House Numbers

Well, I'm still here...and Kalia's still not.  But it's most definitely not for lack of trying.  I'm keeping myself as busy as my tired body can handle these days!  Sigh...

Onto weekend projects...

We live in a community with a Homeowners Association (Chris was actually president last year...however funny that is!), and in our spring time mailing this year we received a friendly reminder that all of the houses needed to have the house numbers located on the actual house per the guidelines.  Hmmm...we've neglected that for 2 years now...oops!  The previous owner actually took the numbers with them.  How odd would it be if they actually moved somewhere with the same exact house number?

Anywho, on one of our many trips to Home Depot within the past few weeks, we picked up a wooden plaque :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

and these big plastic numbers :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

I forgot to take pictures of the actual purchase, but these are exactly the same ones we bought.  We actually wanted to test out the stain we had gotten for the front doord on something before committing and applying it to such an expensive purchase, and then hating it, so this plaque was perfect.  I told Chris that we could just use scrap wood and make our own plaque, but once we realized the plaque was only $5 smackaroos, I let Chris talk me out of attempting to tackle yet another project.  Although it would've been really easy, bending over to even use tools is a challenge with this big 'ol belly I'm rocking these days, so he won.

I applied two coats of stain on the plaque, and we decided we really liked the color, so we did the front doors with it.  Last weekend we had a marathon spar urethane session going on.  We applied a coat to the front door, this plaque, planter stands we got for the back pool deck area, 

and our hammock (which I like to refer to as 'the boat' since it was hammock-less while we were applying the urethane coats on it)...and then repeated the cycle again...and again.

We thought about getting plants for these planters this weekend, but I got too tired.  Those might wait until after Kalia gets here.  If she ever gets here...I guess technically my due date is in one more week, but I feel like I've been pregnant for 10 years already!

Sorry...pregnant brain absent mindedness...back to the house numbers...

Chris test sanded the plaque before officially deciding it was my job to sand the front doors because he wasn't any good at it, but I think it's just the different qualities of wood.  The sanding job scratched some of the stain off (we sanded with 220 grit sandpaper after applying two coats of stain and letting that dry overnight, but before adding the spar urethane), but it wasn't enough that I thought it was worth re-staining and then waiting to add the urethane to it.  It just gives it character now!

This weekend I added the three coats of spar urethane to the back of this plaque, and we made yet another trip down to the big orange store to buy some stainless steel screws.  After adding the plastic numbers on, here's what our house number sign looks like :

I think between the sign, the plastic numbers, and the screws, we spent about $12 on this.  I really love that it ties in with our entry way with our new front door too.

I plan on spray painting all of the lights on the front of the house the oil rubbed bronze, and that statue in the front has been on my to-do makeover list for forever now.  It's way heavy though, so it's something I'm waiting to tackle until I'm un-pregnant.  We'll get around to doing those two things when we repaint the rest of the house.

I think both Chris and I were shocked at how big the numbers actually look against the house, but I think the plaque does a good job of making it something pretty instead of just having the numbers there.  What do you guys think?!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Ours was entirely too short.  How is it that when you're this far along with pregnancy time seems to fly and stand still all at the same time?

Happy Monday!

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Shut The Front Door

Just as a refresher, here's where the entry way started :

And here's where it was after my quick makeover of it a year and a half ago :

Which wasn't bad, it just wasn't great either.  And it left us with zero privacy, which was no beuno.

The rest of the 'door story' isn't so quick, but I'll try to summarize so my post isn't a buzillion miles long! (Note...I fail miserably at this...if you just want to see pics, scroll on down!)

We saw Home Depot had a 15% off special order doors, which we knew we'd have to have because of our size, so we went into check it out...months ago.  Like back in January.  We found a door we liked that was marked down to $875 for the double doors, which was an amazingly great price, so we went to the door sales guy to place the order.

And the bill came up to something close to 2k.  Umm...no, I want the $875 doors please.  Apparently the door prices were mis-marked, but he did go through door company after door company, and threw in promo after promo to get us down to the $875 price.  We had a 10% off coupon too, and he told us to go up to the service desk to pay for it, and we could use it there.  Apparently they're not allowed to double dip, but if you go up to the service desk to pay, they don't know that there's been promotions applied already to the door, so you can generally get away with using another 10% off coupon.

Sa-weet...cha-ching!  That left our door price down to right around $800 after all of the promos had been taken off and applied, and taxes added back in.

The door was supposed to be in a little over two months ago.  It came late, and it came with all sorts of mistakes.  The hardware wasn't the oil rubbed bronze, the door was flat instead of having an arch paneling, it wasn't double bore holed (holed for two entry way handles), and it opened on the wrong side (we switched the configuration to open on the right side instead of the left).  All of which we didn't realize until we got home with this big huge heavy door and managed to get it in our garage.

I called HD and told them to come get our old door and order us a new one.  For some reason, they were a whole lot more accommodating with me than Chris.

Fast forward two months, and our new door finally comes in.  The guy swears that everything's checked out with it, so Chris goes by and picks it up and brings it home.  After getting THAT one out of our truck, we realized it was missing a piece of weather stripping.  I called and told them that they could bring me by a replacement piece that day because we weren't driving BACK to HD for just weather stripping.  My pregnancy hormones must've been in full gear, because they gladly obliged.

Oh, and they took an extra $107 off the door.  Sa-weet.

Well, now the big conundrum is how the heck we're going to install this massive door.  There's no way I can hold it being 9 months pregnant, and there's no way Chris can do the door install by himself.  So...Chris searched around, found a door installer, and had him all set up and ready to go for the week before last.  Happy happy joy joy dance all around.

And then the guy emails, says it wasn't worth his time, and he wasn't interested in doing the job anymore.  Yeah, he emailed that the night before he was supposed to get here.  Great.

So, Chris called around some more, found a handy-man that charged $25 an hour, and got put on his list.  The problem?  His first available day was June 9th.  My due date is May 30th.  Oiy.

But I've taken the approach on whatever gets done before Kalia gets here, gets done.  Whatever doesn't wasn't meant to be.  June 9th it was.

The guy called this past week and said he had an opening and would we like to be squeezed in.  Yes please!!!  I was on strict request to hold Kalia in until the front door got installed.

Can you even imagine?!  The thought of no front door whatsoever is WAY worse than the thought of a glass front door, but we really wanted that new door installed.  And...we're not the type to be able to just sit around and WAIT for things, so...I stopped doing my labor dance and sat on my rear all day long trying to NOT encourage labor to get here.

Here's Chris beaming at lunch time...after they got the old frame out, and the new one in, and it was all plumb!

As you can see, installing new front doors is way more than just taking off the old ones from the hinges and installing new ones!

Do you see the one causality from ripping out the old door?

Apparently the old shoe kick thingy ma bobber (yes, that's my technical term) was screwed into the concrete under the tile, so when it came out, my piece of tile popped right off.  Sigh...put it on the to-do list.  We really weren't too concerned...we were just excited that our new front door was going in!

And after a loong day (6 hours with the handi-man, 3 extra hours with just Chris), our new front door, with our old hardware, was installed.

Look at how pretty those doors are!!

And here's a VERY happy Chris after the doors are in.  Chris helped the handy-man to speed up the process, which saved us a ton of loot in the long run.  They worked hard...all.day.long!

This past weekend, we worked on getting the doors finished.  On Saturday, I sanded down both doors (Chris doesn't trust himself with a sander and anything expensive just yet), and then we each took a door and stained it.  We waited the recommended 4 hours, and then applied another coat of stain on it.

On Sunday, we applied THREE coats of water based (low VOC for Kalia!) spar urethane, which is supposed to be good for interior and exterior wood finishes (most polyurethanes say interior use only), and sanded with 220 grit sandpaper in between each coat.  Holy.forever.

We really were hoping that I didn't go into labor during all of this too.  If I would've, there would've been boxes blocking the front door instead of hardware because we took all of the hardware back off to do the finishing work.  We had a good chuckle on Sunday night, after the hardware was put back on, about our parents being at the hospital and asking for the keys to our house to go check on Kodi.  We could just see us telling them "oh, no need...just move the boxes and walk right on in.  Hopefully everything is still there!"

This week we fixed the broken tile from out front (it's still not 100% done, we need to re-grout it back in!), painted around the inside frame (the new frame is a little more narrow, so things aren't just a quick and easy replace...booo!), re-installed the trim on the inside, and added in the fill trim to account for the size difference.  We still need to go back and add more caulk around the frames, paint the frames, and maybe give the walls one more coat, but this is good enough for now.  I just wanted the framing at least on the doors in case Kalia decides to show up soon (please oh please!!!).  After all that...here's the result of our hard work!!

We need to find a new runner to put in front of this door too, but for now, we're working with what we've got!

Onto the outside...

On our to-do list is repaint the rest of the house (we did just the back when we were re-doing the pool deck), but that is certainty not something I'm wanting to tackle this weekend, at 39 weeks pregnant!

And here's the full Monty entry-way.

So what do you guys think?!  Do you think we're a little crazy to be doing stuff like this with two weeks left till my due date?!  I keep saying I'm ready, but now I'm REALLY ready!!  I'm so happy with the way these doors came out, and I'm SO THANKFUL for our privacy!!

I might or might not have stopped in front of the door and sang out "I'm in my skivvies, yeah, I'm in my skivvies!!!" while doing some retarded looking form of a dance that's only acceptable for my hubs to see at 38 weeks pregnant.  I could be making that up though.  You wouldn't know, even if you lived in my neighborhood, because you can't see in anymore!!!  Hallelujah!!

Whew...what a long post!!  Congratulations if you made it to the end...

Happy Friday everyone!!  Can you guys do me a favor and please get your 'labor dance' on for me...this Florida heat is getting to be too much, and I'm a-ready for Kalia to get here.

Hope you guys have a great weekend!

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Front Door Redo Part 1

Well, no baby just yet!!  Boooo!!  All in due time though, right?  I just wish my 'due time' was now!!

This week I'm going to show you our front entrance / door redo.  With our last house, because it was so much smaller, we were able to just tackle one full project at a time, and not worry about having to go back later to make it the way we wanted it.  We did it completely and correctly the very first time.

But this house is bigger.  A lot bigger, so things take time to shop around for, and to complete.  We can't do everything all at once, and until the past few months, Chris wasn't able to help much due to the whole work full time / school full time thing, so I did as much as I could on my own.

Unfortunately, I don't have a great before picture of our original front door.  I redid this prior to my blog days, so taking before and after pictures used to escape my mind quite a bit!  I sort of took a picture as I was redoing it, so can semi see the jest of where we started.

Here's the view from the inside...

Another inside view...In this one, note the pink tile in the entry way.  Pretty huh?!  Blah!

And here's an outside shot.  You can see the pink tile on the step part of the door.  Oh, and you can see that for some reason, the previous owners changed the left door to open instead of the right.  That actually stayed like that for quite some time!

We priced out doors when we first moved in, and the cheapest we could find one in our size was close to $3000.  I decided to just use gel stain to redo the door, and put off the whole buying a new front door extravaganza until a later date.

I also decided that re-tiling the entry way would solve at least 80% of what bothered me.  The pink, slick tiles were not exactly our style.  I started on the tiling job one Sunday morning while Chris was studying for an exam, and told him that I didn't want / need his help because I could do it all on my own.

In our old house, I laid all of the tile for our kitchen and guest bathroom redo, so I've gained quite a bit of experience and felt quite confident in my tile laying abilities.  We actually have a pretty good system going when we're both redoing tile...I lay all of the tile, and Chris makes all of the cuts.

Well...I started at about 8 a.m. and laid as much tile as I could, and at 5 p.m. Chris decided he was done studying for the day because he felt so bad for me, and he came outside to help me finish up...which we did at 9 p.m..  Why I thought this would just be a one-day job solo is beyond me.  Things are always better together, right?!

So after some new tile laying, removing the old hardware, installing new hardware, getting rid of those ugly gold kick plates, and gel-staining the old front door, our entry way looked like this :

This is the only horrible picture I managed to snap of the inside.  Oops!

Which is how it stayed for the past year and a half.  I didn't do the greatest job with applying my gel stain.  It was the first time I'd ever used the stuff, and I put it on entirely too thick, and didn't do a second coat.  Wrong wrong wrong way to apply gel stain!  Live and learn though, right?

The main problem with these doors is the glass though.  One, when you walk into the house, our bedroom goes off to the right, and the kitchen goes off to the left.  I can't tell you how many times we've peaked out from our bedroom hallway to see if anyone was out front and then took off running to get something from the kitchen in our skivvies.  Which, as you can imagine, has become quite the challenge to 'run' with my 9 month pregnant body I'm rocking!  Two, the previous owners actually cracked the glass when they were moving their stuff out, so the front doors are actually a huge safety concern for when Kalia gets old enough to pull herself up and crawl around.

Plus, I like the idea of not having to answer the door if I don't want to.  With the glass doors, you'd literally have to hide if you didn't want to answer the door, which we did occasionally do.  And it's weird when your neighbor comes by to chat with you and tells you that she saw all of the wonderful gifts that you got from your baby shower in your living room.  Yeah, she saw them through our glass.  Slightly creepy.  We do have great neighbors, but still...I don't want everyone to be able to see in my living room when they so please!

So getting new doors was the very last thing on our to-do list before Kalia got here.  We've actually been in the process of doing this for MONTHS, but that post is for another day.  Stay tuned to see what we wound up with!!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Happy Monday!!  Only TWO weeks left till my due date--woot woot!!

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