More Tile Removal

Now that it isn't so rainy (it has been such a wet year that we have had to put some home improvement tasks on hold because we didn't really have a place for little dude to chill), we finally set aside a weekend for home improvement.  AND MORE TILE REMOVAL!


In an effort to not make the house a huge dust blob, we put up plastic...

But we learned if hubs ran any type of fan at all, you know, so he wouldn't be in hot box ... the plastic fell down. But we had our hearts set on 4 1/2 rows of tile in the kitchen area.

It pretty much took several hours, convinced us we should buy more tools, and we spent the next week or two getting the thin set chipped up, but behold, less tile. 

DeJa Vu -- It's raining in our kitchen...

At the end of 2018, our Toddler surprised us one night to tell us it was raining in the kitchen... This marked our 2nd incident where our upstairs neighbors decided to do plumbing repairs without properly turning off the boiler. (Incident one was their shower install... incident two was in their kitchen above)...

And unfortunately, this was in addition to the Slab leak and all the water we found under the tile in our little man's room...  So imagine our our surprise to see this happen AGAIN.  Same owner... same renters...

But this time they decided plumbing repairs should be done at 10 pm at night... Yup, you read that correctly, 10 pm at night.  Hubs was doing dishes in the kitchen and saw water leaking down...

Naturally I went up there to let them know what was going on, and instead of stopping, they continued to do "repairs." So water leaked into my house for 2 hours straight... yup, we couldn't do to bed until Midnight.

at 10:35 pm the HOA after hours emergency line returned my call, informing me they would dispatch the plumbing company that can turn the boiler off. Ironically, it was the same person I spoke to the last time this happened...

10:56 pm, HOA calls me back to confirm I have an ETA from the plumber with an arrival time. I inform her that I do not have an ETA and have not gotten a call from the pluming company.

When the renters "plumber" AKA the homeowners handyman (who apparently does electrical work too... which is just plain scary.. ) tried to ask me to run my water so they could flush stuff out. I had to refuse because it would damage my unit more since the water wasn't turned off in the building! I pleaded again for them to stop working until the water was shut off, but they refused.

11:20 pm, I got fed up and called the plumbing company directly, and asked for an ETA of arrival since my unit was getting rained on. They tell me I should get a call in 10 minutes from the driver with an ETA.

11:45 pm, water still coming down and no call from the plumber.... but he shows up 5 minutes later and he told me he didn't call because he was already on the way... this was on the stairwell of the neighbors unit, as he didn't even come into mine.

12:06 AM the water stops leaking down... we hear lots of pipe cutting noises... but since the water isn't leaking, and since no one is coming to our unit since the problem is above us, we put box fans up in the kitchen facing the ceiling and go to sleep.

------ Next day ------

Emails with photos to the HOA .... they dispatch the flood remediation company .... the next day they come to the property, and end up cutting a HUGE hole in our ceiling.... remove all the installation.... and tell us the bad news...

 
We are going to have to close all our doors and windows for the next 3-5 days, and run the dehumidifiers and super jet fans on constant cycle.... because these pull so much power, they have to disconnect a few appliances...

Oh ya, and these things radiate heat so your house is going to be a hot box... but because your kitchen is still "accessible" the HOA won't relocate you during the drying out process... even though you don't have AC in your unit.... and you won't be able to talk or hear anything in this area because they are REALLY loud.

So, we let it go.

We ordered take out, barricaded ourselves in the master bedroom and sealed off the hall way so we could at least open a window in one room for fresh air and lower temps to sleep.. and we dealt with it.

It got up to 93 degrees.... would have been more but we lucked out and its be in the mid 60's and 
raining off and on... and not a typical California June.  


The good news was that the technician told me that because the hole was so huge (they had to cut around a can light so its just floating now), if we didn't turn the fans and heaters off they might be able to come by on Wednesday and check the status and remove the equipment before the weekend. so instead of 5 days, it would be Wed Night, 24 hours on Thursday, and hopefully removal by mid-day on Friday.

I update HOA that i'm booking the inspection for Friday and cross my fingers....

------- Friday -------

They come, and we have a 6% moisture level.... anything under 12% is considered dry, so we were like bone dry!

Now I have to coordinate with the HOA to have the drywall and my can light replaced, and for them to texture the ceiling.

Apparently we will have to pay for it to be painted and they won't paint it this time (apparently last time they decided to be nice and just pay the guy to paint it, but our new rep isn't going to authorize the painting.

When the repair company comes, i'm going to ask them to quote me to paint it if i already have the matching paint and see what he will charge me... and if I can get "the landlord" to reimburse me for the costs... cause I really don't want to sand a ceiling down AGAIN...   I've spent enough time in a drywall dust mask in this unit already...

We've been ripping up a lot of tile

Now that I'm getting caught up on a lot of home improvement posts, I have a more recent update for  you all! Hubs has been slowly chipping away at our tile. In the WHOLE HOUSE. You may have noticed some tool expenditures in the January spending report, and this would be why!

For those of you who don't know, we are removing the flooring for a few reasons:

We don't have tile under our bathroom sink.

When we moved in, we realized that the large cabinet in our bathroom that was supposed to be a bathroom vanity, was just a kitchen cabinet with a bathroom sink on top... and that it was poorly connected to the plumbing. When water damage was in the unit prior to the sell, they realized they couldn't purchase a new bathroom vanity that would work with the old floor layout (they would have to re-do the floors because cabinets aren't the same size they were 20 years ago). Naturally they didn't want to spend that much money to sell it, having the same tile everywhere else, so they tossed a kitchen cabinet in there with a sink, since it was larger than the missing tile portion.

It was horrible. Too close to the toilet, no actual storage space in there. The doors didn't have shelves, just opened to one large space.

We installed an IKEA wall mounted cabinet (the legs are just for "show") but we don't have tile on the floor there... it hasn't bothered us since we moved in, but its missing.   

No tile here...

When we installed our new tub, they took out a couple tiles to make it sit properly on the concrete.

I gave them permission to do this in advance if it was necessary since there was no tile under the sink and i'd rather have my new tub properly installed and level.

We also removed that weird "half wall" glass partition in our kitchen that was an electrical nightmare. 

Add caption

If you don't remember the pantry turned office space that was too small for a laptop and contained more fire hazards then I could count, were glad its gone...  We have much more open concept space with it out, but its removal left a fun "gap" in our tile. 

Also, all throughout the house there are high and low gaps, grout lines that don't match, places where the tile isn't even straight with the wall... it was poorly done. 

So new flooring would be in our future.

We got an initial flooring measure and quote from home depot a while ago to replace all of our flooring, which was for $8,762.98, which includes removing tile and replacing it and new carpet in our master bedroom... but there are always "contingencies" with any improvement project and we don't have the full $9,000 right now. We decided a new tub was something that needed to take priority over new floors and every day, we feel we made the right decision. 

The quote above also didn't include putting on baseboards, which we had to remove for the massive ant infestation we endured right after moving in. 

We also found out (because I ask questions) that if they remove the tile and there is damage to the concrete, any cracks, etc more costs get added on... 

Right now, about half the cost is for tile removal, so we decided to start to remove the tile ourselves, and reassess the quote when they can see the bare concrete. It's a good thing we did. 

Hubs started hitting out tile the old cheap way. Hammer, mallet, and sweat equity. He made some progress, but getting the thin set up was hard work so the ground would be smooth enough to walk on... 

 So we bought some tools, hit out a few more tiles and were making some great progress.

Little man and I had a birthday party to attend, hubs thought it might be a good day to do some work in his room, since we would be out of the house.  He planned to only remove some tile that we could hide with his bed and set to work. It was going great so he popped out another row and the found water....

water under our tile.... 

We had no idea if it was a slab leak, prior water damage that never dried, or from the recent rains, so we couldn't stop until we found dry tile... So he kept going... with every tile we popped out, we were left with more water... then a dry tile, then more water... We ended up having to remove all of the tile in a single day from his room.

I even helped out and got a few tiles out after the party, but hubs did like 99% of the work.  We got all the tile up, but not the thin set because it was too wet to come up with tools and hubs wanted to dry it out. We set up fans and sure enough, the next morning it was dry.

 Little man slept "camp" style in the living room and the next day hubs removed all the thin set.

We found 2 cracks in the concrete slab, but we also had 7 days of continuous rain before we decided to rip up the tile. So we don't know if the water came from the rain up through the cracks because the last homeowners DID NOT sealed the concrete before adding tile... No moisture barrier... 

So now we are going to have to wait for more rain to see if we run into this issue again and leave the bare slab... so we just tossed a large area rug from the living room so little man has "most of a floor"...

 If we don't get rain soon, we are going to saturate the outer walls with gallons of water around our unit to "make rain effects" and see what happens. 

So now we do "rug checks..."

We got a new tub!

You can see how much higher the new shower stall is!

So, after spending $234.47 on a bathroom shower rod, curtains, and tub fixtures.... and $500 to resurface the tub... we realized we could no longer salvage our bathroom tub/shower. It got us through a year and then we saw the peeling start... and the fixtures actually break.

While at one point the Hot water actually came out as hot after we did some improvements, but shortly after our hard work, the fixtures we installed broke due to the horrible valves they were attached to.

Hot water was cold.... cold water was hot. When showering you'd go from glacier to boiling because you couldn't move from one water temp to the other easily... or really at all.

Bye bye crappy shower unit.

After looking into options and making a few phone calls we found out that paying $5500 for a new fiberglass tub was not an option. With only a single shower for three people, putting in fiberglass was NOT recommended. We needed something more durable to keep us with the heavy use.

So we paid $150 to have the water shut off in our building and turned back off....

We paid $170.50 for useless permits with our city... (they literally walked in, said, oh that looks nice, and left)...

Our new tub! we did a tub and three walls
that went up to the ceiling!

and we spent $7,740.00 for a new ceramic tub and shower including the following:

• We raised the shower head high so hubs wouldn't have to bend over and duck to wash his hair. The height in his own words is "miraculous." Even his dad loves it.
• We picked a wider and deeper tub for actual relaxing baths... and we didn't have to "move" any of the drains to get a larger tub in there thankfully!
• Took the shower all the way to the ceiling so we didn't have to worry about water hitting drywall.
• Had them re-pipe the tub area so hot was hot and cold was cold -- so an actual permanent fix!
• They fixed and replaced the valves that wouldn't move to allow us to adjust anything... so now we can control hot and cold water with a single finger
• They installed more storage shelves in the shower so we could get rid of the ugly shower caddies.
• And they properly installed a rounded shower rod (apparently hubs didn't tell me ours kept falling down...) 

And its amazing.

It's the best money we ever spent.

I know I say that after every home improvement project, but that's because we aren't spending money all at once. When you live with a problem for a while and learn to work around it and find out what you WANT it to do when it's done, you APPRECIATE it even more when the repairs take palce.

We use this room every day.... and by paying for nice materials, it will last us the duration of our time here, plus the next people who live here after us... which is why we bit the bullet and did this project first, even though it wasn't on our original project list.... and yes, we used Home Depot again.

Since our building has a lot of water issues, we wanted to know if something was done wrong, that it would be made right again... and it was competitive pricing.

Now, every morning, I love my bathroom.

Final look!

Our Ceiling fans broke

I know there have been a lot of home improvement posts as I have been trying to get us caught up on the blog for the stuff we did in 2018 that never got recorded, but alas, we had a few hic-ups already in 2019 which bar more posts.

The original ceiling fans we bought for the condo were crap. The one in little dudes room stopped working 5 months after it was installed. We put a box fan in his room with intentions of replacing it this year before summer.... but then, as fate would have it, our bedroom fan just crapped out on us.

We have noticed a little noise from the fan a few months ago when we turned it off to clean it, but it went away. Well Hubs turned it off to clean it this month and I turned it back on later that night to the inevitable pop.

So we decided to replace all three with the old brand I installed in my original condo... How did I remember which brand I bought 8 years ago? Because Hubs would often hit the heavy logo'd pull chain on a regular basis. So when he decided the brand he picked was crap, he just googled photos of fans until he found the logo and then told me to find something like I did in the old place.

The result were three LED ceiling fans that give off more light (which is a bonus for little dudes room), and get this... they were cheaper than the crap we originally installed and paid WAY more for. Needless to say we are now forever "fans" of Hampton Bay.

$258.50 for all three fans and hubs installed them since they were going where the other three fans were.

• We originally paid $382.52 for ceiling fans that broke. 

Doors Doors and more doors

Since we were a little remiss in posting in 2018, I have a few home improvement updates to share with you all. The first being, we replace our doors... ALL of them.

The front door didn't close correctly and bugs were running into the light outside our door and crawling under our door to die in our house and attract ants... I even had a gecko find its way under my door. The thing was one good kick away from falling off.

So, what did we replace it with? a steel door and frame. It's awesome. We can put up magnets on the back and hang little dude's art up on the walls that he brings home from pre-school.

We again selected Home Depot for our doors because I'm a fan of lifetime warranties since we plan to be here for a total of 8-10 years, plus we weren't allowed to replace the front door ourselves per the HOA policy.

What it cost: Front Door:

• Installation materials and molding for around the door: $94.59
• Front Door: $280.68
• Haul away of old door: $35.00
• Labor: $392.00
• Credit for measure: $-50.00
• Tax: $29.08

Total: $746.35

We then replaced the bathroom, our double bedroom doors, and the door to little dudes room. We needed the inside doors replaced because the jams were so old in the bathroom that the whole thing warped and would sometimes lock little people inside...  We didn't do a door to cover the laundry room... because the only thing home depot carries in a size wide enough for the space is a mirrored slider door... which hubs doesn't like... so we are back to the drawing board there, but that will be a latter project.

What it cost: the rest of the doors:

• Installation materials: $105.91
• Single door: $151.96
• Double door: $379.32
• Single door: $151.96
• Labor: 498.00 for the two single doors
• Labor: 373.51 for the double master doors
• sales tax: $61.16

Total: 1,721.82

The largest cost was labor, but we didn't know what we were going to get with how old everything was... and it was a good thing we paid for their labor and didn't DIY this ourselves. Despite the professional measure, the master double doors were very difficult to replace because the entry way wasn't really the size that they measured. However their crew was able to still install the doors by modifying materials and swapping out trim.

I still need to paint everything, but New doors! It is so nice to be able to lock the bathroom on purpose then get stuck inside...

Little behind on posts...

I'm a little behind on posts and February will be a light month because i'm working a TON with Bunny Days, a grand re-opening and my regular load... but hey, were making magic happen one smile at a time, so it's all good in the end.

I literally just finished painting our dinning room though! I took today off work because i've got an event on Friday, and a training on Saturday and it was the only day I could flex some hours.

Hubs prepped and sanded the walls last night so I could paint them today!!!

Hello pretty Grey!

And these are the only walls I have left to paint... and then we will be rid of the horrible yellow of death...

Memo to self: Don't accept the "invite" to the co-worker "fitness" half hour lunch session the day before you plan to paint your dinning room... 

My shoulders were screaming at me before I even started and climbing down that ladder after a "21-day fix extreme" video was not fun on my booty... or squatting down to remove baseboards... or painting the lower walls....  I thought I was joining in on a little Pilates and stretch, maybe country heat or regular 21 day fix videos... not extreme...

Slab Leak...

The tiles "affected" are the 6 right
next to the washing machine (in
front and to the left of the machine)

Yup. Title says in all for this post.

I had just come home from the HOA board meeting where I was following up on the fact that the deck above my unit STILL hadn't been replaced... and I also suggested the HOA quote out and think about installing dog poop bags because renters are NOT cleaning up after their pets.

So I get back, kick off my boots and start walking down the hall to switch out of my work clothes for my beloved mickey mouse pj's when I noticed the tile underneath my bare feet was warm... I paused and did my version of the bare foot boogie as I slid my feet around to see how much of the tile was warm. Our condo is on a boiler system so warm tiles don't always mean slab leak because sometime older pipes aren't well insulated but it seemed to only be affecting about 6 tiles in the middle of the hall and the rest were their normal chilled temperature.

Super glad hubs and I bought
casters for all our storage racks.
Made it easy for me to roll
everything out of the way for
the plumbers to get in and work.

I got on my hands and knees trying to get more info on the heat and found one tile that was really too warm to stand on for very long. After some inventive skills on Hubs' part (he swapped the dead battery out on our forehead scanner thermometer and then ran it along the various tiles since we don't have one of those fancy point and shoot temperature gauges)... we determined the warm tiles were 104 degrees and the super warm ones were over 110 because all the thermometer would do would flash HIGH Temp warnings at us.

I typed out a quick email to our HOA company, letting them know I was suspecting a slab leak in my unit. Thankfully I was adjusting hours the following day and had a planned day off, so early in the morning the plumber came by to check everything out.

The hottest tile was running 118 degrees... and he was also concerned not only about the tile temp, but the fact that the temperature dropped off so quickly with the other tiles... Since our HOA doesn't fix floor leaks by ripping out the floor... and since we had no visual water damage because i'm a vigilant homeowner...

It meant they were going to cut into my new and freshly painted and textured hallway and laundry room walls....

They started with just 2 cuts.... and then needed to turn off the water in the three buildings that are attached to the boiler.... and then that turned into 7 holes as they found the leaky pipe.

Then the fun began... they couldn't get a hold of the HOA to authorize them to actually re-route the pipe the same day.... so to stop the leak, they capped off my hot water pipe... which, since we are on a boiler system, means that everyone down the line from me also can't get hot water.... and it was a Friday, which meant if they didn't re-route the pipe that day, no hot water for me, and some of my neighbors until MONDAY....

But i'm magic. All morning long the plumbers couldn't get a hold of the HOA... but I could... and it shocked them. I called at 9 am when they went to cut into my walls to make sure the HOA would pay to repair them leak or not, and the HOA took my call to the surprise of the plumber...

and when I called again that morning for authorization for emergency water shut off, they also picked up...

so after the plumber made 5 attempts and sent 2 emails and was about to leave for the day without giving me hot water till Monday, I called the HOA and they took my call and within 2 minutes I had a verbal authorization to his supervisor and he and his extra guy started to re-route the pipe through the walls...

Instead of using another copper pipe, they installed pex piping... and I stayed out of their hair while they worked... But apparently when they were swapping out the pipe, they spilled a bunch of water in little dudes room and didn't say anything to me. Instead, we found damp floor rugs and clothes later in the day after they left...  they did a "rush" wipe up and didn't move things to get the furniture out of the way so we had to clean up after them....      :(

• We had just purchased a new memory foam mattress for little dude (a thin twin version of ours for $90 off Amazon)... and the bottom of the box was so soaked that we didn't really have a choice but to take it out of the box to make sure it was still sealed and okay... and at that point keeping it hidden from little man was no longer an option, so he's sleeping on his big boy twin sized bed now... a whole 1.5 months BEFORE his birthday... (But he's not getting his buzz light year and woody bed set until his birthday)... He's stuck with the spare blue sheets we bought him.
• AND I have to re-wash all the clothes in his "I out grew" this bag, since the bottom of the bag got all wet.... 

We may still have some warm tiles in the future without a slab leak since 4 more pipes run in that area, but it looks like we caught the leak before any water damage occurred to our property.

Apparently on Tuesday or Wednesday the Drywall guy will come by to patch the holes and texture the walls... and Thursday they will paint and touch everything up the plumbers had to cut through.

But, this is seriously having us re-consider carpet.

Knowing that all future water leaks mean pipes will go through the walls, and having the plumber talk about the moisture seepage our association has with the concrete foundation, our only flooring options since we are on the ground floor are carpet or tile.

We planned to do carpet in the bedrooms and tile everywhere else, but now we are strongly thinking tile everywhere is the best way to go... so we are going to re-quote out what it would cost to tile everything.... but that also means we would have to figure out how to move our closets if we don't carpet our master. (Our original plan was to do new carpet around the closets and leave them in place....) 

Call that a completed living room

There isn't a whole lot you can write about when you talk about watching paint dry, but with our closets finished in the bedroom, I started itching to finish the rest of the place so we knocked out the living room. 

I edged while little dude played with dad and got half the room done on a Saturday... and since we have late church on Sundays, Hubs and I knocked out the smaller second half of the room before lunch so we could let it dry while we were at church.

 All that's left is the entry way and dinning room and then the kitchen! More of the house is finished then not!!!!

We purchased some casters for the shelves in the kitchen because when we pull everything out to paint, we plan to swap the shelves with the fridge, and wheels make all that work so much easier!!! We want to try out a new layout for our minor kitchen fixes we will be making since the kitchen will be the last thing we think about in project renovation.

I've been slacking off and I'm just now getting our neighbors to sign off on operation front and interior doors... But hubs is on the fence about clovering the hall closet with doors by the laundry room... I'm trying to sell him on the change because NO ONE wants to see a laundry room from the couch and not doing it will make selling this place much harder down the line. but two large doors would make the area very accessible, just not as accessible as its now open design...

After we get the doors in, we can do the floor once they and the trim are all painted... then we can put in the ikea storage built ins for the living room :)

Closets are done!

If you were paying close attention to our "what we spent in January" post, you would have likely noticed that we journey'd up to Ikea and bought our wardrobes... which means...

drum roll...

We have fully functioning closets.

You can see the closet boxes on the floor while hubs and little dude were battling it out with the cardboard boxes.

We did it over a the course of a few days, putting the double center together, then the single that makes up the three mirrored panels...

What followed shortly was the successful completion of emptying every single box we had yet to unpack after the move. We are slowly moving towards a clutter free space!!!!

We are still trying to figure out what we are going to do with the space at the very top and sides... (not sure if it will be best to by some molding pieces and make it look more built in or just leave it as is... 

But getting our closets done also has me itching to finish painting the living room by the end of the month so all I have left is the kitchen and dinning room areas.  

We have a bed...

I can do this... I can do this!

After disassembling our Murphy bed and sleeping on a mattress on the floor for several months, (or weeks? all I know is we felt like it was far too long on the floor)... in order to paint our bedroom walls a while ago... and to rip out the baseboards in our bedroom in an effort to kill the ant infestation.

I'm happy to say we actually slept on a REAL bed the other night and it was absolutely AHHH mazing!!!

Over the weekend we hit the wonderful world of Ikea with little dude in tow and purchased a new dinning room table for our kitchen (solid wood), a bed for our room, and the final wardrobe components for our master bedroom closet (full mirrored wardrobe and a half mirrored wardrobe) that we would need to assemble our expanded built in closet system.

We bought all three on a single day and opted for the glorious same day $59 delivery because, hey, if your paying $59 to have it delivered, might as well make it worth the drive and pick up other items we planned to purchase to avoid paying another $59 in the near future!

It's also the best deal in town not to have to figure out how to get things to fit in a Camry that are WAY too long to fit ... (Trust me, they wouldn't fit) and not having to carry them inside from the far parking lot is another bonus.

While i'll blog about the closet separately after we build it, (And we love our new kitchen table more than we thought was imaginable) our main priority was to sleep in a real bed...

We still have our Murphy bed from our 1 bedroom condo (and loved everything about it) and intend to keep it in our storage closet if needed at a future date... but after looking around and realizing we were seldom if ever lifting our bed up in the new condo, we decided to get a real bed frame.

Cardboard battles with Dad!

It didn't take long to assemble (we finished in in the morning after breakfast before heading to church after making lunch), and Little dude got to dress up as a paper ranger with the ikea packaging materials.

Hubs made a couple of swords by crushing a box insert to make a handle, and I created a crown and armor. It was a hit and kept him occupied for a majority of our building process.

But behold, we have a new bed and it is happy and amazing! 

Paper Ranger!

Ceilings Complete!

Earlier in the month I had a work event that went after hours and I ended up working a double shift... which meant I needed to take a day off to adjust my hours... and being the productive little bee I am, I decided to take a Friday off work so I could make the most of a home improvement weekend.

The end result?

I'm super excited to say that I won't have to paint another ceiling for a very, very, VERY long time!

My right arm is currently in a state of rebellion, and super sore, but I managed to paint the living room, dinning room and kitchen area all in a single day!

But before we touch on painting, I have to throw a shout out to the savior of the home improvement project... HUBS.

Hubs was a super hero helper and during the week before my scheduled paint day, he and I stayed up late after little man went to sleep, despite having work the next day, and together we taped plastic all over the living room and kitchen.

This is one of those things I will hands down say is WORTH the time spend to put up PLASTIC....

Drywall dust and mud get EVERYWHERE if you don't put up plastic and I had no desire to actually hand wash and clean everything I own in the condo... because it doesn't matter what room your sanding... it will find a way to get into the bathroom and down the hall... because dust carries well in the air and the wind.

Hubs looking like santa after sanding
our newly textured ceiling

We also made a point to put up plastic to block off the hall that leads to the rest of the place, essentially creating a plastic bubble.

So hubs used the ladder to hand sand our whole ceiling with a sanding brick in the middle of the night.

He looked like a pretty epic Santa clause when he was done.

If your wondering where I was during all the sanding, I was sitting on the tile in the hallway petting roxy safely behind a sheet of plastic.

My asthma has been acting up lately to the point where I actually got an inhaler from the doctor and have been using it a couple of times a week because I find myself wheezing late at night or early in the morning... the idea of sanding everything, even with a mask, was unappealing to my lungs and unlike painting, is something anyone can really do with little instruction... (We have a rule in our house that I paint... because I will be the worst critic of someone else who paints and that's not healthy for our marriage).

So, since I was hesitant to sand everything, hubs knocked it out like a rock star with his incredibly long and manly arms... He technically didn't need a ladder and could have used the step stool, but he didn't want me to feel like a shorty, lol.

Look what I found mom...

I'm darth vader...

So, since hubs sanded everything, I wanted to make the most of an entire day off of work while our little dude would be chilling at daycare with his little peeps.

So, I told myself I had a single day to paint the living room, dinning room, and kitchen area.

Ambitious, yes, but do-able.

I've learned a few tips and tricks since I've really dented the painting of our condo.

• If you wrap your roller or brush in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge, you can avoid cleaning it for WEEKS and then just re-use it...

Yup, I've had a paint roller in my fridge for around 6 weeks now... or whenever I finished the ceiling in our bedroom. Took it out of the fridge for a minute or two to warm it up to room temperature and then continued on.

He loved the home depot car and
didn't want to leave so he tried to
hide from us.

• When painting a ceiling, you don't need painters tape. 

Your supposed to always paint your ceiling before you paint your walls because even the BEST painters tape with "leak lock" and easy clean technology won't prevent drips from the ceiling touching the wall by getting under the tape... 

I know this because I've taken the time to tape it out.. and have bought the so called leak lock pricey rolls of blue tape... and it doesn't make for a clean line.

So it's really not worth it to tape it off until you actually go to paint the wall... (and even then, I don't really use painters tape. I take a very small art brush and hand paint my "edges" to get a constant line that looks clean because in these older condos, the walls with the texture just don't allow you to get a straight line to work with.) 

In other homes where your lines might be cleaner, the tape is nice so your roller doesn't hit the newly painted ceiling...  but if your careful and if you paint your own edge it's not really needed.

But the ceiling is FINALLY one single color... not four different whites or yellows... and it looks SOOOO much better in person. Pictures just don't do it justice!