Living in Chaos

President Elect Barack Obama called for a day of service today on the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday. In Portland, there were so many people interested in helping, that some volunteer organizations had too many people. I performed my day of service for Eleanor. Eleanor is the name of the elderly lady who owned the house before us for 42 years. I helped Eleanor by painting the last coat of paint in the living room, installing a new light fixture in the living room (electrical work is a little scary) and doing some unpacking. I think Eleanor and President Elect Obama would approve.

I know many of you are bugging us about getting some more photos up, but to be honest, we have no idea where our computer to camera cord is in order to import our photos. That's kind of the story of our lives right now. "Becky, where's my ___________?" "I don't know - probably in some box in the basement!" Living out of boxes is making us both crazy. Now that we have the three bedrooms complete, we are going to make more of an effort to get these rooms unpacked.

We have learned and continue to be affirmed, that nothing is as easy as you think it's going to be. For example, that light fixure installation I did today. I was thinking about a 20 minute job...2 hours later the fixture was installed. I think the biggest example of this has been the pedestal sink. If I can give anyone advice when deciding on a pedestal sink or a vanity - go for the vanity. Our bathroom is relatively small so I thought a pedestal sink would free up some room. Also, the pedestal sink kind of matches our bathroom decor theme the best. We bought the sink, bought the faucet and then started doing some research on installing the sink. I googled "pedestal sink installation." Thisoldhouse.com has step by step direction. I'm thinking, "great, we'll have this done in an afternoon or so." Then I read the first paragraph of the article when my attitude quickly switched from optimistic to dreadfully pesimistic. The second sentence reads, "Pedestal sink installation is the graduate school of sink installation." Not sure if you all have picked up on this yet, but we are not graduate school ANYTHING when it comes to home remodeling. Heck, we aren't even upper elementary school yet!

After doing some more research it turns out that when you install a pedestal sink, you need to anchor and bolt the sink to a 2X4 screwed horizontally between the studs in the wall. Easiest thing way to do this is to saw out a piece of sheetrock at sink heighth, screw in 2X4, patch it up and then go about installing the sink. Weeeelll...we tiled our entire backsplash from the floor up the all about 3 1/2 feet first. Putting in a 2X4 for anchoring would mean we'd have to tear out the tiling job we just did. AWWWWWW! Why can't anything be easy! Long story short, my dad called some plumbing/contracting buddies to see if there was anyway around this. It seemed as if we could bolt the sink in using these toggle bolt things. So my dad started screwing through the tile and it turns out there was a stud there anyhow. Hooray! In the end, the sink installation ended up being a lot easier than we initially thought.

The bathroom is almost finised with the exception of faucet installation, some wall texturing, and painting. The end is in sight and that is gratifying! I finished the living room today. All we need to do now is find window coverings and furniture. Right now, the only piece of furniture we have in our living room is our refrigerator. We bought I first appliance, the fridge, right when we moved in. We found a really nice stainless steal Whirlpool Gold side-by-side refrigerator at the Sears scratch and dent center for 45% off which saved us a good bundle of cash. We have yet to find the scratch or dent.

Right now we have our kitchen and living room set up in the basement. I'll be honest with you - I hate it! I can't wait until our kitcen is finished so we can actually start living comfortablely in this house. We ordered all our cupboards and they're set to arrive in mid-February, so my goal is to have everything done by Spring Break at the end of March so I can use that time to unpack. I know that setting these kinds of goals can be dangerous, but I'm feeling like this is a realistic goal. At that point we will have owned the house for 4 months and that's about all I can handle of living out of a basement!

Once we discover the box with the camera cord, we'll post all our updated photos of the bathroom, living room, fridgerator and our basement living quarters. Stay tuned!