Pretty new loo.

I've got an uncanny knack for never finishing stories on this ol blog.

Like the time three months ago I told you we completely tore up my bathroom

Fear not... I haven't been squatting in a bucket throughout the winter. That project actually came to completion and I have a functioning full bathroom again. I just did some other cool stuff, like go to Australia, and forgot to mention the "after" on here!

Shockingly, I have very few "before" photos to show you... this is the only one I could find (what, like you regularly photograph your throne room?)

This was shortly after closing on my house, I picked up a quart of a darker teal and called it a day.

Fast forward a few years.... I love it a LITTLE bit more now!

It just so much more inviting (can a bathroom be inviting? I kinda wanna hang out in there, even if I'm not using the facilities, little weird - eh?)

I still have plans to swap out the mirror for something else, and add more art to the walls, although I have THE hardest time settling on artwork for bathrooms. It's just such a weird place in my mind. Having actual photographs of people in restrooms freaks me out, and I absolutely hate the cliche seashell, ocean, or bath themed imagery. (Yea, that's a paint-by-number panda I scored at a local antique mall... I kind of adore him, the whole color scheme of my bathroom came from him to be honest)

On a whim, my dad and I decided to lay the (bargain!) floor on a diagonal.... best.decision.ever. I LOVE the little quirk it adds.

[ sink: home depot // faucet: overstock // flooring: local outlet (remnant) // rug, stool: TJ Maxx // basket, stool: antique ]

Sprucing up the entry way

Halloween was gross.

I don't know about your stomping grounds, but here in the good ol circle city it rained and rained and rained some more, and not the kind of light showers with pretty rainbows. Gross, gray rain. All of this to say I was grumpy. I left work at 5:02 and somehow found myself in the parking lot of the home improvement store 24 minutes later.

So I did what any normal 20-somethin does on Halloween -- purchased two quarts of paint and went home to do a little sprucing up. Only stopping to go meet my parents for some Mexican food.

What did I paint? My entry way!

When I first bought my house there was a built in bench opposite the coat closet in my front entry way. Well it looked fine, 1 out of every 97 people who came to my house actually used the front door, so it leaned more towards the 'worthless' end of the spectrum, and was ripped out within a week.

A little wall patching, a little paint, a TJ Maxx find done and done.

Until last week. I just kept thinking how boring it was. Not that anyone but me, the dog, and 1/97th of my visitors see it. But hey, who wants boring?

Entry way meet cobalt blue. Cobalt blue meet entry way. An hour later, me and my dog can now smile every time we pass through there!

Crappy jobs.

The weirdest thing occurred to me last night as I was telling a friend I was spur of the moment ripping tile out of my bathroom... I learned that some people actually (wait for it) PLAN their home renovations.

Which just sounds totally foreign to me.

I mean I have been dreaming about redoing my upstairs bathroom since before even signing the closing papers (I mean, pale green floors, really?) But it was functioning, therefore the least of my worries. At some point during the HJ era we bought quick-fix peel and stick tiles and I redid that in some fit of "I don't need you, you cheating asshole" rage after we broke up. (This story is getting dramatic quick).

Everything was fine and dandy in a 'god I still hate this floor, and this toilet has been unlevel since I bought the house' kind of way until I realized my bathroom starting to smell last week. Which made my dad laugh in a "damnit, I've been saying for three years we would need to redo that bathroom and rip out the subflooring because your toilet is unlevel so naturally it probably has leaked' kind of way. And so we both shrugged it off because DAMNIT three years of tearing up my house is TOO DANG MANY!

And then yesterday, prompted by an impending house guest next week, I decided 'hey, what better time?!'

I conspired with my mom how to trick my dad into coming over to help me work on my house yet again. By 8pm we had removed the toilet, sink, vanity, a layer of tile and a layer of subflooring, and called it a night.

The saddest part of this whole story was that the only thing I really did was shut off the water main and drain the toilet.... and pull up tiles. Me and crowbars and upper arm strength just don't really mesh well.

THANKS DADDY! 

(And no, I have no clue what flooring I'll be putting down, nor what sink/vanity I will be replacing the old one with. So there's that.)
 

One year ago today

One year ago I was knee deep  forehead deep, in tearing up a house.

 

Hadn't even had the keys a week, and I had already recruited a team to help me make a wreck of the place!

Today I can't help but think about how grateful I am for having that opportunity. For being financially stable enough to buy a home at the age of 22, barely 23. For having parents who subcontracted their own home and knew how to do tackle nearly anything I could dream up. For friends and loved ones who would head over on a Friday night, spending it with me drinking beers and ripping up flooring.

You wanna learn a lot about yourself? Buy a house and renovate it. There are things I gained in that process that I'll never be able to put into words. It may not be the most expensive home, or the prettiest home, but she's MY home. MINE. My sweat, blood, tears, time and hard-earned cash really did go into nearly every bit of it.  I can't tell you how good that feels!

Evolution of a kitchen floor

If you haven't noticed, I love to bake. A kitchen is a VERY big deal to me in the grand scheme of a house, and it gets me all giddy in my toes that mine is finally starting to come together.

It was the first room to get torn up, and dang near the last room to get finished!

Let me remind you what it looked like to begin with...

Then the old linoleum was pulled up to reveal some very heavily glued plywood subfloor....

Once all of that plywood was painstakingly pulled up(literally in 3" pieces), we found a mess of sticky tar/glue

We tried every kind of adhesive remover and chemical to remove it, because underneath that layer of yuck was hardwood floors.

It involved a lot of scraping and picking, and I had help from my wonderful friends!

Unfortunately, when that just wasn't moving along very well, gears were changed and a new subfloor was installed over that mess...

 

And Friday, Christmas Eve, a WONDERFUL man gave me the best Christmas present... he installed my new floor! (Sorry, Chris, it wasn't you)

One of my mom's clients (she's a hairstylist) installs flooring, and he offered to do mine for nearly 1/3 of what the company quoted me for the job. Dave arrived bright & early Friday morning, after picking up my flooring from the warehouse, and got to work

 First he sealed up all the seams from the subflooring, and then he took 200 measurements (better safe than sorry right?!) and rolled out my floor in my driveway to do some rough cutting...

 Then it was brought into the house and he began to unroll it and lay it out. This is when I REALLY started getting excited! I think I had texted Chris & my mom about 80 times by this point telling them how much better it looked already!

 I really love how well it goes with the hardwood floors that are in 2 of the 3 rooms that connect to the kitchen

It didn't take long at all for the whole floor to get put down, honestly maybe an hour or two!

Here's the bathroom (newly expanded, and not quite finished yet... that'll have a post of it's own soon!). The floor was carried into here, and it turned out so good!

Pretty great improvement, huh?! Now my fridge & stove can be moved into the kitchen instead of keeping the toilet company in the sitting room, ha!

Pour some spackle on me

I've spent the past week texturing the ceilings in 7 rooms of the house.

Most of the house had flat ceilings. While nice and full of possibilities (paint?!) a house built in the 30s does some settling and many of those ceilings has tiny hairline cracks in them. So we patched those then added a nice spiky 'do!

Let me tell yah, those fellas who are professionals and come in on their stilts and have an entire house done it .2 seconds... Yea, those guys are show-offs!

My best time was in the dining room, which I finished in 40 minutes! (patting myself on the back)


It's funny that my jacket looks halfway black here still, in reality I looked like a reverse dalmation! (I'm aware you are all jealous of my get-up... I was tired of getting Sheetrock in my hair so I created a makeshift bandana!)

I finished up the final ceiling on Sunday, I feel as if my shoulders will continue to burn for the next three weeks!

PS that bedroom is no longer pink, my dining room is no longer blue, and my bathroom is no longer white!

Stuck

There's no better word to describe exactly how I feel right now. Except maybe gerbil wheel but that's actually two words. I keep trying to remind myself that I only got the keys 2 weeks ago and we've gotten a whole heck of a lot done in those two weeks... but sometimes it's just hard to stay upbeat when the whole house is in a state of chaos!

Since getting the keys on the 17th of November:
Replaced all of the locks
Removed old linoleum floor in kitchen
Removed carpet in sitting room
Removed 2 layers of linoleum in sitting room
Removed lousy chair rail from dining room
Removed wallpaper from living room
Removed wallpaper from entry/stairway
Sand down walls to remove wallpaper gunk
Fix hole in master bdrm from door knob
Sanded down upstairs hardwood floors
Sanded down the bottom step because previous owner had a dog and it looks like someone took a cheesegrater to that step
Fixed cracks in walls (it is 70some years old after all)
Fixed other cracks you find while fixing the first cracks
Fixed the ceiling cracks
Tore down the wood paneling on the kitchen wall
Painted my craft room, but I hate it & it's getting repainted

And then there's the unexpected things that have popped up, like the decision to texturize the flat ceilings because, well let's be honest, a house built in the 30's has done some settling and there's atleast one tiny crack in each room... and it when you've stared at that little crack for two weeks it really starts to tick you off.

And sometimes when you decide to take off a light switch panel in the kitchen, 8 layers of paint decide to come off with it. And no, 8 isn't an exaggeration. And it's enamel paint, so it literally peels right off with your finger. So you might as well scrap all the peely paint off that wall since you already started the mess!

And then you notice that the iron railings at the bottom of the stairs have nearly 27 coats of paint on them, and no longer look like twisting iron but blobs. So you might as well go ahead and unbolt those and strip them down.

And all I want is painted walls. Paint makes a room look finished. I'm tired of looking at drywall putty covered walls. But before we paint the walls the ceilings need textured. And we need to finish all sanding before we texture anything so we don't get dust in the ceiling and paint. And then after that we have to stain floors. And after the stain is put down we'll be at a standstill because you can't walk on fresh floors for like 5 days.

Oh, and did I mention the entire downstairs bathroom is down to bare studs and no floor, because you couldn't even sit on the toilet without hanging your head on the sink So part of my extremely large pantry/closet and sitting room are becoming bathroom territory. Thank God my dad does a pretty good impersonation of a licensed electrician, plumber, and builder. Otherwise I might be up shit creek without a paddle!

And everyone is so sweet and asks how it's coming along, but in reality I just want to bite your head off. Because honestly, home renovation should not be scheduled around certain times of the month if you, ahhem, catch my drift.

Alexson over at Bigger, Better, Best hit the nail on the head when she said "And frankly, it makes me want to curl into a ball and eat seven pounds of M&Ms. "

S.O.S.

Tearing up the house

A majority of my weekend was spent tearing up the house! What a fantastic stress reliever, ha! Just pulling out carpet, and ripping up floors and tearing down wallpaper... loved it!

Let me start off with a little diagram of my 1st floor layout that I tediously created (sarcasm) it's not true to scale at all, but whatevs. I kid you not, every room on the first floor is in it's own stage of disarray... and I LOVE IT! I can already see everything coming together and am so excited.

(Click to enlarge)

The sitting room is acting as a dumpster of sorts, holding all the torn-up kitchen flooring.

Speaking of kitchen, big kitchen remodel plans are gone to the wayside... We've figured out that by taking out the built-in that was in one corner, all appliances can easily fit and makes quite a nice kitchen layout! Helloooo money saver!

One of the first things we did after I got the keys was take up the linoleum floor in the kitchen. It was pulling up on the sides and yellowed and all around yuck! We found hardwoods underneath the subflooring that was under the linoleum! Woohoo!

What was once a fancy formal dining room is now a storage room of sorts, and the chair rail (which was actually upside-down baseboards) has been removed

The living room and entryway/stairway had some spiffy white damask and striped wallpaper, which was removed (thankfully, it came down pretty easily)

The living room had a lovely shade of pale green hiding beneath!

The sun room is now a lace-curtain graveyard

Phew what a mess! I have amazing parents and boyfriend who have been over there every day helping me work on the place. Don't know what I'd do without them! Sorry this post was such a cluster of everything... I am trying to figure out a more organized way to catalog what's being done, but until then I'll just play catch-up of what we've been working on!