Meg vs. the Stairs: Hiring it out!

Our friend took on the job of turning the back doors around (they used to open out over the stairs; not very safe!), framing them, and building new stairs for the sun room. They are amazing! So much better, so much safer. They even have a handrail =).

Meg vs. Safety: Fire/Carbon Monoxide Detectors

Wednesday: Put up new smoke/CO detectors. Call to set up final house inspection.

It has been a busy day. I have been trying to clean our house--really clean it--and have done everything but the floors and the tubs. That is a lot for me (I usually don't even manage to do the dishes daily!). So when the plug on the smoke detector didn't fit the plug in the ceiling, I couldn't bear to go out and turn off the electricity and re-wire it just before bed time. And good thing I didn't, because the little one decided he didn't want his dinner anymore just as I was putting him in bed, and kindly returned it onto my shirt (and his own jammies). So I gave myself a pass on that one.

However, I did install two combination smoke/carbon monoxide detectors in the hallways, so I didn't completely neglect the goal. My current plan is to do the last one later this week when we also put in the new light switch, since both require wiring in the same room.

Now that my 2-hour bedtime fiasco is over, time to get those floors and tubs and GO TO BED!

Meg vs. The Living Room: More Stinking Paint!

Thursday: Get paint samples for bedrooms and bathrooms. Scrape damaged paint from living room windows, then prime and paint.

I have to say, I am seriously tired of painting, and I still have about 80% of the house left to go. Blegh. Okay, the complaining is out of my system now.

We painted up our samples in our bedroom last night. We decided we would pick the color for our room, use that same color for the other bedrooms, then get the next darker coordinating color for our bathroom. We are holding off on picking paint for the kids' bathroom until we decide for sure on tile. Here are the samples:

Sorry for the horrible pictures! We chose the one on the left as a safer bet. The one on the right seemed a little dark and almost had a purple tinge to it. The last thing we want is to end up with all purple bedrooms! I am excited for clean, fresh walls if not for actually doing the job.

This afternoon during nap time I got to work on the front windows.

There were two places where the paint was bubbling up, and we were worried about water damage, so I scraped those spots off and took a look: no discernible damage. Yay! I started sanding a bit and was going to go at it with the electric sander to even things out again, when my common-sense alert kicked in: "This is a window on an old house! It isn't unlikely that one of these paint layers has lead! You are pregnant and have two kiddos! What are you doing?"

At this point I did what any experienced homeowner would do: I called my mom. "So, Mom, I think there's a good chance that the place I scraped has lead paint. So I think I should just stop right there and paint back over it."  "Yeah, I think you should do that."

So that's what I did. One coat of primer this afternoon, one coat of paint tonight, and another to come before the end of the week. It doesn't look too pretty, but not much worse than the big, bulging, chipping mess that was there before. Maybe sometime I'll have someone else deal with fixing it when the kiddos and me will not be near the premises. I also spent some time touching up all of the trim around the windows. Close inspection revealed that it was in dire need.

Ah, the perilous adventures of scatterbrained me trying to fix our old house!