Fixer Uppers

I've pretty much completed my January "To-Do" list.  There are a few stragglers, but I still have a couple of days left yet.

- Give Banshee her meds!! 
- Put away all Christmas decorations.
- Send birthday cards to all Brothers-in-law.  We still need to write Bill's brother a little note while he's at basic training.
- For the inlaws (who are divorced), figure out a small gift and/or schedule time for a visit and/or dinner for each of their birthdays.   We did a nice dinner at his mom's house.
- Buy gifts (if necessary) for Little Christmas.
- House Fix-its.  95% complete 
- Start the Big Purge!! 

We did go from talking about the house fix-it projects, to actually accomplishing almost all of them.  And when I say "we" I really mean Bill, because I hardly did any of the work.  He's pretty awesome that way. 

There were five mini-projects to complete:
1.  Paint the front door.
2.  Paint the back door and kitchen closet door.
3.  Patch the holes in the upstairs hallway from the pipe we removed.
4.  Patch the crack in our bedroom closet.
5.  Fix the guest bedroom door that was coming unhinged.

I didn't really take before and after pictures of everything because 1) I am a bad blogger, 2) most of this stuff is not too exciting, and 3) this is not a DIY blog (at least not yet), so there will be no step-by-step tutorials.

I do have a few pictures for Projects 1 & 2 - painting doors.

Back in 2011 we painted all the trim on our first floor white, but for whatever reason we never finished painting the doors.  I know we didn't paint the front door because I wanted to just replace it, but for the back and closet door I have no idea why we never finished.

I did manage to find a shot of our front door from 2011 when we were refinishing the floors, so here's the before of that:

It was stained on the inside, and painted maroon on the outside.  It also had a very gross sheer curtain on the interior covering up the windows.  It was ugly, but offered privacy, so we kept it.  Now it looks like this:

Bill painted it back - both front and back, and we removed the ugly curtain.  I still would prefer to have a solid front door, but I'm getting used to the openness of it.  Oh, and like I said, this is not a DIY blog, but I will tell you that we used Glidden Trim & Door Paint.  I had seen a commercial for it awhile back, and had wanted to give it a try.  I really like how it turned out.  It's high gloss, and looks really sharp in person.  A few things to point out though, is that this is an oil based paint and also it is not low-VOC.  I would defintely use this product again though.  (Oh, and Glidden did not pay or sponsor this...I wish!)

 

We also painted the back kitchen door and closet white to match the rest of the trim in the kitchen.  It took four coats (probably why we put it off so long).  I did two (this paint was low-VOC) and Bill did two.

You can see them both in this picture.  Basically, they were wood toned and now they're white.

 

As far as the other items on the list...

 

Last year we removed a pole that was in our upstairs hallway.  I don't remember now what was venting through it, but when we re-did our downstairs bathroom we rerouted whatever it was.  The pole was no longer needed, so we had it removed.  We were left with about a 3" diameter hole in the floor and ceiling.  No more though...Bill patched both the holes.  We still need to slap some ceiling paint on the top, and cut a piece of carpet to cover the bottom; but we're almost there. 

 

Also last year, we noticed that water was leaking into our master bedroom closet.  The closet is part of a small edition that was added to the house at some point, so its roof is not the main roof of the house.  Basically, the roof of the edition was gone (animal and wind damage), so we had it replaced...no more leak.  However, we never patched up the cracks left from the water damage.  Bill has since patched and sanded them, but we still need to paint.

 

Finally, the guest bedroom door is coming unhinged from the doorframe.  Bill has his plan to fix it tonight actually, so this one can be marked as done too.

 

So, there you have it.  Again, props to Bill for tackling all of this.  After each project gets finished or near all we keep saying to each other is "why did we wait so long to just get this stuff done?"  Are you guys tackling any projects that are long overdue?  Do you get 98% of a project done, but then run out of steam?  I know all these little projects are easy to procrastinate on; especially when there is not a big "wow" moment after finishing them, but it feels really good to have them done.