GETRUNTAH

New White House report claims more jobs from stimulus bill

According to the July 14, 2010 article "New WH report claims more jobs from stimulus bill," the Obama administration claims the federal government stimulus spending program prevented unemployment in the U.S. from being worse than it was. Claims such as this are impossible to prove (or disprove), however. The report is an attempt to deflect blame from the President for the condition of the economy and to inform the public that the Obama administration has been pursuing the standard remedies for fighting economic recession: expansionary fiscal policy (in the forms of increased government spending and tax cuts) and expansionary monetary policy (in the form of low interest rates).

According to the article:

WASHINGTON – A new White House report says last years $862 billion stimulus law has now "saved or created" between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs.

Thats up from 2.2 million to 2.8 million in the last quarterly report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Christina Romer, head of the council, says in congressional testimony prepared for Wednesday that every $1 from the stimulus bill is matched by $3 in private money.

She says the law "appears to be stimulating private investment and job creation at a time when the economy needs it most."

President Barack Obama has traveled the country telling voters that as bad as things are, theyd be worse without the stimulus. He acknowledges the message is a tough sell. Obama travels Thursday to Michigan.

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New House Renovation Progress First Floor

Thats the view from the front door. Im standing in the living room and the next room you see is the dining room. The doorway with the bright light shining through it leads to the kitchen.

We ripped up the yucky carpet throughout (including the stairs - oy) and my sweet mama spent practically an entire day on her bottom pulling out tacks, staples and nails to prep it for the new hardwood flooring. What you see below is the subfloor post-carpet-ripout.


Next is a view of the dining room from the day we closed. We ripped those closets out (as I mentioned in this post), pulled the carpet and patched the brick wall with drywall.

 It feels so much more spacious in here now! Can you believe the next photo is even the same view as above?


Here we are standing in the dining room and looking back toward the front door.

Before:


As soon as the floor was prepped and my father-in-law took care of some of the tricky hardwood flooring areas, C and I got to work on installing much of the rest of it. We knocked out almost all of the downstairs flooring on Halloween and as a funny aside, when the neighborhood kids came by to trick or treat, I greeted them at the door wearing my ear protection and wielding that flooring nail gun you see in the next shot below. Im not sure if they thought I was wearing some sort of costume or that I was just a crazy neighbor lady!

Anyway, in case you were ever curious about how you lay hardwood flooring, the photos provide a mini-demonstration.

We found that its fastest and easiest  with two people (relatively speaking that is - hardwood flooring is not really fast or easy no matter how you do it!): the first person lays out the strips and bangs them into place with a hammer. The pieces fit together with a tongue and groove, but you have to use some muscle to get them flush. The second person comes through with heavy duty flooring gun and secures the pieces to the subfloor with it. Theres more to it, of course, but thats the quick and dirty version of the process.

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New House Renovation Progress

Happy Wednesday, friends! Thanks for all your kind words about our new home last week! In case you missed it, catch up here with the empty house "before" tour and real estate photos (there are some gems in there...). We have been hard at work over the past several weeks getting the place into shape so we can move in THIS weekend. Yep, this weekend! Its crunch time. Well see how much we can finish between now and then - I cant wait to see it all come together. SO much work has been done (Ive been calling it our month-long renovation blitz), but there is still plenty to do and weve already got plans for future projects.



Goodbye, closets! The reasons we removed them were two-fold: one, they made the dining room feel really small, and two, they had to go to make way for our plans to open up the dining room to the kitchen. We have plenty of storage elsewhere in the house, so we werent worried about losing that space.


Soon after that we turned our attention to the second floor. Room by room, we ripped out nasty carpet, prepped the floors (oh how I dislike you, carpet tacks, staples and old flooring nails) and started laying the new, beautiful hardwood floors. The next few photos are from the installation in our master bedroom.



In case any of you are in the market for new flooring, we went with 2.25-in wide prefinished oak hardwood from Lowes (Bruce Addison Oak Hardwood in Spice to be exact). Ill probably dedicate a separate post to our hardwood floors, but so far we are happy with them. Theyre perfect for the more traditional style of our home, and many of the other homes in our neighborhood have similar hardwood floors, so trading the carpet for them is one way were bringing this house back up to snuff :). And yes, we did install them ourselves with the help of my FIL. Installing 1000 square feet of hardwood is not for the faint of heart!

Available link for download