Our floors are DONE!!

Oh my gosh, we are finally finished with the floors in the 3rd room (soon to be my office)!!  We are both SO happy that they're done!!  We've been working on them since March, and that room has been unusable since we first moved in to our house. We have to wait a few more days before we can put furniture in there (they recommend waiting a week after applying polyurethane before putting furniture on your floors), so on Sunday we're going to load it up with some of the furniture that's been crammed into the guest room!  We're so excited!!

Here are the "before" pics from right after we pulled up the carpet:

This was all super sticky adhesive!!  We scrubbed for sooo many hours

And here are our beautiful floors now:

 They are soooo smooth and pretty!!  We're so happy with them. They were a LOT of work. (that white spot in the middle is just the sun shining on the floors... )

We spent a lot of time hanging out in our screened patio room this weekend so that we could have fresh air while the polyurethane dried in the 3rd room. We had to apply the poly on Saturday morning and again on Sunday morning (it needed 2 coats), so our windows were open pretty much all weekend. The fumes were SO strong, so we really couldn't be in the house for hours after applying the poly. It was kinda relaxing hanging out in the screened room though... We brought some books and magazines out, and just kinda kicked back for a few hours of "forced" relaxation. Guinness didn't enjoy this "relaxation" time as much as Kevin and I did though...

I think Guinness was quite bored during this "relaxation" time... 

We also made a lot of progress on our hall bathroom!  We are completely finished with painting in there (touch-ups are finished!), and we got the light and medicine cabinet installed (well, I didn't really help at all... but I stood there and watched while McGee installed them!), and we also got the shower curtain rod, toilet paper holder, and robe hook installed!  And we had to install the robe hook because our bathroom had a really gross robe hook on the door, so we definitely needed to have a replacement hook in that spot or there would be holes in the door...

Here's with the lights on! 

And here's with the lights off so you can see them better. 

And here you can kinda see the paint color better. Oh and at the bottom of the pic is the base part for our pedestal sink. The sink will get installed this next weekend (along with the baseboard heating covers).

On Saturday evening McGee's parents' friends were having a party, and they invited us to come. We only live about 10-15 minutes away from them, so McGee's parents met us at our house, and they dropped off a rocking chair that McGee's dad made for him awhile ago! They'd been hanging on to it for a while so we could get all settled at our house. It is SO beautiful! McGee's dad is quite a talented woodworker. We still need to organize our furniture in the living room to find the best spot for it (NOT near the fireplace... haha), but it's such a beautiful piece.

It's so comfortable too! 

The party was fun, and McGee and I actually spent a lot of our time there just sitting down outside and relaxing with a few beers. McGee only knew a few people there (his parents' friends), but it was really nice to enjoy the scenery and relax (We'd had a busy day of housework and yardwork! We were exhausted). The friends' house is in a really beautiful spot, and they own a LOT of land!  It looked like a golf course to me. They actually live next-door to M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, The Village, etc)! We were thinking/hoping M.Night might stop on over to his neighbor's party, but nope... When McGee and I left the party, we drove down towards M.Night's house to try to get a good peek at it (yes, like creepy stalkers...) but he's smart and has his house set way back and hidden from the road. 

I hope you're all having a good week so far! We're having a heat wave here... It is gross. It's mid-90s for the next week or so (and I know mid-90s temperatures are nothing to Sacramento folks!), but with the really intense humidity the "feels like" temperatures are above 100 degrees. I'm SO glad we have air conditioning now!!  That was our smartest purchase ever.

Huge house projects: Floors and a bathroom

We had SUCH a busy weekend! We were quite exhausted by Sunday night. We did do one REALLY fun thing this weekend which was we went to the big IMAX theater at the King of Prussia mall to go see Ant Man on Saturday morning! It was really exciting and funny, and I highly enjoyed it.

But, after that fun, we just worked on our house all weekend!!  On Saturday afternoon, McGee finished sanding the floors in the room that will soon be my office (right now we usually just call it the 3rd room). We started this project back in March after we first moved in, but it's been SUCH a pain. This last part that has taken the longest is sanding around the edges of the floors, which also included sanding underneath the baseboard heating along the sides of the walls. It was a lot of work, and very discouraging, so there was definitely a month or so where they didn't even get touched. But, we really want to have that room finished before our houseguests arrive next month, so that we can get some of the furniture out of the guest room!  So, McGee finished sanding, which took most of Saturday AND part of Sunday morning. While McGee was working on that on Saturday, I did general housework (vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, cleaning the kitchen, etc).  Here are a few pictures from when McGee was using the big sander back in March:

Here was McGee with the big sander, and you can see how it can't get that border around the edge of the wall. So all that had to be done with a hand sander. 

This was before McGee did touch-ups and sanding around the walls (you can see by the far wall that it still needs sanding).  

On Sunday afternoon, we started staining the floors in the 3rd room!  We found a stain that fairly closely matched the original stain color (it's called Gunstock by MinWax), and got to work. We both put on some knee pads, and I was the person who applied the stain and rubbed it in with a rag, and McGee followed right behind me and rubbed the floor with a clean rag to rub the excess stain off and smooth out the color. Before we'd even gone a few yards, we were SO happy with the results. It was hard work (my arms and knees were killing me), but it was really cool to see the amazing progress as we were going. Every time we walk by that room now we both feel ecstatic and proud of how amazing the floors look after the countless hours we've spent working SO hard on them. We still have 2 coats of poly to apply (we're going to start that tomorrow night I think), and then about a week later we can bring in some furniture.

They are so smooth and beautiful! We've worked so hard for them. 

Then Sunday evening, we decided that we hadn't quite done enough work that weekend (haha) so we decided to paint the bathroom we've been working on. McGee has already done a ton of work in the bathroom over the past few weeks, including ripping apart a wall to change the wiring for lighting from 2 sconces down low on the wall to a normal vanity light above the medicine cabinet. Then he had to put up drywall and re-build part of the wall because the original medicine cabinet was enormous and ugly, and the one we wanted was a different shape. So, drywall and many coats of spackle over the past few weeks, followed by some primer (I did that!), and we were ready to paint on Sunday evening. Our bathtub and toilet were both in good shape, so we decided to save some money and keep those. They're kind of an almond-ish color, so we picked a paint color that we thought played well with that color. It's like a light blue-ish green color (I don't know how well you can see it with the worklight that's currently in there! We haven't installed the vanity light yet).  Oh, and I forgot to take a "before" picture of the bathroom, but here's the photo from the house listing before we bought the house: 

Here was the "before" picture from the house listing. You can kinda sorta see one of the sconces on the left side of the picture. And we hated that sink (it was falling apart and very cheaply-made). 

Here's the huge hole for the old medicine cabinet, and the holes in the wall from working on the electrical wiring. 

Here you can see the worklight, and the hole for the new medicine cabinet. That's the wall that McGee had to rebuild! He did such a great job with the drywall and spackle - It looks so smooth!

You can kinda see the color... It's a soft blue-ish green.

Here's another attempt to show you the color... It's hard to get a good picture with the lighting in there! 

And here you can see the absence of a sink (we bought one - we just have to install the new baseboard heating covers and then install the sink). 

We didn't stop working until after 9pm on Sunday night, and that's when we ate dinner. We made a frozen pizza, because neither of us had the energy to do anything else. With all of the work we've been doing on the house, we have eaten a LOT of pizza (mostly frozen, but some Domino's) over the past 4 or 5 days... We're both pretty sick of it at the moment. 

The bathroom is definitely still a work-in-progress, but I think I should have some very cool progress to show you over the next few weeks! 

A wedding, and a chandelier!

This weekend was quite busy, as usual!  On Saturday morning we had a bunch of errands and house projects to work on, and later in the day we had a wedding to go to for one of McGee's many cousins.  The huge house project that McGee completed on Saturday was that he installed our new chandelier!! It was a bit challenging because he had to go up in the crawl space above the dining room to add extra support to that area, because our new chandelier is a lot heavier than the old one. There was no support at all for the old one! He did such a great job and we absolutely love our new chandelier.

Here's McGee in action!!  He was just tightening the bolt on the cover plate at the top. 

Here's our beautiful chandelier! And you can see the green color in our dining room better too. 

I'm not sure how well you can see the glass, but it's this beautiful bubble glass that I LOVE. I think the glass looks so cool. And those are Edison bulbs, and they look really cool when they're dimmed too (I forgot to take pictures of them dimmed though... ). 

The wedding for McGee's cousin was in Lancaster, PA which is right in Amish country (McGee's cousin isn't Amish though...). It's a beautiful area, with tons of farmland (it looked like mostly corn). The drive wasn't too bad (about an hour with  no traffic), and the wedding started at 4pm. It was an outdoor wedding and oh my goodness was it hot at 4pm. Luckily the ceremony was only about 30 minutes, and we were back inside an air conditioned building by about 4:30. The reception was lots of fun and we had some fun dancing, but McGee and I both seemed to hit an exhaustion wall at about 9pm (it was a rough week for both of us). We powered through until 10pm when the reception ended though, and then we drove home.

Here's my handsome husband looking at the pond on the property. Our chairs were right next to the pond during the ceremony. 

Here's the area where the ceremony took place! They'd already removed the chairs by this point.

Here's the barn where they had the reception.

Here's a view of the farmland right behind the barn. That's a lot of corn! 

The bride and the groom both teach 4th grade at the same school, so they had one of these books for each of their classes. 

This one was the most hilarious to me! I'm thinking he's heard his dad say this or something... 

I thought this kid's answer was cute and funny too. Basically cleanliness and smelling good is very important for making a marriage work. Haha :)  

Here's the inside of the barn! 

Here's Mook and Mo! Our table was RIGHT by the dessert table (as you can see behind McGee's sisters). There were tons of cookies, and a make-your-own whoopie pie station, and 3 kinds of cupcakes! 

We spent today working on the house some more, and we also had a few Home Depot trips. Our hall bathroom is ALMOST ready for some paint, so we're really trying to have it back to working order by the time our August party rolls around so that our house guests will have a bathroom to use! We're also trying to finish up the floors in the 3rd room (soon to be my office) so that we can finally get our guest room organized. Our house is certainly keeping us busy (and tired!!) :)  

Happy 4th of July from Mrs. McGee

Yep, that's me!!  I am officially Erin Elise McGee. I have my new social security card, and on Friday morning Kevin went with me to DMV to change my name there. We got there nice and early so the wait wasn't too bad, except that after I waited to discuss the name change and hand over my form for the name change to the first desk, I had to wait in a whole different line to have my picture taken for my new license. I was REALLY hoping they'd just use the same picture as before (I actually didn't hate that picture, which is kind of a miracle for a Driver's License photo...), but nope... they wanted a new picture. So, I do NOT like the new picture... but that's normal for my driver's license photos I guess. Haha :)  I'm excited to be Erin McGee but also quite sad that I'm not Bishop anymore! I'll always be a Bishop though, even with my new last name :)  I really have to work on my new signature though - right now it is uuuuuugly!  I had to sign my name for my new Driver's License, and oh my goodness it looks bad! My first name looks normal, but then my last name goes up in like a full diagonal line on my license. It's weird.

It only took me a month to change my last name! Not TOO bad... 

Oh, something funny though:  I just realized yesterday what my new username is for work. We need a username for pretty much everything... I use it multiple times every day, and it's always our last name followed by our first initial and then our middle initial... so that means I'm now "mcgeeee" with 4 E's!!  That cracked me up.

I'm still changing my name with my banks, work, etc... It's quite a process!  Hopefully I'll be all done within a few more weeks.

Last night we had McGee's friend Big Mike (the opera singer) over for dinner! We just grilled some hot dogs and had mac and cheese, corn on the cob, and watermelon. We also took Guinness over to the nature trail, because we knew Big Mike would get a kick out of seeing Guinness run around there. And then we stayed up super late watching "It" (the Stephen King story) because for some reason on our nature hike we started talking about Tim Curry, and then that led to us talking about him as Pennywise, and then Big Mike mentioned that he'd never seen "It". So, we watched it and all of its 80's gloriousness. It's pretty awful, yet amazing at the same time. And Tim Curry is SCARY as Pennywise! This picture is for my lovely and amazing sister-in-law Amanda:

Amanda hates clowns. Love you, Amanda!! :)  

I hope you all have an amazing 4th of July celebration tonight!!  We aren't going to do anything at all - We definitely want to be home with Guinness because he really freaks out when he hears fireworks. We've had a very busy day too - I've done lots of house cleaning, and McGee and his dad have been working on our bathroom. They're putting up drywall - Not fun!!  I think we'll be ready for a chill evening.  Love you all, and I'll post more soon!  And no more pictures of clowns, I promise (don't worry, Amanda!).