The number one rule of tackling a fixer upper:  It will take much longer than you planned.

We moved in with my parents at the end of February, planning to stay no longer than two months.  Here it is May and we are looking at at-least two more weeks of work.

First, the renters stayed a little longer than originally planned.  There were issues with their new rental, so they asked to stay a few more weeks.

Then, everything else just takes time.  And when you have three kids and you know, a life, it takes a little longer.  And, in all honesty, we haven’t been rushing ourselves.  If we have one thing to our advantage, it’s that we have time.  There have been no late night work nights and sometimes, on weekends, we skip painting and take the kids fishing.  And that’s ok.

So far, we’ve removed the yucky old carpet and knocked down a wall.  That wall has been patched up (as well as other holes in the sheet rock from renters).

We have cleaned all the floors and gotten the upstairs ready for new flooring.  There were so very dusty from the sheet rock work.  See this before and after vacuuming photo for further proof:

We are currently painting.  And painting.  And painting.  Everything had to be primed first.  The ceilings have to be painted.  We haven’t even gotten to the actual paint color yet.

On the new house front, we are still rounding up prices from different constructors. (<–Is that even a real word?  You know, people who do construction-type work….plumbers, brick layers, etc.)   Justin and my dad will do a lot of work themselves, but we still need estimates for things like materials and plumbing and brickwork.  We are ‘planning’ to have all that together in the next two weeks so that we can make the dreaded trip to the bank, but if there is a theme to this post at all it’s that things rarely go as planned.