The last two weekends Lauren and I have spent hours upon hours working on the condo. We’ve been painting trim, painting rooms, upgrading switches, outlets and heaters and, on occasion, totally screwing things up. Below are a few of the recent projects with some tasty before and after shots. The first is the one I’m probably proudest of. I ripped out the old and nasty baseboard heater and upgraded it to an wall unit. The second is a before and after shot of our balcony. I started with 20 inch square deck material that I bought from Ikea and, basically, cut it to fit our balcony and then nailed it all together with boards underneath.

By no means is this all that we’ve done the last two weekends. Here is the laundry list of things we have done in the last few weekeneds.

• Painted the guest bedroom “mocha brown”.
• Painted four new interior door slabs only to realize that I had measured two of the doors wrong and I couldn’t hang the other two doors because I was neither equipped with the knowledge or the right tools for the job.
• Put new trim in the guest bedroom.
• Put new switches and outlets in the guest bedroom, our bedroom and the bathroom.
• Painted the window sills in both bedrooms.
• Replaced the baseboard electric heater in the guest bedroom.
• Put in a faux deck on our balcony.
• Painted over the nasty yellow in the living room with a clay color.

This coming week our contractor is coming to put in all new interior doors, which will need to be painted and trimmed. After that is done we plan on painting and putting new closet doors up in both of the bedrooms.

At that point we will have hit a wall. The other projects from that point forward will need to be handled by professionals. We plan on gutting the kitchen and the bathroom and then, the final touch, putting in all new carpet.