Full Steam Ahead

So everything is really coming together.  You can see the exterior paint is almost done!  It’s pretty dark!  I was a little shocked, but I that’s really what we were looking for. Dark and modern.  The painter really did an excellent job on the stucco with smoothing everything out and patching any cracks, holes or problems.  It almost looks like a new stucco job compared to what it was!  Try to envision it without the red doors and orange stairs, and without the old metal gate.  I’ll be glad when that front is cleaned up.  I’ve also got to head to the paint store to find that perfect shade of mustard for the doors.  Still figuring out what color to paint the steps.  It should be lighter, but not too light to show the city grime! 

The sheetrockers are getting close to done!  The mud is taking longer to dry than we had hoped, so their sanding has been delayed a couple days.  The good thing about doing two units is that we’re not losing time when the rental mud is taking a couple extra days – they just got a jump on the drywall in our unit.  They’ve got fans and heaters running like mad to dry it out.  

This is our kitchen area going into the living room!

A peek at the rental unit where the bookshelf was!

We’ve got Keiko, a manager that Jimmy works with, coming to lay our floors.  We also got our interior paint bids back – talk about breaking the budget!  We really underestimated that figure.  Thankfully Jimmy is resourceful and asked Keiko to get together a crew to bring over to do the painting.  This way, they can coordinate the floors and painting together and we’ll be paying this group hourly instead of a painting contractor.  The only downside is that we (Jimmy) needs to get all the supplies and kinda watch over them.  Both units flooring and paint look like they’ll take about 3 weeks, so Sept 1 is realistic, but we’ll be cutting it close!  

The tile also just arrived today for both bathrooms along with the flooring on the rental.  Sept 1 is the ultimate move-in goal, but the bigger goal is to have one unit done enough to throw a party next Saturday night.  We’re having a bunch of friends from LA come up for Outside Lands: http://lineup.sfoutsidelands.com/  next weekend, and the post-party is at our new place.  The contractor laughed when we told him we at least need one toilet installed by next Saturday.  I’m excited to see how far we get in the next week.  We’ll have flooring, tile, painters, cabinets, and bathtubs all in process (plus one toilet). 

We also just listed our current place on Craigslist and are having our first open house on Saturday.  I’ve just started answering all the Craigslist ads for people wanting to see the apartment, which is great.  {this was a shocking reminder that we’re about to be landlords… again}.  So, we’re moving full steam ahead.  I’ll be so happy to see some finish work in there!