I guess because we haven’t had a house in four years we are getting all the trials in one fell swoop to remind us of why we like living in a trailer on the road.
I don’t know how decorators do it, they must have really thick skins or know their stuff so well they never question their decisions. Having learned our lesson with the little paint chips, for our last bedroom we chose the palest of greens we could find. I decided to paint a test patch on the wall just to make sure…it was so light Larry couldn’t find the green on the white walls until I pointed it out to him.
Here is a tip before you paint: you really need to pay attention to your light sources and watch how the color on you walls changes over the course of a sunny day, how it looks at night with artificial light and on cloudy days. If you have a lot of windows your paint color will probably stay pretty true, but it you get a lot of shadowing, the color’s seem darker. Ours actually change color in the corner from wall to wall depending on the light.
So anyway, Larry painted the “green room” and of course it darkened up a little and was the perfect shade, tone, of green that we wanted. I wimped out on the bathrooms, going Off White, which will look like sandy beige when it is done. I am too scared of color on walls; I am just going to be colorful with the things I put in the rooms and leave the “accent colors” to the professionals!
This was Sunday by the way and Larry even got our new light fixture hung in the living room. He had to rewire the thing of course and cuss out the builders of the house because they put all the electrical boxes in the house with sheet rock screws instead of the screws that come with the boxes. Means nothing to me, but mattered a great deal to Larry.
On Monday Larry finished painting the green room and ripped up all the carpet and pad in the rest of the house. Yuck, I swept up a bunch of junk and dirt and I don’t even want to know stuff. Larry then painted Kilz primer on all the pet pee spots on the wood floor. That stuff works, but does it ever have killer fumes! We left for the new Lowe’s in Fernley. It is only a half hour away instead of 
the hour drive to Reno for Home Depot.I think we were at least 2 hours in Lowes. The funny lady at the check stand watching us debate the merits of all the bathroom light fixtures asked if we had brought dinner with us! I told her that at least Costco provided snacks…something Lowes might want to consider….smile. After spending probably an hour in that one department alone we decided on only one bathroom light…we needed two.
We also bought faux wood blinds for the master bedroom and living room and a towel bar and misc. other stuff. After we got back home and after dinner, Larry hung the blinds in the master bedroom. Now, here is a quirk of mine: I do not like my windows obstructed by anything like the slats of mini blinds during the day. So I tip them to keep the sun out and then after the sun passes I pull them up to the top. Here’s a tip, if the blind box is REALLY heavy, you are not pulling your blinds up and down every day and these were not mini-blinds which is what I had in the past. So after Larry wrestled with them and we decided we hated them, down they came and back into the box. At least we decided this before he hung the blinds in the other window.
The house really echoes and is colder without carpet and pad and that fine dust blows around every time the heater goes on AND getting up in the middle of the night to trek to the bathroom was fraught with danger with the tack strips from the carpet waiting to attack if you take a miss step. I guess you get that I do not like this whole redecorating the whole house at one time thing!
Tuesday, the 8th, dump day. Loaded up all the old carpet pad and miscellaneous boxes and old stuff that has been collecting in the garage for the past week and topped it all with the old carpet. It didn’t rain on Larry and he dumped 580 pounds at the dump. It cost a little over nine dollars, better than Larry expected.
After lunch, which he decided was a mistake; he crawled under the house with the piece of board he bought yesterday to fix the broken floor board in the master bedroom. He said in a couple spots it was touch and go whether he was going to get stuck and he was so tired at one point after nailing the board that he was resting and almost fell asleep. Not the greatest place to take a nap! I told him if he had gotten stuck he would have just had to stay there until he got a little skinnier because there was no way in you know where that I was going under there to help him!
After he got out of there he took down the old bathroom lights…I heard cussing, apparently another builder boo-boo. Sure enough they didn’t mount the box for the light center over the counters and to make the lights center the installer just pounded 
the sheetrock out with his hammer over to the point he mounted the light. Fixable, but a LOT more work. Thank goodness for us Larry knows how to do all this stuff! 
The annoying part is it should be simple and for the people that hire this stuff out end up paying big for all the extra time that it would take an electrician to fix the problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place! So after some debate Larry decides the light we chose for the guest bathroom will still work and he had to do some thinking over the master bathroom, because of course there is a pipe running up the wall almost dead center of the sink in the master bathroom; doesn’t really matter though, because the sink isn’t centered in the counter or vanity any way! Wow. And so it goes. Oh, because of the lighting issues, we couldn’t paint the bathrooms yet which we were hoping to get done before the carpet came.
Then it is back to Lowes to return the 2 inch blinds, find mini blinds and then get a bathroom light for the master bathroom.
Now it is Wednesday. We are really excited about today. We get the bed stood up in the
kitchen and our two recliners from the trailer that we have been using into the kitchen. The carpet arrives!! Our installer is great. Has the attention to detail that we like and is considerate of our walls and fixtures. Some scraping can’t be helped; it is the nature of the beast. Carpet backing is stiff and like sandpaper, but Dallas is very careful and is doing a great job. He has all the carpet laid out in all the rooms and is starting the gluing of the seams, when Larry walks through the front door and says that the two pieces of carpet are different colors. WHAT! Sure enough, where the seam runs down the room one piece is distinctly darker….lordy. No it wasn’t the nap, it was pieced correctly. Like happens with fabric or yarn the dye got messed up coming out of the machine somehow and even being off the same roll of carpet it was different. Dallas was great, he just wanted us to be happy with the job, so he gets on the phone and it was decided that they would cut another piece of carpet to join up with the living room. Yup, wrong too! So now what?! Dallas leaves and goes to the warehouse and for over an hour they pull carpet off this roll trying to get a match…nope. They think they have it but by now it is late so we’ll start again tomorrow. They want us to come by the warehouse first thing in the morning to check out what they came up with. No carpet finished at the end of Wednesday, darn. We have a living room of lovely blue carpet pad. The fumes of the pad, carpet and paint are starting to get to us, because the pad is looking pretty to us!
Wednesday night we just flopped the mattress down on the living room floor, Motel 3! Now we have moved that bed and slept in every room of the house, thank goodness it doesn’t fit in the bathroom! We were so disappointed and frustrated. Carpet day…the crown jewel, the finishing touch of all the hard work and nothing. We hated to put our installer through all that work, but we were paying lots of money and we wanted it right. The carpet place was doing all they could to make us happy. We spent the day caged in the kitchen, couldn’t do much of anything without getting in the way and we weren’t looking forward to another day of that, but it had to be done.
Now it is Thursday and we head over to the warehouse at 8 a.m. As SOON as we walk through the door we can see that the two pieces are two different colors….crap. Then in talking to the guy that makes the decisions, we find out there is another whole roll of this carpet. He had offered us an upgrade, but I didn’t like the upgraded carpet. Larry was thinking that if they had decided that the whole roll was flawed, why didn’t they just break out the new roll? So then it was wait another hour or so while they pulled carpet from the new roll and back we go. Now it looks o.k. Larry expressed his concerns that now the bedrooms being off a different roll weren’t going to match up, but they all thought that it would match up o.k.
So Dallas comes back and gets started on the living room again. They have him do a serpentine seam to help blend better, he doesn’t like them and for a bunch of technical reasons I won’t go into Larry doesn’t like them either, but it’s done and at least the two pieces are the same color. So now we are off and running. It’s getting to afternoon and Dallas starts seaming the bedrooms to the hallway and sure enough…noticeably different colors. So Dallas is back on the phone to the store. The guy at the store wants to Larry to call him or come down and talk to him. Ticked Larry off royally the way this guy was “handling” us and the problem. The guy of course agreed that the bedrooms needed to be replaced too…anything to make us happy. But the thing that angered Larry was why didn’t he just say, replace the whole works from the new roll instead of putting the decision off on us and making us feel like picky pains in the asses! They all agreed that the first WHOLE roll of carpeting was flawed, so they should have just bitten the bullet and said the whole job needs to start over. We just wanted it done, but done right.
We decided to just leave the master bedroom, it was done and we were just worn down by the whole thing. This morning of course Larry wishes we had them replace that one too, but I think once it’s all broke in you won’t notice the line in the doorway so much (I’m hoping). We got our bedroom put together last night.
This morning, day three of a simple one day carpet job, Dallas showed up with the new bedroom carpet and it is fine. It is after noon and he is in the finishing up stages, so the rest of today we will be doing the finishing touches; hanging curtains, working on the bathrooms, cleaning etc.
We had more snow the night before last, about an inch. Today it is sunny and cold.
Even people buying new construction, might consider having an independent home inspection before they sign off on the house. We have found multitudinous other things wrong too. You hear that things on new builds have to be signed off by an inspector, but in some places I guess they don’t pay too much attention to how ALL things are done. A biggy that’ll bite us in the butt when we go to sell is when they do a pest inspection, they do not like any pieces of wood under a house and Larry found that the builder left all kinds of scraps under there that we’ll have to get taken care of at some point. Yikes.
Your all caught up now and need wonder no longer what we have been up too! Smile.
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