Danielle: The first thing we had to do was sanding, and honestly, you can only sand a few hours at a time. Ely did most of it because it was just so physically demanding, standing on 16-foot ladders with this heavy electric sander over your head. The whole house was just covered in saw dust. But once that was clean and cleared, we painted everything — and I was responsible for most of the painting.To cover those water stains, we thought it was going to take one coat of primer and two coats of paint, but it took the best primer and paint money could buy — and still, five coats. Plus, we had to paint all of it by hand. But once we finished those two big things, we were then really able to focus and go room-by-room.