So, how are we all feeling after a long weekend of house work? I know you housebloggers were all tinkering on something….. admit it. While everyone else was out shopping for Christmas presents at the mall this weekend, you went to check out the deals at Home Depot. Am I right?

I’m feeling like an achey old woman today, thanks to plenty of house progress and Wagner Wood Day 2005. Teague’s parents have an outdoor wood stove, so every year the whole family gets together to stack logs. It’s great exercise, and Geri feeds us afterwards. Next year I think we’ll follow it up at our house with Wagner Rubber Roof Day, or perhaps a Wagner Insulation Fiesta. It’s amazing how quickly things can get done when you have that many hands.

The upstairs soon-to-be-apartment has seen a few upgrades this weekend. Of course, our plans to just “make it look a little nicer” turned into major demolition… but when does it not? I started the job on Friday while Teague was at work. The bathroom tub surround had to be ripped out, which in turn led to the removal of wallpaper and the patching of MANY holes and cracks. The old shag carpet (ewwww – on so many levels) was not a keeper – once that was pulled up I could see that the plywood underneath was rotted, so that got pulled up too. Which was a serious PITA, requiring hours of tedious ripping and pulled and prying.

Once we got down to the original wood floor, we found lots o’ rot and unevenness, so new plywood got laid down. We’re going to put linoleum over that for now because it’s cheap, easy, and will be easy to get rid of when we’re ready to REALLY do the upstairs bathroom.

We put new abitibi board up around the tub, followed by caulk and edging strips. It’s not the prettiest stuff, but it’s very cheap and will last a few years. That’s all we are looking for at this point.

Since we had the radiator out to do the floor, we decided to clean it up and spray paint it. Might as well, right?

We had some (somewhat busy) wallpaper lying around that we bought at Marden’s for $1/roll, so that’s going on the walls. Again – cheap, and better than the ripped and tearing paper that was there. The walls are unfortunately in pretty bad shape, nothing a coat of paint could hide.

When we called it quits last night, the upstairs looked like a garbage dump. I took photos, but Teague stole the camera so you’ll have to wait!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving ;)