Winding down... sort of

The weekend started with me discovering this sweet bottle that the garage contractor laid aside. I'm sure he unearthed it while removing the old garage foundation. For those of you who can't read it, it says: "Graf Bros, Iowa City, Iowa." Very cool.

I currently have the bottle soaking to get rid of the residual dirt inside it.

Here is the dining room when we bought the house.

This is the final version of the dining room floor after the third coat of polyurethane. It looks even better in person.

Final floor in the living room.

Here is the way the foyer looked when we bought the house.

Here is the new foyer floor and staircase - Oscar is checking things out.

Here is the new floor in the master bedroom - believe us, the pink won't be around much longer.

This is the NEW wood flooring in the upstairs hall where the floor was unfinished. This previously had white vinyl tile and tar paper underlayment. No longer. This is an engineered wood floor and it looks sweet.

Here is the new wood flooring in the nursery. This room had white vinyl tile with an awesome pebble pattern. Oh yeah, that was covered with cherry red carpet.

Here is the new floor in the guest bedroom.

This was a big week and we got a YES vote at the historical review on Thursday. Friday morning and Saturday afternoon, the contractor removed the old garage foundation and began grading for the new footprint/foundation with road stone. They should be pouring the foundation/floor this week.

Today I put in our new aluminum hose reel. It's done in a decorative style and I really like it. It's anchored to the brick. Installing this sucked. I thought it would be easy but the uneven brick face proved hard to line up hammer-drill holes in.

When we bought the house, this was the only bath. There was a vinyl floor and an acrylic tub/shower on the right overlapping part of the window. It took up the whole room.

Lastly, I installed the new bathroom mirror and sconces for the downstairs bathroom. This also took WAY longer than it should have. The anchoring system that came with it failed, then my second shot failed and finally I went with 4 wingnuts locked in behind the drywall. This mirror weighs a lot - I hope they hold. It looks really good. The brackets to the sides match the light brackets. The soft yellow light looks really good in here. I also did some more painting. Carrie described this Aqua today as Tiffany blue, which is pretty close to what it looks like. This room is getting close to completion.

I also put in our new yellow pine thresholds for the tile to wood floor transitions and lots of other odds and ends. Soon this place will be habitable for Sue and the baby shower!