Happy 2011

Happy New Year!

The holidays have come and gone. Our guests have come and gone. Now it's back to the renovating.

The electrician should be finishing up this week, cross your fingers. (Seriously. This is week 5. He said in his initial bid it would take him a week. He'd better freaking be done this week. I'm kind of tired of him.)

Brad and I need to sit down and figure out what our next moves will be. I want to paint. But that may not be the most pressing item. I just love how finished things *feel* with fresh paint. And beautiful counter tops would be even MORE beautiful when not surrounded by unfinished drywall, right? And I guess while we're at it we can re-hang the trim that we had to pull down in order to put in that new drywall... that might help with the "finished" look...

Anyway, no pics this post. Sors. We'll try to get some up soon.

Hooray, 2011! Here's hoping you'll bring happiness and success! (And timely electricians.)

Walls!

Today the drywall was put up, and it looks much nicer than it did yesterday. Here are some photos of the work.

Notice the flooring that we've laid from the post the other day. I think we need to clean it.

The tile is gone! Tomorrow the island will be marble will be installed.

The big hole in the wall behind the fridge is now gone.



Holy Sh*t!

Thursday night Jessica walked into the house and the first words out of her mouth were "Holy Sh*t!" This is because I began removing the drywall in the kitchen. While there was kind of a cool look to the 50s plastic tile in the kitchen, it doesn't work at all with what we are doing aesthetically. We wish we could have only removed the tile, but the old glue for the tile has left removing the drywall as our only option. Furthermore, we need to remove the linoleum tiles in the kitchen to lay the new cork floor. As a result, our kitchen (and due to the dust, the rest of the house) is more disastrous than it was before.

Living Room Art

Last weekend, while taking a break from work and renovations I started to design artwork to be placed on our main living room wall. The sketches started as some sort of graphic representation of where Jessica and I are from, how we met, and how we’ve ended up in Chicago. However, I soon realized I was making this thing way too complicated and it was becoming very ugly. I pretty much started over with the aspects I liked and then showed Jess. Her eye and new vantage point was exactly what the design and my brain needed. The design then became this:

It is the state of Nebraska (where Jessica is from) overlaid on the state of Kansas (where I’m from) to create a conceptual version of the Chicago flag. Since I know nothing about sewing, Jessica is going to create the design as an actual flag. We’re then going to frame the flag so it doesn’t look straight out of a dorm room.