Dad used to tell me “When you do a job, don’t do it half-assed”.  My wife has accused me of “never finishing” (or rarely finishing projects) – so I suppose I didn’t listen to my dad in that case.

When we started working on the house we knew we were going to be spending a lot of money.  We budgeted what we thought we would need then went through and did a quick calculation of what it was going to take (give or take a couple thousand).  Since we had the funds in the bank, in cash and could spend it we considered all the ways we could either sell the house quickly or get the top dollar out of it.

Given that the house will only get us “what the market will bear” is something that has weight heavily on me since we started.  I have been doing a lot of the work, but we hired contractors to do some as well, like rebuild a bathroom and add carpet.  As it turns out after researching things and weighing the cost of flooring versus carpeting we decided to go with oak hardwood flooring, new carpets in the four – soon-to-be, five bedrooms (another thing we had the contractors do).  Essentially we wound up having a bathroom remodeled, a closet added to JoAnne’s old office, new hardwood floor and some minor electrical.

Over the past three months I’ve personally rebuilt plumbing, installed new electrical fixtures (lights, switches, plugs, new covers, etc), hung bedroom and closet doors, laid tile, grouted tile, painted everything in sight, breathed fumes from paint, hammered my left thumb, index finger and wrist (don’t ask how I did that), dropped a door on my foot, cut open both hands–twice.  I’ve climbed up and down the ladder roughly five hundred times and crawled the length of the house ripping out old carpet, tack strips and nails, then started repeating the process to re-install the floorboard trim.  I’ve installed new door knobs, painted doors and missed a bunch of small spots I’m going to have to go back and touch up.

Last night I finished the kitchen – except the trim, which I will complete tonight giving me a roughly 1/10 or 10% completion of the project. hahaha

Tonight the kitchen will be completed.  We only have to move the new fridge in and mount the new microwave to say “It is 100%”.

However, this weekend we accomplished putting trim in two bedrooms, JoAnne and our daughter Kristy painted the kitchen with “Kilz” because it was pink (JoAnne always wanted a pink kitchen.  I’m NOT letting her paint the galley pink on the boat though so don’t worry) and I did the rest of the painting yesterday for the kitchen.

Basically, if I had to put a real and honest “percentage completed” on this we actually have all of the upstairs bedrooms “finished” except the trim.  Minor repairs in the master bedroom.  A full “cleaning” in the upstairs bathroom.  One linen closet door to be installed, and a patch of carpet for the front room closet.

The basement needs both sets of closet doors in the bedrooms completed – I have one set left to hang and adjust and the other set to adjust so they swing correctly.  The bathroom in the downstairs needs the toil installed and the sink and vanity installed.

And I have perhaps a few small jobs to repair or patch things and touch up painting, and nearly all the electrical sockets and switches upstairs and down.

But JoAnne said it best when she said, “Hey, we’re FINISHING jobs now, not starting them”

I’d give us perhaps an 89% to 92% completion score on the projects.

My son has promised to come over and work on the yard when the weather improves… (Let me see, first snow was October 2012, and we’re expecting snow tonight on 22 April 2013: That’s six months of winter so I figure we will have perhaps 3 days this summer when the weather will “improve”.)

Our “May 1st” shoot day is still in the picture – I have one full weekend and 9 total evenings to complete the following:

Trim the rest of the rooms
Install new plugs and switches

Touch up the paint

Paint the doors

—— Ok, we might get finished about 10 May(ish) – we’ll see

Either way, we are still hitting our “Month of May” shoot day to find a realtor.