The end of the marathon

As it turns out, buying this house with the intent of turning it into an airbnb definitely confirmed something I've always suspected about myself: that regarding my personal capabilities I'm often wildly optimistic.

WILDLY optimistic.

In the beginning, I imagined getting the house painted in a couple of months.  I mean, how long does it take to paint walls?

Well?  As it turns out, about two years!  (And that's with a little help from my son.)  What I didn't know?  That painting dark stained molding takes FOREVER.  The walls are the easy part.

Sometimes it's a real blessing the things we don't know, when we begin an endeavor.  I imagine I would have been pretty daunted had I begun this with the knowledge I have now.

Since we're really only doing a cosmetic redo of the inside of the house, I didn't expect to have the kind of delays and problems people run into with remodels.  But when we had to resurface the walls (after taking down wallpaper in the hall and bathroom that wrecked little parts of the wall, and discovering wallpapered-over holes), trying to locate ANYONE to do the work took months.  And my husband ended up doing it himself.

Then there's the outside (the actual remodeling part): we had no idea how complicated it would be having a dock built.  When we realized what we want to do will involve extensive excavation, it became obvious what a huge project this will be.  (I say "will be" because after two years, we still have not begun it.)

It took about a year to make the plan and wait for approval from the TVA.  Then we tried to locate a contractor, another dead end.

We had a quote that was so expensive (for the excavation alone) it was a no go.

The good news?  We believe we've found a reliable, affordable contractor who can do the excavation in March.  So it looks like a project that will be tackled in stages.  But our new potential excavator guy actually responds to texts and phone calls.  That's a first!

We are really hoping to have the house ready to rent by the beginning of summer.  So we'll have to wait to search for a dock builder till next year.

So here we are, the end of January, and I need to get this house done and ready by June.  Where are we at?

Well, I'm FINALLY down to the last little bit of painting:

This little area between the hall and living room that needs to be painted.

The walls and bathroom vanity still need to be done.

Figuring out the colors is the hard part.

I've got 3 little areas left of dark molding that needs to be deglossed and painted.

And then it's FINALLY done!

This little section in the hall was covered by the scaffolding my husband built so we could paint over the stairs.  We couldn't get to it till he took it down.

This is the inside of a closet that for some reason I didn't do when I did the molding in the rest of the room.

I know it's just the inside of the closet and maybe I'm being a bit of a perfectionist here, but I just want to know that ALL the molding in the house matches.

This bathroom window has been covered by a curtain since we bought the house, so it never hit me that there was a dark window hiding behind it.

Again, my perfectionist problem is kicking in a little.

But after these I will have no more dark molding anywhere!

This is currently the state of the "basement" room.

When I went to Florida unexpectedly in November, my son stepped up and painted this whole, huge room for me while I was gone.

It looks so fresh and nice!

As soon as the hinges are painted, we can put this vanity back together.

The hinges and cabinets to be painted so we can put the downstairs kitchen back together.

So, aside from finishing the painting, I just need to go room by room and organize, adding and deleting the final furniture and getting them fully set up finished.  This will help me figure out what I still need to find, furniture-wise.

I'm going to start in this bedroom, which, like all the rooms has been a repository for the "house stuff" I need to arrange and organize.

Time to get the kitchen table out of here that my husband's been using for a desk.

He's not real happy about this.

So, here's where we're at.  I know it will take some time to set the house up online, etc.  The sooner I can get this done, the better!

The finish line is in sight.