This room had a lot of issues – icky lavender paint, navy blue carpet and scrawny, little baseboard:

One wall had a pocket door that we wanted to get rid of, another wall was on a diagonal, and the end of the closet was also on a diagonal. It made for a lot of awkward places in the room:

And of course, there was the popcorn ceiling, which pretty much made my skin crawl every time I looked at it:

Jim demo’d the walls we wanted to change:

He patched the gaps in the ceiling where the old studs used to be:

The yucky old popcorn ceiling got scraped off:

Jim brought home another load from Home Depot and studded in the new walls:

He put up new drywall and went through countless hours of taping, mudding and sanding. He applied a knockdown texture to the ceiling and new walls, and then primed the ceiling and all walls. He painted the ceiling white:

And – surprise, surprise – he painted the walls pink:

He installed the same bamboo flooring that we used in the master. Then he did such a bang-up job on the baseboards that I wrote a tutorial called Installing Colonial Baseboard and published it on HubPages.

And the most recent addition to K’s room was – TA DA! The first completed door in the house! Jim built it from scratch, rather than buying a pre-hung door:

We need to finish the closet and put up decorative items, but K’s already moved in with her bed, chest, dresser, and pink butterfly chair. It’s great to have two functional bedrooms again!

He’s a wood stork, and is probably down in this area for the winter. He has a long, decurved beak and a very interesting, scruffy-looking head – it reminds me of a turkey or vulture with its roughness. His body was white, with just a little black underneath, his legs were black and he had pink feet.

In the U.S., the wood stork is an endangered species and is the only stork that presently breeds here. It lives off a diet of fish, frogs and insects.

If you’ve ever seen this bird swimming, you know why it’s also called the snakebird – it swims with its body submerged and, with just its head and curvy neck sticking out of the water, it looks like a snake. Another common name for the anhinga is the water turkey, due to its long tail.

After swimming, it likes to perch and spread out its wings and tail to dry. I could tell this bird was a female anhinga, because her head, neck and breast are buff-colored.

These birds will dive underwater to hunt for food – It’s interesting to watch them come up with a small fish clutched in their beaks and then carefully flip it into position so they can swallow it.

And a last little tidbit of information – the binomial name of this bird is anhinga anhinga, which for some reason just cracks me up…it’s like someone ran out of ideas when they were naming this bird, and just used the same word twice

Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!

For now I wanted to share a photo of our new backyard visitor. As I’ve mentioned before, Allen’s Creek runs right through our back yard. It’s a brackish water creek that feeds into Tampa Bay, which connects with the Gulf of Mexico. We are really enjoying watching and identifying the wildlife. So far we’ve seen lots of turtles, pelicans, yellow-crowned night herons, crabs, white ibis, anhinga, river otters and ducks.

Recently I saw a big pink bird flying by…I started yelling that there was a flamingo out back and ran to get my camera.  After examining the shots I took and taking a close look at the fellow’s beak, I realized that it wasn’t a flamingo – our bird book helped me I.D. it as a roseate spoonbill.

It was gorgeous!  It’s the only spoonbill bird species native to North America.  It is a wading bird which feeds by rhythmically sweeping its spatulate bill back and forth through the water.  I haven’t seen one feeding yet – this guy was just hanging out with his buddies on Bird Island.

This other little guy was also hanging out on Bird Island – I think he was posing to be on the back of a coin I’m a little unsure, but I think he’s a great cormorant. They have a large hooked bill and a bright yellow throat patch bordered by white feathers. One of their characteristics is that, when perched wet, they will hold their wings in a spread eagle position to dry.

There’s never a dull moment in the Huebsch House back yard!

Yes, Winnie the Pooh adorns our bathroom wall – but wait, there’s more! The previous owners were apparently Pooh-maniacs. Pooh is surrounded by lots of blue clouds.

There are blue clouds over the doorway…

blue clouds over the window…

blue clouds over the shower…

and blue clouds on the light soffit.

But wait, there’s EVEN more! There’s a Winnie the Pooh cabinet knob:

And we wouldn’t want Pooh Bear to be lonely, so there are also Tigger, Eeyore and Piglet knobs:

And we’re not Pooh-i-fied enough yet – there are Pooh and Tigger stencils EVERYWHERE…on drawer fronts:

On closet doors:

And my personal favorite, over the toilet paper holder:

I guess you can never have too much Pooh in the bathroom

We decided on Morningstar’s 3/8″ x 3-3/4″ clic strand carbonized bamboo:

(Source)

We ordered 2500+ sq. ft. of it from Lumber Liquidators…two weeks and $11,385 later, we brought home one of the three pallets:

We loaded 5 boxes at a time onto a wagon to wheel it up to the front door. My job was to pop open the end of each box so that the wood planks would acclimate while sitting in the house.

We had to wait an EXCRUCIATING five days for the flooring to acclimate before we could start installing it. We are not good waiters. On the fourth day, Jim put down the moisture barrier and the underlayment.

The underlayment was crinkly and didn’t want to lay flat – there was definitely much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Finally the room was ready for the flooring! (Prepare yourself for my animated GIF – give it a few seconds to load; then it will replay after a 5-second pause.)

After the flooring was down, Jim painted and installed new 5-1/4″ baseboard to replace the skinny little baseboard that was there before. Finally the master was ready to move into! And just to jog your memory, it went from this:

to this:

Ooo-o-o, wait, we have to see this side by side!

We just love everything about it! We’ve spent 2 days in the master and it’s wonderful. Here’s a recap of what we did (and by “we” I mean “mostly Jim”).
– Remove the popcorn ceiling
– Realign the hallway/closet wall
– Divide the closet into 2 walk-in closets
– Re-align the hallway/bathroom wall to create a small linen closet
– Center fan on ceiling peak and install new fan
– Apply knockdown texture to ceiling and new walls
– Prime and paint ceiling and walls
– Install bamboo flooring
– Install new baseboard

Hopefully we’re done with the hardest of the four bedrooms to update. Jim moved on to K’s room today and started demoing – no resting on his laurels!

Jim finished texturing the ceiling and new walls in the master. He sprayed on a coat of primer – it looked great, but it did involve an emergency trip to Home Depot for a second 5-gallon bucket of primer and a super duper respirator mask for Jimbo.

After the primer, he rolled on a coat of white ceiling paint…the ceiling looks beautiful with all that popcorn texture gone!

We picked a paint color for the walls – “Pale Wheat” by Behr. I ended up buying a gallon of eggshell enamel by Glidden, which they color-matched to the paint chip…don’t you just love color matching? We decided to just get a gallon because we’re notorious for not liking the first color we pick. Jim used up the whole gallon and…

WE LOVE IT!! It just makes the room look nice and warm! So, I’ll be off to Home Depot shortly for another gallon of paint, which should allow Jim to finish up the job today. Then tomorrow we’re heading out to shop for flooring. We’re interested in wood flooring, maybe stranded bamboo in a natural color. After the flooring, the baseboard will go up, and then WE GET TO MOVE INTO THE MASTER – too exciting!!

Yes, Jim is sweaty and grimy and fixed a leak in the water supply line to our house a couple of days ago, but that’s not it…OK, remember this from mid-August?

Hooray, the blue cast is finally gone!! Jim actually got it off two weeks ago, and we were surprised at how painful his hand has been. The doc actually says the posture of his thumb is good, and he’s been going through physical therapy to work on regaining full use of his hand. Jim claims that his physical therapist, Irma, is mean…no offense, Irma Actually, he says that she is very good, but a lot of the stuff she has him do really hurts – hence, the “mean”.

At least, the cast seems to have done the trick, and hopefully he has avoided surgery on this – that’s always good news! So, Jim’s back in action with the renovation. Fixing the water supply leak wasn’t exactly “renovation”, but just one of those maintenance items that seems to go along with owning a 28-year-old house. He did an expert job, and when I asked him how he knew what to do he said, “I watched Richard Trethewey do it on “This Old House”.” Amazing. I could not watch someone do something on TV and then do it myself to save my life! I love being married to a handy guy