Striped walls

My dad spent the day taping and mudding our new pantry, laundry room and bathroom remodel. Grace just saw it and walked out to say "Grandpa is in big trouble! He colored and striped the walls. Go to timeout Grandpa!"

New bathroom/pantry pictures

A picture from the south to the north side of the old pantry. What a mess all of that plaster was!!

A shot into the new bathroom. You can see that we'll have two separate vanities and storage in between the two. The door inside - which used to lead into the pantry until it was boarded up in the early '50s - will lead into the new laundry room.

As of last night, this is what the pantry wall to the south looked like.

And the pantry wall to the north. You can see that they built in a half wall off of the old chimney. This wall will separate the old pantry into a laundry room and a much smaller pantry which will be accessible off of the kitchen.

The old pantry - facing south - after being gutted down to stud.

Grace & Emilia found a new place to play hide & seek - inside one of the new bathroom vanities!

A picture from the inside of the old pantry before it was gutted. The white built-in shelf unit we were told was built by great-grandpa Emil for great-grandma Esther. Unfortunately we were not able to keep it as time had made it a bit rickety and this area will soon be our laundry area.

A picture from the bathrom looking at the old pantry - now laundry room door. All of this plaster and lathe has been removed and is now covered in lots of insulation and drywall.

Grace made a sitting area for her and Emilia so that they could watch some of the construction.

Landon's room

Yes, we are still alive and now finding time again to work on the house! It has been a busy few months between school, concerts, church events....we were running ragged there for awhile!
We had hoped to get quite a bit done on the house over our Christmas break from school/work, but instead were snowed in for much of break with cabin fever and not enough supplies to work on our projects. We are thanking our lucky stars that we found a good tractor earlier this fall because it is really helping to keep us cleaned out on the farm. This last snow took Paul more than 4 hours to clear out with the tractor and loader and now we hear that there's more snow coming in next week!
We just had the bathroom flooring laid down on Saturday. I will post pictures hopefully soon.
The most recent project that we've tried to tackle is to get Landon's room ready for him. We are only a few weeks away so it was definitely time to get going on it. It took a few days to get Paul's old room cleared out and ready but then we started working on the walls with hopes of getting them painted. We didn't realize how much old wallpaper was on the walls and we had to scrape most of the walls down to bare plaster before we could paint. It took A LOT of paint for the walls, ceiling and woodwork, but it's finally done! Paul doesn't want me to forget to add the fact that every Bloomquist male has slept in this room for the last 94 or so years, so it's pretty special!
We found two great antique dressers for him (you can see the girls cleaning them in the pictures) and Gma & Gpa Linn bought a really nice mission-style crib too. Now we just have to get clothes put into the dresser, his crib made and pictures on the wall. Hopefully we'll have time to finish the room up soon!

"Wet paint. Don't touch!" is Grace's new saying. She's right too!
We've been painting fools on the farm!

Emilia taking a break from dusting the new dresser.

Grace spent almost an hour dusting this one drawer!