall were gross but uneventful. Then came the tile floor on the main level. This turned out to be really messy and time consuming. Plus, we needed a trailer to put the broken tile bits in (as well as the carpet), and my father in law's trailer was not available. I decided to jettison this idea, figuring when J got back, he could do it quicker, and the trailer would be available, so cleanup would be possible. Then I decided to move on to stripping the rails and spindles so that I could refinish them. This was not going well. The stripper I bought wasn't as effective as envisioned, and it was very frustrating.

After a couple days of this, I was re-reading all the tutorials on painting cabinets, and it occurred to me that the cabinets project is going to be a couple weeks. Maybe I should get going on the cabinets, and strip the banisters while I waited for paint to dry?

So, I moved on to cabinets. I got all of the faces removed from the cabinets and put in the garage. Here I encountered another problem- there's an awful lot of carpet and pad in the garage, and an awful lot of cabinet faces. I also started envisioning the sprayer spraying paint. If I don't clean the garage up, I'm going to have little bits of carpet and pad permanently painted to my garage. I need to get that carpet out of there! But no trailer.

So I go back inside, and start scrubbing down the cabinet boxes so I can just paint those. Except, I realize that the tile floor is probably going to interfere with my painting. So, I need to get that tile out.

I swear, my life has become "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie"