The Bois Bungalow

Here are some picture of our progress!  This was the color in the kitchen before. It wasn't horrible, but we wanted something different.  Starting painting We are also stripping some of the woodwork in the kitchen to repaint.  Thomas did some plumbing and insulation. Behind our old dishwasher, we could see the exterior wall of the house... Not great for keeping the kitchen warm. We got a new dishwasher and hope to get a garbage disposal eventually (so excited!).  Thomas pulled up the top two layers of linoleum and we worked together to scrape the last layer that was glued to the fir flooring in the kitchen. It was by far the most difficult project that we have taken on and was not fun. We hand scraped for a while and then decided to rent an industrial wallpaper steamer to scrape the rest. It was far faster than hand scraping, but still took three entire days to scrape away the linoleum backing and adhesive that was left behind....

Life has been crazy in the BoisBungalow! We have been working our butts off on the kitchen floor since last weekend. Thomas decided to start pulling the laminate up when I was at a training on Saturday and we have been regretting it since... There were two layers of laminate that we were able to cut, but the third layer was glued on the wood floors. We have been cursing the previous owners who did this to the beautiful fir floors. We have been scraping every day and evening since and are now down to just the laminate backing and adhesive. We have rented a wallpaper steamer and have found it to be more efficient than scraping the paper while it is dry. It is a very tedious job, but we keep telling ourselves that it WILL be worth it in the end! When we were stripping the linoleum, we got to the end of the kitchen (that used to be a covered porch) and found plywood. We were disappointed, but we went to our local lumber supply store and ordered $320 worth of clear fir to use in that sec...

It has been a while since I posted, but we have actually accomplished a lot. We finished the planter boxes for the front. Pruned back the roses. Our cacti are gigantic!  Stripped a door down. and then painted said door.  Cleaned up door hardware. Watched our mums from last year bloom like crazy.  We have also completed a bunch of trim work in the house after stripping, sanding, staining and polying them. I will post pictures soon!  We are hoping to get to some other projects soon.  Projects on our plate: -Painting kitchen table/bench to match the kitchen cabinets  -Painting kitchen walls and trim  -Pulling up laminate in kitchen and refinishing the wood floors in kitchen -Woodwork in parlor  We are hoping to check several of those off before January. Wish us luck! 

Just a heads up, this post is going to be full of pictures of the yard. I wish I had taken more pictures earlier when more was in bloom... We are having the lawn sprayed with Pylex to kill the crab grass. It is amazing stuff. We are going to reseed later in the fall. The trumpet vines have taken off this year. They didn't bloom much, but the greenery is nice against the fence. I love our oak tree. It provides a great shade canopy and the dogs love chasing the squirrels that live in it. Our rain barrels are still going strong. We haven't lost any goldfish this year, and the water plants are growing like crazy.  The climbing roses are also growing like mad. We only got one bloom out of them this year, but I appreciate them anyway. Clematis survived this year :) It is pretty delicate and the dogs like running up the fence and broke the one last year. We planted several new plants this year. This lily is one of them.  The delphinium was lo...