Boob Villa

Well the lack of posting was due to getting my mothers house in move-in condition and the back house to rental condition so I can get the hell out of this holy rolling steam blowing shit pit and get to Oregon. I go either tomorrow morning or saturday morning. Probably saturday because im pretty tired and need a rest. For the last month or so I've been working 9 to 10 hours a day 6 to 7 days a week. When I wasn't working I was making trips to Lowes or Home Depot. No big deal except they are in shreveport over an hour away.
I am pretty proud of having done all the work myself, for my first time I think I did ok.
This is the cottage out back, it used to be a beauty shop. Just getting to this stage took ripping out carpet and chiseling away what was under that, 50 year old green vinyl tile. It made me grumpy.. You remember the kind they had in the lunch room at elementary school? Yeah that stuff.
Before

After that I laid down wood floors, painted, put up wainscot and trim and put together a couple of the kitchen cabinets. There is more to do but the rest is pretty simple stuff that shouldn't cost her very much and she needs an electrician and plumber in there anyway. 2 things that I wont touch. Electric because i'm e-scared and plumbing because..well, there is a good reason why those guys get paid a lot of money. *shudder*
After



In the main house there was what we called "The Red Room". The previous owner had put down faux wood floors in the form of vinyl sheeting. The walls, I found out later were actually panneled with wallpaper board, you know the kind that goes in old mobile homes. Well you can't take the paper off that so the owner just got a bucket of drywall compound and went to town, making big blobs hoping for a faux venetian plaster finish im guessing. You'll see where I've had to sand down the blobs with a belt sander. The paneling was apparently put up over a textured wall that was too lumpy to take wallpaper. I found THAT after tearing out old built in book cases that they just walled AROUND. If only I had known that fact before I started trying to rip them out. I was literally hanging from the lip off the top and pushing off the wall with both feet trying to get the damned thing to budge. I dangled precariously hoping for the tell tale crack that I knew would send me falling on my ass, it never came. Instead I spent 20 hanging minutes wishing I had me some man muscles and cursing my noodly girly ones. Here is the aftermath...


You see the old green/blue walls in chunks that I had to fill in there with more luanne (sp?) and spackle etc etc.



Anyway it is all better now after 8 coats of Killz.

There was a long list of other stuff I had to do. Put quarter round through-out the house, paint etc. So that's where i've been. I'm pretty thrilled with myself but i've also decided that i'm pretty slow at everything. I'm going to take a few construction courses when I move to OR. There are womens groups there for chicks who like tools, so we'll see how that goes. Maybe it won't be so tiring when im not in louisiana heat. =)