You're welcome LenkArt!

btw, I've removed our condo photos from Flickr to make room for hiking pics for now.

Hi All. It's been 6 months since we bought the place! It's blown by actually. Well, no photos up yet...obviously. Since March, we've spent most of our free time out in the woods on multi-day hiking and scrambling trips rather than inside. Yet, each room has it's new paint so the place is much more cheerful and cleaner. Quite a big job that I don't want to do again any time soon. The cigarette tar that seeps through the bathroom paint seems to just stay isolated to the bottom of the cove that adjoins the ceiling with the walls, and there's not much showing anymore. Along with the multitude of other worthy details yet to tackle throughout our condo, one more coat of primer and paint on those areas should finish it off. Fingers x'ed. I gutted the closet in the "bedroom" (sleeping nook, actually) a couple of weeks ago and this weekend I'll start rebuilding it to be far more effective. Should be fancy schmancy when it's done - a worthy endeavor since it's our single largest storage space aside from the one in the basement. A bookshelf, a window seat and a bit more kitchen storage are the only other big projects left. We almost bought a house with a yard, garage, etc. - very glad we didn't as 465sq. ft. is enough to tackle for now. Photos someday soon. Todd

Andrea here...It's been a little over three weeks since we moved into our condo and we've been enoying it immensely.  Not only did we sell half of our furniture collection and gave away a ton of clothes, dishes, books and other miscellaneous junk, we simplified our lives further by living within walking distance of our workplaces...what a luxury! 

We no longer sit in traffic, waiting for the creep of cars to get closer to our home (on the days we were too lazy to ride our bikes).  Now we walk or ride our bikes.  In the past 3 and a half weeks we have driven our car to work once (we carpool).

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I'm digressing from the home-related stuff...so we've been busy.  We painted the bathroom from a dark yellow color to bright white (white really DOES make a room look larger)...and we learned a lesson.  We found out that cigarette smoke really does bleed through paint!  Yep, the past owner was a chain smoke apparently.  Neither Todd or I smoke so we're trying to get the painting done.  One thing we won't do again is think that primer can mask tar residue.  It won't.  Not even the sealant type of primer.  You need Kilz or TSP to do the job correctly.  It's nasty stuff, TSP, but if you don't douse the walls then you're bound to see the brown tar seeping through your walls...gross.

Tomorrow we paint our bedroom and office nook areas...we really do need to get some home pictures on here to show what it looks like...