Calderwood Cottage – Round 3, part 1 – Over Budget and Behind Schedule

Hey guys, we’re back! Over our 9 day holiday from working on Calderwood Cottage, we had time to look at our bank account and see how much money we’ve spent so far. “Big surprise” — we’re way over budget and way behind on our schedule. This is a special problem for us because our brother, Sid, is coming to visit (and see how we’re doing on our flip house).

Sid is kind of our mentor. Julie and I like to have our heads in the clouds and Sid keeps his feet firmly planted on the ground. We call him “Dream Killer” because he shoots holes in our big plans. Generally, he’s right and we come around to his line of thinking. Occasionally we ignore his advice, stick to our guns and find ourselves…over budget and behind schedule. So now that he’s practically on his way, we’re frantically trying to get something done so it’s not quite so obvious that our flipship is taking on water.

The drywall is hung and getting mudded. We know if we can get it painted the whole house will look 100,000 times better. Also, floors help drastically in that department. So our goal for this week is to paint the inside and outside and install some flooring. So while we wait for the drywall mud to dry, we’re going to get started on the outside. Yes, we’re painting the brick. Deal with it haters.

Lucky for us, when we went to pick up our paint, we fount four, 5 gallon buckets of premium paint on clearance for less than the cheapest paint in the store. BOOM! All aboard the staying on budget train.

Guess what color we’re paint her? You guessed it! I’m using my Graco Nova 390 to spray because it’s way faster than rolling.

 

The drywaller was inside finishing up while we were outside painting. Working around his ever growing debris pile was like a game of steeple chase. He was using doors and windows to toss out scraps until we taped plastic on the windows. We didn’t really care about getting paint on the windows. We just didn’t want to get beaned with catapulting joint compound or drywall scraps.

Can’t we keep this place clean for 5 minutes!?!

I mean, we JUST had a clean up day.

We used Behr Masonry, Stucco paint and primer in one which was 1/5th the price of another brand’s “best paint for brick”. Because of the price difference, we weren’t sure how well it would cover. But, we’re on a budget so we went with Behr. And it covered GREAT!

The below picture is after one coat.

And this is after two coats.

The only thing we had to roll was the top of the chimney. And I swear, that little section took as long as spraying one coat on the whole front of the house with the sprayer. Credit to the spray gun or the gun slinger?

We rented a dump trailer and hauled all the sCrap away. Again.

We got rid of the wheel chair ramp too but we didn’t haul it to the dump. We gave it away for free by putting an add on Craig’s list.

Here’s a little sneak peek of our contrasting trim color.  Excited to check a couple things off the list:

• clean up yard 
• paint exterior
• 100 million other things

Julie is really hoping Sid will assess how much we have left to do and agree with her that we can finish by April 27.

I am preeeeettttty sure he’s going to smile and laugh (with his sparkly eyes which beam with pride because of his sisters’ abilities and awesomeness — but constant lack of self control when it comes to ALWAYS wanting to go over the top when it comes to making a house the best it can be)!

 

We’ll see. We have a few days left before he arrives. We might be able to close the gap on our schedule by pulling some all nighters!