Shower Tile

K has made huge progress on the bathroom tile in the last few days.  Most of the tile wall behind the vanity and the tile in the shower is in. 

Vanity wall

I chose a marble tile for inside the niche, and K wasn't sure about it.  But now that it's installed with the aluminum edging, I think she likes it.  I really like it-- there are little hints of purple and blue and yellow in the stone and I think it coordinates with the floor tile and the wall paint.

After K cleaned up for the day, we showed Baby V the nightlight on the ceiling fan and let him crawl around and explore the room.  <3

Looking at the blue nightlight on the ceiling fan

VACATION

K and I are in Puerto Rico this week for VACATION!!!  The timing worked out for her-- before she starts up another project for work.  And we both needed a break from working on our house. --We spent about a week working on our walls and ceilings, and then the week after that was when our hardwood floors were getting done, and we were mostly sleeping at our neighbors' house...

And while we are gone, K's employee/brother is demo-ing our entire kitchen!  And the first floor bathroom!

Emptying EVERYTHING!

Main floor bathroom

We're excited to see the progress, for sure.  It's not going to be an easy couple months-- I know that.  These are big remodels that we're just starting, so I'm glad we're getting some rest on vacation before we have to get started.

Hardwood Floor Progress

As of today, there is PROGRESS on our floors!  Our hardwood floors were sanded today, and they're already looking fantastic!  Tomorrow, the floor guys will start the staining and sealing process.  We've picked a nice dark color for the stain, that will really show off the grain of the maple. 

It looks like there are 2 burns in the living room floor that didn't sand out-- they're just too deep.  (Honestly, I thought there would be so many more burns and scratches that were too deep!)  They'll fill those in, and I think once the floor is stained they will just look like knots in the wood.  I don't think they'll be terribly noticeable.

Living room

Our bedroom

Baby's room

Room Craziness

It's been a rough week.  Whew.  Poor K is wiped out...  I can't keep up, either!  We've been working on the walls and ceilings in our rooms with hardwood floors, in order to get those walls before the floor guys come in to do the refinishing on Monday.

So, patching, mudding, sanding, painting our plaster & lathe walls.  Trying to repair years of damage and neglect.  It's totally working-- the walls look 100 times better!  It's just a LOT of work.

K used a sprayer to paint all our doors and windows, which were previously all a very industrial-looking tan (which we're SO sick of!)  We figured this would be a big improvement until we replace the windows, and visually, it is definitely much better!

Newspaper & painter's tape = cheap stained glass

Living room window, mid-taping

Post-spraying

She also sprayed all our vent covers, just so we didn't have to go out and buy all new ones right now, on top of all our other expenses.  Some of them were painted weird, just like our trim, and some were just old-looking.  Now, they may not all look perfect when you look closely, but they sure look better. 

Repairing progress in Baby's room

Above, the baby's room now has a smooth painted ceiling, painted windows and doors, and wall repair is mostly complete.  This room will have painted white trim around the windows and doors.  The other rooms will have stained wood trim.

Our room has a newly painted ceiling, painted walls, painted windows and closet doors.  The door to our room was too damaged, so we'll need to get a new one.  We decided not to mess with the texture on our ceiling.  I guess the look of it grew on us over these last couple years. But it was so much dingier than we had realized-- once K got painting it with the bright white paint, it was like, "WOW!"  It looks so clean and crisp, and the chandelier looks even nicer now.  Yay!

And ohhhhh, the living room.  I'm in love.  Seriously... we've never had a usable living room, in all the time we've owned the house.  For a few days, here and there, we've set up a sitting area when we needed to, but it was always on top of a big sisal rug, on top of the ram board from when we were working on the ceiling.  And there was always wrapped-up bookshelves in the corner, and storage stuff against the wall.  So, just never an actual "living room."
But it's already so pretty.
I'm so excited!

Living room, in progress

The ceiling and coves are smooth, painted, and gorgeous.  The windows are sprayed, which is a huge improvement.  K had to do some major repairs on the entryways to the room because the plaster had gotten nicked away over the years.  She built them back up, so now the corners are sharp and crisp once again.  And the walls, though still in progress, already look sooo much better.  :-)

Rough week, true, but it's so fantastic to see this progress and know we'll have actual finished rooms SOON!

Floor Prep and Room Progress

More progress on the rooms!  The ceiling in the nursery is now all scraped.  K was surprised at how nice it all came off-- much better than in the living room.  She thinks it will be really easy to mud and get cleaned up.

The hallway ceiling is also scraped.  This is the hallway that connects all the rooms on the first floor.  Just a small little space, but the ceiling looks a lot better already.

The trim around the living room windows has been pulled.  We'll just paint the inner wood parts, until we replace the windows.

Our floors are also accessible now, with the trim pulled in all the rooms.  We have some floor guys coming to refinish them in just a little over a week.  Can't wait!  K could do them herself, but she thinks it's just easier to have them do it, since it's such a messy process.  I'm excited to pick out the stain color.

These beautiful floors need some LOVE!

There are lots of little burns on the floors in all the rooms...   :-(

In our bedroom, the trim was painted with a black glossy enamel paint.  But not painted well-- just slapped on with one pass, with the brushstrokes showing on each piece.  And they got the black paint on the floor quite a bit when they did it.  Dummies.

Black paint from the trim

But it's all going to be good.  I'm so excited to see them all sanded, stained, and glowing.

Starting On the Bedrooms & Main Bath

I had no idea when we'd start working on the rooms of the house, but it's suddenly happening!!  K and her bro did a bunch of work on the house today-- pulling off the painted, wrecked-up trim and starting to scrape off the popcorn ceiling in the nursery.
... Did I just say nursery?  That's right, I did!!  K and I are expecting a baby, due at the end of June.  We're over the moon about it.  And so, the spare bedroom is now being prepared to be the baby's room, just as we hoped it would be someday.

Popcorn ceiling on its way out

K had also spent a large part of her day in her office, so by the time the evening rolled around, she was itching to do some wrecking!  Getting rid of those things in the house that she's so sick of.
So... she took a jackhammer to the bathroom on the first floor.  She pulled off some of the tiles, and pulled down the storage above the bathtub. 

We have wanted to improve this bathroom since we bought the house.  I think that it may be original to the house...?  Or maybe it's a 70s remodel?  Not sure, but it's never been very functional for us.  The worst is how filthy it was.  After years of renters, we never could get it clean.  The bathtub, though iron, is a typical size, so a tall gal like me can't take a bath in it without my whole torso or all my legs sticking out of the water.  And with the storage above the shower, I'm too tall to take a shower in here!  The storage up there also wasn't necessary because there's a spacious cedar-lined closet in the bathroom already.

Our goals for remodeling this bathroom are to put in a deeper bathtub, make the shower usable for a tall lady like me, replace the worn-out vanity and maybe even put in two sinks.

I did make sure to keep those chrome pulls on the cabinets!

Again, I'm not sure if this bathroom is original or a remodel?  Once K started taking down some of the storage and tile, we could see that the walls under the storage used to be painted yellow.

MLS Photos

Since I've been wanting to research our home's history, I asked our realtor if he could find any additional information about its previous sales or owners.
He sent me all the listings for the house on the MLS system.  There were a total of 5 listings, including the one that was included in our house search this past spring. 
And there were 2 pictures of the house that I had never seen before.  One from 2003, with the house clean, the yard maintained, and the roof unstained.

2003 Sale Listing

And the other was from 1997.  The roof looks similar to how it does now, a bit rust-stained, so it must've been replaced between 1997 and 2003.  But the landscaping is adorable!  Lush green grass, bright rose bushes, white stone edging and lights along the path to the door.  Now I know why we found so many rocks buried under the layers of dead grass in the front yard!

1997 Sale Listing

It's inspiring to see this little house all dressed up with a fancy yard.  That's our hope for the yard next year, to brighten it up and give it a lot more curb appeal.  We were so overwhelmed with the moving this summer, and then it was so hot, that all we could manage was ripping out one of the giant, overgrown bushes, and putting two potted hibiscus next to the front door!

I wonder if it would be annoying to do that rock border again...

Revealing The Stairs

The stairs up to my office are wooden and gorgeous, from what I could see peeking out from under the green industrial-strength carpet runner that is nailed over them.  The carpet itself wouldn't have been so bad except that it probably hasn't been vacuumed in a decade!

The stairs on the day we moved in....  With lots of goodies left for me!

Looked at the stairs mid-day Sunday and decided today was the day to take that carpet out.  Started at each end and worked towards the middle, yanking out those claw-like carpet nails with only a couple hammers.  K was off to the big football game with our friends, and I couldn't find her cats-paw tools, so I had to make do with hammers.

My tiny hammer!

Under the carpet was so. much. dirt.  Like an inch in some places.

Dirty!!

A few hours and a pile of carpet nails later, I had the carpet off and rolled up into a thick, dirty bundle.  Swept and vacuumed the stair treads, and then went over each tread and rise with a strong solution of Dr. Bronner's and Murphy's Oil Soap.  The wood was SO dry and neglected.  It glowed when I was finished!

One tread is really cracked, and K is going to fix that later.  It is fixable and makes more sense than replacing the tread, since the wood probably wouldn't match.  At some point, I do want to sand and refinish the stairs, but that will have to wait, for now.

But they look SO much better already!

After

Before