guacamolepizza

I’m in love with this console table. Someone find it for me at an affordable price, stat!

In other news, the kitchen floor is being ripped out so that the foyer and the landing between the flights of stairs can be patched. I’m not too sure what we’ll be walking on in the kitchen since we’re not planning on updating that room for several months.

Lots of changes at the condo. The carpet’s been removed from the stairs and upstairs. All that’s left upstairs is the padding that was underneath. The steps have been leveled out (the left side was lower than the right on every single step) and covered in wood. When we refinish the wood floors, the treads will be stained to match the dark walnut color we have in mind.

This one area has been changed so much, it’s hard to envision it looking like it did before. I don’t actually have a picture of that over-sized step at the bottom, but you can at least see where the banister used to be in this picture. And in this picture you can see the area in transition, after the step was removed and the closet door was lowered.

[I went back and found some pictures from recently sold units where you can see the large step and banister at the bottom of the stairs, here and here.]

Will and I went to Kuhl-Linscomb to buy some pendant lights that I had found on sale a few days earlier when we spotted these sconces and fell in love. We need a pair for the half bathroom and thought these were perfect… until we looked at the price tag. I believe K-L was originally selling them for $580/piece (slightly cheaper than the $610 from this picture’s site), but were marked down 50%! The sale price makes them quite a steal (I haven’t found them discounted anywhere), but still out of our price range. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I can’t find anything even remotely similar to them.

The bar is gone. Some were sad to see it go. The people who saw it in pictures thought it looked cool in a retro way and the people (cough Aussies cough) who saw it in person decried the removal of anything related to alcohol.

Will and I were very happy to see it go. Admittedly, it looked kind of cool in pictures, but in reality it was an awkward piece that obstructed and closed off the space.

There’s been a lot of progress at the condo. I painted the banister white, which made a huge difference. I almost don’t dislike it now since it blends into the background. Removing that large step and banister at the bottom of the staircase really opened up the room. The closet door was lowered so now you’ll have to step up into the closet, but it looks much more normal now.

We removed the square molding and chair rail following the stairs and hallway. You can kind of see what it looked like in this post. Here is my rant about that:

Dear future DIY-ers,

Please do not glue decorative trim to the wall. I know there have been tutorials on some popular DIY blogs telling you to glue boards to walls, but DON’T DO IT! See that ugly brown spot at the top of the stairs? That’s where we pulled off dark blue square molding. It continued up the stairs and down the hallway. However, because it followed the stairs, there was a mixture of rectangles and parallelograms. Normally, you would just nail the trim on the walls, but for some unknown reason the previous owners decided that they would attach the trim to thin plywood boards and then glue the whole thing to the wall. It was ugly.

The brown spot is there because pulling off the decorative trim damaged the sheetrock. Which means we had to replace all of the sheetrock. All the way up the stairs and in the hallway.

I know it is enticing because it’s fast to glue things to walls, but if you’re going to do something, do it right, not because the room will ZOMG TRANSFORM BEFORE YOUR EYES IN MINUTES. If you ever want to change what you’ve done, it will take you much longer to replace the sheetrock behind the trim. Nails are your friends.

Things have been busy, busy, busy. The past week+ has been hectic, although if you were to ask me what I’ve been up to I wouldn’t be able to give any detailed answers beyond volunteering, condo stuff, and hanging out with Aussies.

This is my living room ceiling right now. We had an electrician come in to install recessed lighting and ethernet. After about a week of work, we now have a new electrical panel (the old one was on its last legs and was flagged in the inspection report), recessed lighting in all the rooms (the place had practically no lighting), moved light switches (the original placements did not make any sense), terminated some electrical outlets (no overhead lighting means the previous owners probably used a lot of lamps), hard-wired smoke detectors, and ethernet (hub will be in the downstairs closet). Essentially, the place has been completely rewired. I think the only original electrical left is in the kitchen, but even that will be redone when the kitchen is remodeled.

Next up is removing the wood bar, but luckily that will be free because our electrician is taking it and turning it into an outdoor bar at his house. There’s a lot more to do after that, but that’s a little further down the line.