Cathy and I have been busy... busy finishing projects that we've started up to 6 years ago. You see, we're going through a refinance. For refinancing, a new appraisal of our house is required. So, in anticipation of this appraisal, we are sprucing it up.

Back in 2004, when we first moved in our Frederick home, I set to replacing the bathroom fan with a bathroom fan/heater/light combo. After breaking though a plywood wall (with my nifty new sawsall!) in the attic and cutting a oversized hole in the bathroom ceiling, I installed the unit. That's when I discovered what it means to own an old house. You see, the fan units are designed to hang flush with the ceiling. The distance between the hanging rods and the fan face is about one drywall thick. The previous owners slapped up drywall on top of the existing plaster ceiling, leaving the fan recessed in the ceiling! Looking at the gaping hole I realized I had no idea what to do about it. I kept putting it off and putting it off again. 6 years later I finally repaired it by cutting a plywood panel and framing it with trim. I cut a hole in it where the fan unit would be and installed it. It looks pretty good- well... it's better than the gaping hole. So... 6 years and it's done!

Cathy has been working on her own project for 5 years. She started scraping layers of paint off the stair rail in 2005, with the intention of stripping it down to the wood and staining it. It was quickly (and when I write "quickly," I mean 5 years later) apparent that that just wasn't possible. She got down to a dark brown stain (after cutting through3 other paint layers) and decided we're just going to paint it brown. She really did ALL of the work on this and it looks really awesome! To be fair- she had to stop for 4 years, because we had a baby, then toddler in the house, and we're pretty sure we were dealing with lead paint!

We painted Kilz over the water stains (mental note: must inspect roof in spring), put up storm windows I've been meaning to put up,  and generally cleaned up everything.

I have no idea what the appraisal will come in at. If the refinance falls through, at least it feels like we have a new[er] house :P

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Update 2-17-2011

We received a great appraisal and are going through the process of refinancing!