Our First House: I Love a Good Deal!

So...I feel very lucky to have found a lot of the great deals that I have come across for things for our house. I've bought every faucet on clearance, got a deal on our kitchen counter tops, had mail-in rebates on every gallon of paint, got an excellent deal on our kitchen sink, and so much more. Lately, I haven't been able to find many good clearance items and thought my luck had ended...UNTIL the past few days :)

For starters, we had looked at putting the nicer Levelor brand plantation blinds in all of our double windows. I was just afraid that the cheaper brand that has a plastic rod across the top would not be able to hold up the weight of a wide window for a long time. The Levelor blinds run about $82/each. Somehow, I found two sets of blinds in the right width and length on clearance for half price at Lowes this past weekend. They had apparently cut the wrong size for another customer, so they had to slash the price. Lucky for us :) THEN, today I stopped in Lowes just to see if there was anything on clearance that I needed, and the exact bathroom vanity that Tom and I had looked at buying for the basement bathroom was on clearance. One of the decorative feet had broken off, but is fixable by glue...and the part that looks damaged is the part that will go next to the wall...which means no one will ever see it! It was regularly priced at $449, was marked down to $331, but they ended up giving it to me for $100.....yes...that's right...$100!!!!! We'll be able to get the cabinet and counter top for less than what we were going to pay for the cabinet alone :) I've posted the picture of the vanity below.

In other news, our carpet was installed on Monday, but after the installers left, we saw all of the damage they caused to the baseboards. I can understand a few marks here and there, but there were even places where they dug into the raw baseboard. My mom had to go through and re-paint the baseboards in all of the rooms where they had installed carpet. They also used some metal tool to twist on and off our brand new brushed nickel doorstops...and destroyed them in the process. So...today, we convinced them to not only reimburse us for the cost of new doorstops and paint, but they're also giving us back most of our installation cost! YAY!
As for our brand new windows that are already collecting water in a couple of places and showing rust spots...the installers came out today to look at them...and have no idea what's going on. So, they referred me back to Lowes, and they have a rep coming out tomorrow to look and see if it is maybe a manufacturing defect. I just hope they can fix them without having to do any major work.

As for the rest of the house, we're coming along. We've put up all of the backerboard in the guest bathroom upstairs and have done one layer of mud between the drywall and backerboard. We have to sand this down and do one more layer of mud and then we'll be able to start tiling.

We are finally getting to the end of this renovation. Thank you for all of your love, help, and support through this process. We've set our big move-in date for August 22nd, so we hope to set a big open house for sometime in the month after that. We'll keep you posted!
Thanks!

Here are some more pictures!

Backerboard in place in the upstairs guest bath

To fit the new tub in, we had to completely cut out this corner of the drywall....I had to mud it, tape it, and mud some more. I think it turned out pretty well :)