I was going to write this update on adoption and Éveiller, but as I'm writing, I realize that there HAS been a lot in Éveiller that has happened, so I'll do another post about adoption soon. So, Éveiller. Josh and I have been working hard on getting this place updated, or just feeling like home. I think when you live in a construction mess for so long, it just starts to feel normal, or you naturally just don't go into rooms that you know are going to stress you out, so instead, you just close the doors and pretend they don't exist. We have a few rooms like that, one of them being the master bedroom. This room was meant to be the first room done.
We wanted a place that we could escape to at the end of the day and ignore the rest of the house and relax. But that has not happened. When we first moved in, I was all gun hoe about sanding the floor in this room and getting it refinished. So I started, not realizing how God awful hard it was going to do by hand, and it left a rather large space of exposed wood on the floor. We couldn't just move in, and walk on the exposed wood, at risk of ruining the whole floor, so since I started, I knew we had to finish it. So we waited, and we waited, until we could rent a floor sander and get that bad boy done.
The floor was extremely hard to sand, and took Josh a whole day to do this one room, and lots of sweat and tears... ok, maybe not tears. Alas, it took awhile. It still even looked splotchy, but at this point we had tried everything, so we were just going to go with it. I had picked out Bombay Mohogany for the floor, and went to stain it. It didn't stain AT ALL! It actually turned the floor the EXACT color that it had originally been. Turns out the stain was old, and all the color had sunk to the bottom to one big hard lump that fooled me as the bottom of the can. So, I opened up a new can, making sure I actually scraped the bottom of the actual can this time in mixing, and restained the floor again. I got about half way through before it was proven to me that I cannot handle staining a floor twice in one day, more so, my lungs couldn't handle it, even with a mask on. So my husband finished, and because I had been high on fumes and coughing up a storm, along with getting an instant migraine during the second staining, and my husband having a hard time figuring out how the stain brush worked, the floor turned into one big dark blotchy mess. Alas, it needs another coat, but I'm kinda scarred for life after almost passing out the last time, so I'm pretty determined to just move in and pretend it's pretty and stain it again in the summer. But, we did get the nasty drop ceiling down, the ceiling tiles down that was behind that, and revealed the beautiful old wood ceiling that we knew was hiding up there. We still have to get the glue off the ceiling, since they like hot glued those bad boys up there, but ladders and I have a horrible relationship with each other, so I'm kindly waiting for my husband or someone else to crawl up there and do it. Oh, and since we took out the drop ceiling, we had to get a new light! The ceiling is super high in this room, so I opted for a chandelier.
Side note: My husband would highly suggest not going shopping with me for a chandelier. I may sing the entire time ' IIIII want to swiiing from the chan-da-la-HEEERE, and IIIIII want to fllllyyyyy like tomorrow doesn't exiiiist.' and may continue to do so all through the installation period as well.
He loves me, I know it!
Oh, and we're doing a pallet wall to cover up the old wall by the window that has something on it that's like an old form of drywall, but I'm not even sure what it is.
We had a work day at Éveiller, and some of our friends came to help us with some of the renovations. Josh, my brother in law, Jason, and my Dad did the plumbing for the upstairs kitchen that day. It ended up being trickier then they expected, and had to work around a few things since the building is so old. But, I can now run my dishwasher upstairs so YAY!!!! I don't have a sink yet though, and really nothing else is hooked up or installed, but that does not stop my husband from hauling dishes upstairs to stick them in the magical machine that saves us from the worst chore ever.
My group worked on the South Wing. Yes, I call it a wing, because I just don't know what else to call it! It's where we, for the most part, live on a day to day basis. It's where the bedrooms are, and where we will one day have a bathroom (which is actually serving at Josh and I's bedroom until we can move into the room with the chan-da-la-HEEERE), and the laundry room is. The old part of the building, which the master and the laundry room are in, has the nice hardwood floor. The other rooms are in the newer addition and had carpet.
Carpet in an old church = YUCK! I actually learned that it wasn't that old, only like 5-6 years old, but boy oh boy, I couldn't handle it. We ripped up the carpet in the boys room, the long room which will one day be split in two and serve as the girls room and the TV room, the bathroom/our room, and the hallway. It wasn't the carpet that ended up being smelly (thank goodness) but it was the nasty padding that was underneath it. So we sold the carpet, and since Josh and I hadn't budgeted to redo the flooring, we were just going to paint the chip board that was there until next year some time.
By the way, this nail board will make you scream and cry the whole time you work with it. It's evil stuff, I promise you!
Turns out, that painting the floor was a bad idea. I had asked the Home Depot guys what they suggested I use for the flooring, and it turned out that this paint was for outdoor uses only, and they told me to use it indoors... and pretty much, ever since painting, I've been dying of a horrible cough. My husband thinks I may have a chemical burn of some sort on my lungs, I think it's just irritated, and the doctor actually didn't know what to think of it so put me on a crap load of meds to try to fix it. Which, btw, only worked until the meds ran out, so I went back in today, and got put on a new load of things.
ANYWAY, so our quick floor job wasn't going to work. So I spent some time researching cheap flooring, and we drove back into town, and picked out this floor.
It's actually very pretty, but with the layout of the rooms, it's slightly tricky to install. Therefore, we have half of the long room installed, and the rest is just waiting... but that also means that there is still a bunch of that paint exposed... which is probably why I'm not getting any better.
In the rooms that are in the newer addition of the building, there is not any nice old wood ceiling hiding behind the ceiling tiles. So to cover up any remaining churchy smells, we painted every last inch of the rooms that had the carpet (minus the bathroom/bedroom since it's going to be awhile before we get there). The ceilings in all the rooms are higher then average, so I was able to get away with the dark ceiling again, which improved the look of the tile. The boys room will be nautical themed one day, so they have white walls with blue stripes, and the dark ceiling.
The long room, since it will be cut in half (someday) we painted it according to future plans. The girls room had this dark greyish-purple ceiling, and what I thought was an off-white wall... but it turned out to be kinda like a super pale pink... it works though! The TV room has a color called Seaglass... I liked it every time I went to the store, but couldn't decide where it would work in my house, so I finally decided to use it in this room. I just went with a dusty white for the ceiling (which will be the only normal looking ceiling in the whole house, haha!). Until the wall to separate the two rooms is up, I just have one giant room with two colors on the ceilings, two colors on the wall, and currently two different floors until we can get the rest of the wood floor in. In other words, it kinda looks like Easter! Pastels mushing in every which way.
So, that is where we are for now. We keep working on bits here and there, this week we took off because I can't handle any more painting until I figure out what this outdoor paint did to my lungs, and we are currently working on a fundraiser for our adoption which I will share with you on my next post, but if you're on facebook you may have already seen it!
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