We closed the deal on our house yesterday and are officially, once again, Boulder homeowners. Yay! The house needs a little work and we also opted to remove a wall between two bedrooms. So this week, before moving the stuff in, we're doing a major bedroom remodel, carpeting about 700 sqft of the basement, and painting 4 rooms. The remodel of the master bedroom: This house has 3 small (11x10) bedrooms upstairs and two larger, sunny, bedrooms in the basement. Since we obviously don't need FIVE bedrooms, we are taking out a wall to make a large 12X20 master. I hired a contractor named Michael Harrington (he was one of the 20 guys who answered my craigslist.org ad) for a ridiculously low rate because he is just getting started in the area. Turns out that when he was living in SoCal he participated in an HGTV episode of Designer's Challenge ! So far he is doing a great job. Laura said she has dibs on him next. The carpeting of the basement: While watching an episode of a...