A bright idea

Our family room when we first moved in.  So very, very dark.  We painted it back in September, but I wanted to call attention to the lights in the room.  Originally when we moved in there was an ugly ceiling fan and an old can light in front of the fireplace that didn't work.

We replaced the ceiling fan and added a new light in front of the fireplace, as you can see in the picture below.  The only problem was, both lights and the fan where on the same switch.  Which meant if you wanted the ceiling fan on, you had to have the light on in front of the fireplace.  Not so great for warm movie nights.

So I came up with the idea of buying one of the remote kits for ceiling fans.  I figured it would work with a light, and therefore you would be able to turn the light off with the remote, even when the ceiling fan was going.  The remote kits sell for about $20 at the home improvement stores.

And viola......the light can be turned off independently of the fan.

Unfortunately the room is still very dark.  There really isn't any natural light that comes into the room.  Which is great for watching movies, but hard for taking pictures.  I still plan on working on the fireplace wall, someday it will be brighter in there.

Living in the wild west

Or so it feels sometimes.  We have new creatures living in our backyard.


It could be a mole.

Or a vole.

But whatever it is, it's causing damage that looks like this.

Entry Way Demo

It feels like we are finally getting something done around here.  Here was the entry of our house when we moved in .  It had wood floors, which we liked when we purchased the house.  But the quality of construction on the wood floors, and the millions of scratches made by the previous dogs and our own, made us want to change the wood floors out with tile.

That and the fact they had laid the wood floors over the parquet floor, which meant all the doors couldn't open and shut properly.  So when we had to replace the front doors because they had a 3 inch gap which was allowing all our conditioned air to escape the house, we had to start tearing out the floors.

I apologize for the dark pictures.

Underneath the parquet floor was a sticky tar like substance, that makes it look like we currently have black tiles

And here is the tile we are leaning towards installing.

It's a porcelain tile, which looks like natural stone.  After doing our homework we found out that with two big dogs, porcelain was the way to go.  It was the most durable, and lucky for us the easiest to install.  I guess we will see about that in the next coming weeks.

Moldy Walls

Example of the mold in our basement

Here is the basement, minus most of the drywall.  It looks quite a bit larger without the room framed in.  At some point in the near future we need to take down the studs, and then eventually put up a new layout that will better suit our needs.  Funny how re-finishing the basement was probably the last thing on our list of to-dos.  And now it might have jumped a few spots, until some other disaster strikes us that is.