Muchacho Polaco

We have been working strong on the house all year. I have employed Tavo 6 days a week since the beginning of January. This was no small cost, but at least the house is getting close to being finished.

The walls are done. The ceilings are done. The texture on the wall is done. The priming of the walls is done. The painting is almost done. Tavo begins laying the tile Monday. I met with him today to go over the plan. He will be done in a couple weeks.

Last weekend was a holiday weekend. We spent the entire time priming and painting the house. We went through roughly 20 gallons of oil-based primer. It was horrible. I have an excellent paint sprayer which made the process relatively fast. But my respirator could only take so much of the fumes and it wasn’t long before I was extremely dizzy and for a lack of better words, thoroughly intoxicated from the paint. The respirator was expensive, but apparently not good enough to last 10 hours. Its useless now until I replace the cartridges.

Removing oil-based paint is no small task. I was saturated in it, including my hair. After a week now, most of it is gone.

Last Saturday I met with the company that is going to built and install the kitchen. I didn’t want to use pre-fabricated units because they are notoriously poorly constructed and notoriously expensive. Instead, it was a better deal to have the cabinets custom build from solid wood (as opposed to particle board). The kitchen will take three weeks to complete.

Once the floors are done I will have Tavo install all of the internal doors. After the doors it will be on to the bathrooms. Yun and I found an impressive brand-new tub on craigslist last weekend. An $800 tub which we paid $100. I love craigslist.

The paint runs about $120 for a five gallon bucket in the stores. We bought 25 gallons of Sherwin Williams Ultra (a highly rated paint) off craigslist-phoenix for $100. We did the same for the exterior paint. That’s a $1000 savings on interior and exterior paint!

Here are some pictures of the progress:

This is the living room. We have a lowered ceiling around the walls. I don’t know what this is called, but we liked it when Tavo suggested it. It works well with the recessed lights.

This is the kitchen. We installed a nice skylight in the center which will go over the island. The kitchen is really big which is hard to appreciate in this photo. The island in the center will be six feet by 3 feet. The two lights next to the skylight are for pendant lights which are surrounded by recessed lights.

The room on the other side of the arched door is the dining room. It too is pretty large and will accommodate a big dining table.

This is the master closet. We had a small skylight installed in there to lighten the room up. It’s a good size closet. We added a vanity area on the left as you enter. Above the vanity area are two small recessed lights. I bought some LED lights for this area that are really nice.

This picture was taken while standing in the dining room while facing the office. We added a medium size skylight to this room which adds a lot of natural light. Surrounding the skylight are four recessed lights. The two outlets seen in the photo are on a protected circuit for surge protection so as to protect computers or other expensive electronics that lightening has a tendency of destroying (the monsoons are currently shaking the house as I write this).

This was taken inside the kitchen facing the opposite direction as the kitchen photo above. It faces the living room and the hallway/entrance to the master bedroom. You can’t quite tell from the photo below, but in addition to the sheet rock, we added a 3/4″ sound deadening material to all exterior walls and to the interior walls. Each room is mostly sound proof.

As you can see, there’s still an enormous amount of work left to do. However, if you have seen prior photos, you’ll note that this is an entirely different home from when we bought it. It’s really nice and we’ve put a lot of work in to it.