Home Renovation – The Whole Damn House

As a wedding professional, I’ve heard a lot of best man/ maid of honor speeches start out with, “For those of you who don’t know me…” It is almost a joke among wedding vendors because approximately 98.74% of the speeches begin with that statement. I’m pretty sure I started my speech at my best friend’s wedding with it (photo above)..and I almost started this blog post with it.

It is because introductions are awkward. When you are standing in the middle of a dance floor in front of 150 of your BFF’s favorite people staring back at you it is almost as awkward as writing something on a blog that hypothetically 3 billion people in the world could read. You put yourself out there in both situations. And in both situations people could think what you are saying is stupid. So you start it off with, “For those of you who don’t know me…”

Well, I’m not starting this blog post with it because I figure if someone thinks what I am saying is stupid, you can click the X up at the top of your internet-browser-of-choice window. HA. This is our corner of the internet, suckers. And mostly, this blog is for us (me).

The Whole Damn House is a home blog that is here to document our journey improving our first home. Mostly, it is so that we can see our progress and remind ourselves that living through a construction zone is worth it. Seeing before photos after progress is made is a seriously powerful motivator. This blog also gives us the opportunity to keep our families and friends updated without having to monopolize phone conversations, connect with other fixer upper or non-fixer upper homeowners, and hopefully make a few folks laugh at our expense. 🙂 We like having people laugh with us. Maybe one day we will get to the point where you might learn something about home improvement, but..we’ll see. I’d need to convince Josh to write things here if you want to learn anything. 🙂

So. Hey! I’m Alison and I am the one who writes things here. Josh is my husband and he is the bossy one (haha, just kidding! That’s me, too!). He’s the one that has actual home improvement talent and is teaching me things everyday. In 2014, I used a nail gun for the first time and it was FUN. Our dog Tucker is along for the ride whether he likes it or not because we continue to feed him.

This is us when we were young(er) and in love. (Yes, this is from High School)

Why did we name it The Whole Damn House? Two reasons.

1. We have to re-do the whole damn house, and

2. Josh graduated from Virginia Military Institute. At VMI, one of the cheers they do during sporting events ends in “Whole Damn Team.” When discussing buying this house, Josh was wearing one of his VMI shirts that had the phrase on it, and I giggled about how we were about to buy a house where we needed to renovate the whole damn thing. So…I started the blog. I hope VMI doesn’t come after me with a cease and desist letter because then..See #1. (We’ve donated!! Love ya!)

One of my goals for 2015 is to blog more often. I signed up for Blogging101 through WordPress to learn more about this fabulous platform, get on a more frequent posting schedule and explore blogging in a new and different way. You’ll be seeing you’ll more posts coming through over here in our little weird corner of the internet. 🙂 Some may be random, some may be funny..I have no idea since WP is taking me (and a few thousand other bloggers) on the journey and assigning things day by day.

One less room has ceiling tiles in our house! VICTORY! 2 rooms down, three to go!!

You see, we have a total of four rooms getting some drywall at the moment, including the hole in our kitchen ceiling from installing the insulation, the back bedroom that got flooded with our shower drain pipe leak, our living room, and the sunroom. In preparation for the arrival of our drywall on Monday, we were scrambling to finish up several things including wiring, insulating, and installing a vapor barrier in the sunroom and living room and taking out the rest of the wood paneling/trim/ceiling tiles in the back bedroom.

Don’t you just love our mini fan?? Josh broke it when removing it, so unfortunately we will have to replace it. Darn.

I got to demo the ceiling in our back bedroom since Josh is the electrical mastermind between the two of us (surprised?). It was seriously the easiest job in the world to take down the ceiling tiles, which were glued on to a layer of drywall. I didn’t know it was drywall at first because the glue was slathered on there like nobody’s business. We were thinking we would just leave it up there since we didn’t know exactly what the material was slash if it contained any harmful materials and our new drywall could just be attached to it. Once we slept on it, we figured it couldn’t hurt TOO MUCH to remove one piece and see if the back side had any labels on it (living on the edge, ya’ll!).

The next day, my dad came over, we put on our masks and took down the first piece. The back had a label saying it was “The ORIGINAL Drywall.” I made a joke about wondering if it really was the ORIGINAL (like..you know how there are about a bajillion FIRST Baptist Churches..are they REALLY all the first?!), then we went crazy on the stuff until it was all down. It took about…14 minutes until it looked like this: