The Pink Sink Project

Football is a pretty big deal at our house.  Little Lady knows that Sunday afternoons are dedicated to watching the game.  After the end of last season she was confused as to why the TV wasn't on for the game - she had gotten so used to watching football on Sundays! Alas, the Man Cave isn't quite ready for today's season opener.  All we need is the flooring.  Oh, and a couch.  Oh, yeah, a new TV would help, too.  M has been scouting out a new TV and we both have a pretty good idea of what we want for furniture, but we don't want to pull the trigger on either until we get the flooring done. We finally finished up the painting, which took a lot longer than it really should have.  We had aimed to have the entire room done by the end of August, but life has kind of gotten in the way.   I wanted to wait and show pictures of the room when it was completely done, flooring and all, but that might be a while... To recap, here's what we started with...

As I write this I'm waiting for another coat of paint to dry in the Man Cave.  Despite no posts in the past week, we have actually been making progress on the room.  The walls have actual paint on them now!  I'm hoping that by this weekend all of the painting will be done and all that will be left is the flooring. I have to admit that I went through a week without any motivation to work on the room because I didn't think it was coming out how I wanted it to.  It's been so much prep time that I was getting frustrated that it wasn't coming out as I envisioned it would.  Specifically, I wasn't happy that after hours of prep works, I could still see paneling peeking out from behind the walls. When I last posted about the Man Cave I feared that I would never be able to cover up the paneling.  Here's a picture from the last time I posted: Despite spending hours filling in the crevices with joint compound, the walls still didn't look flat.  Particul...

Still plugging away on the Man Cave. I have now put a couple of coats of joint compound on the paneling, but I have to say that I'm not loving the results.  It seems to be filling in the crevices just fine, but I think you'll still be able to see the paneling when all is said and done. The worst case scenario is that we resort to Plan B, which is covering up the paneling with some decorative baseboard molding.  It's not the worst thing in the world, but I was trying to avoid that.  I still have some tricks up my sleeve to minimize the look of the paneling, but more on that later. What I am happy about is the initial results of cleaning the brick wall around the fireplace.  Here's the "before" shot of the wall. It doesn't look all that bad from afar, but I wanted to start the entire room with a clean slate.  I did a search for "how to clean brick" and this site was one of the first ones I found.  After doing a little research I di...

Let me start with a big "Thank You" to everyone who has sent me a message to say how much they like how the office turned out.  What a boost to our confidence you have been!  Thanks for reading and supporting us in this crazy venture. We were fortunate enough this past weekend to take a much needed road trip to visit good friends and get away for a few days.  At first, the thought of losing steam with the renovation projects scared me, but it turns out we needed those few days away from the house.  Nothing like a few days in a tiny hotel room with two kids to make you appreciate your own house!  I've come back refreshed and ready to take on the next project. So, what's next you ask?  The Man Cave! When we first looked at the house we didn't quite know what we would do with this space, which is on the lower level.  My husband pretty quickly decided it was where his video game-playing and football watching would take place.  We started joking ...