Summer Projects 2018

Summer Projects

The reason I have been off-the-radar

This summer has been one of the most DIY projecty (word?) that I have ever been.  I usually pick one big DIY thing to do during the summer and this year I took on some big projects.  There are so many things that come along with owning a house.  We chose to buy a bigger but older house, but along with that comes lots of fixing up that needs to happen.  This summer I took on redoing our cabinets, paint-fest in the master suite and sitting room, and bought and installed a swimming pool (with major help from Dad and Mom).

Let's start with the kitchen cabinets.  Kelly said she wanted this done and I thought she was crazy.  The dark cabinets we had didn't show any dirt at all (which I was a fan of).  In hindsight she was right.  Painting them made the whole kitchen look brighter and much BIGGER!  I thought that I would start and finish these in a week.  Well, that was WAY OFF.  I started about a week and a half before we left for vacation.  It took about two weeks after we got back to get it all finished.  This was much more of an undertaking than I originally thought.  

The original dark brown.

The priming process.

As this whole thing began to drag on longer and longer, I took less and less progress photos.

Final product sans Kelly's kitchen decorations.

Painting the Master suite and sitting room was a wild hair that I got one day.  It started with painting the bathroom and then I decided that while I had all the painting stuff out I would go ahead and paint the wood wall that was in there.  I had to fill all the cracks between the boards, sand them down, and paint them.  I must say I feel like I made the right decision.  I am always leery about painting brick and wood because once you commit you can't go back.  It turned out just fine though.  It is a lot more contemporary look.  

I forgot to take before pictures, so these are pictures of the bathroom before we moved in. 

...and post paint-fest

And the bedroom and sitting room, once again not good at taking before pictures.

I also turned this ugly closet into a mudroom for all our stuff.

I've been thinking about that closet conversion ever since we moved in.  

I also painted the guest bathroom from yellow to classic Huffman Gray.

Last but not least, the pool.  We had planned on putting in a pool in a few years, but Kelly really wanted to fast-track that.  After seeing the prices of new ones and tapping into my dad's expertise in pools, we decided to buy one off Sell-it-Semo.  We found a steal and snagged it up!  My dad and mom offered to help me move it and put it up.  Dad also has a backhoe so he brought that up to do the dirt work.

Right away we found a MONSTER cedar stump just under the surface.  We had to dig down like 12ft to get it out.

Leveled out and laying out the framework.  I borrowed Grandpa's tillers to tear up the dirt a little so it would dry up. 

A little late night retaining wall building.  That was a really long day and I was beat after I built this. 

Big Helper!

Walls are up! 

My mom is a very hard worker!

Finally...Water!

The Inaugural Swim!

That is how I spent my summer.  I did some outside stuff like clearing up bushes and small trees, but I didn't take pictures of those.  I am going to have to sow some grass this fall after all the outside stuff I did.  The work for a homeowner is never done.  I get tired of doing these things, but I can't sit still for too long and need to keep me busy.  This spring I know we need to deck around the pool, I am not looking forward to that.  Haha!