The stain on the wood is so dark it is practically black…I hate it, but HE likes it.  I’d rather just paint it white!  The “Cheery” looks good with the “Sahara Desert” baseboards and “Moonrise White” window trim. 

We painted the entire bathroom “Sahara Desert” and I made Hawaiian-style curtains for it.

Skeeter had three new fans put into each of the bedrooms.  Ariel rehung all the curtains.  I made new curtains for the kitchen/dinette window…you guessed it…Hawaiian-style.

Skeeter proceeded to tear out the nasty, ugly, smelly, yucky carpet, and the whole place looked 10x better.  We discussed, animately, the reasons why we needed to leave the tack boards down and just cover them up.  I found molding at the Habit for Humanity store, for very cheap.  We nailed the molding on top of it.  It doesn’t look that bad.  Skeeter decided to use the same molding on the ceiling.  I was skeptical, but it turned out rather cute.

The real nightmare was the kitchen cupboards.  We painted them white, and they looked bad.  So we painted them to match the walls, they looked even worse.  Then we decided we would take the doors off and go with either the no door look or the curtain look…all of which I have seen in the latest remodeling magazines and remodeling shows.  But with the doors off, the paint left on the frame looked really bad.  Of course, we tried to peel this off…yeah right, like that worked.  We then had new doors made out of, I think birch, but I really don’t know.  Now they really looked bad…new doors, messed up frame.  Skeeter ended up finding a guy who does vineer…he ended up doing the frame for us.  I was going to do it myself, but Skeeter told me no way. They are a little two-toned, but actually look pretty good.

We carried the tile through from the studio into the kitchen.  It looks a lot better.  It looked a lot better after Skeeter ripped the carpet out.  Heck, I would have lived with the kitchen floor like that, it looked so much better. 

We’re at the little things now and hopeful we get a responsible person to live in it.

Stay tuned for updates and be sure to check out the yard section…that will have updates really soon.

Skeeter and I decided that we could tile the whole studio ourselves.  No need for an expert, we’ll just consult the book (or the Internet).  So off we go to buy everything we need, which we are both clueless about.  After several days and several stores later, we manage to have just about everything we need.  I read the book and it says to make a plus sign, which will be your centering lines.  Sure, that sounds easy enough, I remember math, how hard can it be.  Let me tell you, it took us 2+ hours to place the tiles in the “plus sign”.  We measured and remeasured, and moved tiles back and forth, and side-to-side, and everything else imaginable.  We finally got them just so…the conversation went something like this…”No you do it, no you do it, I’m not doing it, you do it….”  Neither of us wanted to put the adhesive down for fear we might mess everything up.  We sat there for what seemed like hours trying to decided who was going to do it and how to start, or where to start, or what to do, etc.  We went with the book’s suggestion, which is start at the end of one of the center lines, and do one tile at a time.  In hindsight, DON’T DO IT THIS WAY!  After three tiles, we decided that was the stupid way and would take us the next month to finish it.  We moved to doing 2 tiles at a time, then three.  We got to the point where we were doing as many as could be reached at one time.  Skeeter laid the adhesive and I laid the tile (using the spacers even though Skeeter did not want to use them).  I thought we made a pretty good team.  Oh, by the way, remember the first three individual tiles, yeah, well we had to move them a bunch of times to get them lined up right.  After a few days we got most the tile down except for a few by the back door.  Skeeter decided to do these himself…yes, you can tell! 

We moved on to do the small room off the studio.  This created a bit of a tiff between us.  Skeeter wanted to do it this total jacked up way and I wanted to follow the book.  After (Skeeter’s) huffing and puffing, and grumbling, I finally got my way.  Plus, I kept telling him to call his son.  At every corner he’d get on the phone and ask what about this or that or can we do this or that.  It was kind of funny, in a way. 

The next several days were trying to do the “cuts”.  We had some done by the store, some we tried ourselves, which we did not use, and other we marked for cutting.  When we got as far as we could, Skeeter took the carpet out of the kitchen of the Main House and we decided to tile that too.  Finally we were ready to grout, but I think Skeeter thought we were too far in over our heads so he called his son again.  This time he made a deal that he would pay for a 14-day trip with 7 working days and 6 vacation days, if his son and his wife came over and finished the tiling and did a few other jobs. 

Through the past few days the “family” has been working on the house.  The tile is done and even sealed.  I did not go today but am hopeful it looks good.  I do know we have to go back in and repaint the mess made from the tiling, but hopefully it will not be too bad.

I have learned a valuable lesson…never do a job you can pay someone else to do for you!