More Progress

I'm back with another update on the house.  It has been hard for me to get motivated to start packing to move because when I would go up and look at the place it didn't feel like a house.  The kitchen was torn out so all that was there were a few pipes in a big room.  Well, the cabinets have been put up in the kitchen and now it feels like a home.  Isn't that funny how that works?  Anyway, here is how we left it:

Since then, the house has been dry-walled, then the walls were given a 'hock and trowel' treatment, and then painted.  Yesterday, the cabinets were hung and sanded down in preparation for painting.

It is hard to tell with the angle of the pictures but since these weren't custom cabinets they don't go all the way to the wall on the left hand side of the window.  There is about 20 inches of space so we are having a pantry built in there.
Also, in the last picture, the lower cabinets will continue on the perpendicular wall on the right and the refrigerator will also be on that wall.  You can see the crown has been added there on the right too. 
All the interior doors and trim have been painted white.

The 2 bedrooms without windows now have windows, which makes a huge difference (go figure).
No window:

Window:

Window into the garage:

Window to the outside:

 Here is a sneak peak at the laminate flooring we picked out.

Funny story (now looking back on it), I had picked out the cheapest laminate flooring Home Depot had about a month ago.  1400 square ft of flooring is a lot of flooring.  A whole pallets worth of flooring that they had to load in the back of J's truck with a forklift.  Then our contractor unloaded each box off the pallet and we had it stored in the garage until the time of install.  A couple of weeks ago I was walking through HD and spotted this laminate floor that was EVERYTHING I wanted and the exact same price as the cheapo stuff I initially purchased.  So being the crazy determined woman I am, I convinced my husband to help me load all the boxes back into his truck, drive them back to HD, haul them in 3 separate loads through the whole store to customer service, have a forklift lift the new pallet into the back of his truck, drive home while the huge stack is leaning precariously over the side of the truck, and unload them box by box back into the garage.  So worth it.  Right, dear? 

Let the packing begin!

Oh, on a side note, our youngest celebrated his 1st birthday so we built him a sandbox on the property.
J picked up a 4' x 8' piece of plywood, 3- 10ft 2"x12" pine boards, 1 - 8 foot 2"x6" pine board, and a piece of PVC pipe.
The plywood was the bottom, he cut to 2x12s down to make an 8 ft x 4 ft rectangular box and screwed it together.  He screwed the bottom onto the box. He used the 2x6 to make seats in the corners and screwed them on.  Then cut the PVC pipe down and screwed that in the corners to hold umbrellas.  For much clearer instructions check out this link.

 One of the blow-up toy tires did not survive.  Do you see it stuck on that cactus is the back?:)

The kids have already gotten a lot of good use out of this.  It cost about $100 in material, which I feel is a good investment.  Kids love sand.
Just as a disclaimer, we are not doing the work on the house, we are hiring out this work.  We are picking everything and telling the contractor what we want but this type of work is not something we have the time to do right now.  I just didn't want y'all to think we are that good.  We are good but we aren't THAT good.