Spring Renovation Have Just Begun.

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting on the sofa with a cuppa, watching the national voting results until Ray changes the channel for the soccer match in a few minutes. I'm taking a break from the painting today, I have some pretty hardcore cramps in both hands where the thumbs go down into the palms. So far we’re very pleased with how it’s turning out, but it’s taking quite some time to get done because we’ve been trying to pay attention to a lot of small details, and we’re also painting doors that we had to sand down, meaning they take quite a few layers of paint. Here are some “before” and “during” photos of what we’ve been doing. I’ll post “after” photos when we’re completely finished, hopefully by the end of this next week.

This is the hallway looking from our bedroom into the kitchen. The door on the left is the downstairs bathroom. We’re painting it red with white trim and all of the doors in the hallway will be white as well, which you can see in some of the photos (we only have 1 coat on 1 door thus far.)

 

These next photos are looking from the opposite direction, down towards our bedroom which is at the back of the house. There’s another hallway that goes off to the right and leads to the backdoor. We haven’t started to paint it yet because we’ve stuffed a lot of crap back there while we’ve been painting.

When you walked down this hall, it was so dreary and depressing! The idea now is to use the wall on the left to hang a lot of pictures of our family and friends. You cannot tell in this photograph, but to the right, before you get to the bathroom door is a large cubbyhole. We’re going to install shelving done in a dark wood with things like lamps, a radio, books, etc.. I really love how the red paint also makes that doorway kinda thing that hangs down from the ceiling really pop out now. We’re also going to have a shelf up there that you walk under when you go down that hallway. Our plan is that when we’re done with this project, we’re repainting the bedroom and moving our tv room down there.

 

The next photos are from the bathroom, which has always creeped me out because everything in it was white and clinical. Even up until Rita died, there was a white shower curtain hanging up in there. I started out painting the ceiling, but I don’t think I let it try enough before I taped it up so I could paint the walls. So now I have to go back and do a lot of touching up along the edges.

The problem with this color is that it doesn’t really match my shower curtain, which I didn’t buy very long ago. Getting rid of it is going to depress me because I love it. I might try to find some accessories that could tie the shower curtain and walls together, but I really don’t think it’s going to happen.

This is a wardrobe I stuck in there for all of our towels and such, and the weird thing at the top is a really tiny electric heater that actually does nothing for the room. I still need to get into the back of it with a small paintbrush.

Kitchen Update 2.

We've finally gotten quite a bit done on the kitchen. We painted it this weekend and started putting everything back, we still have curtains we need to put up along with some other stuff on the walls. It's amazing, the change in the room from the 12 layers of wallpaper from before. If you scroll down to previous entries, you can see a floorplan of the room. This is where the sitting room was. Our sitting room is now the room marked "bedroom" on the first floor, towards the front of the house. (Not the one in the back.) Oh yeah, we also have to get skirting boards put in, and the trim around the top of the walls. We're going to be replacing the floor though, so we'll wait to do that!

Anyhow, here are photos of the new kitchen. There is no sink in the kitchen, as it is still in the small scullery area (see other pics below), which is basically just around the corner from this room...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitchen Update.

We've moved on from the tv room into the kitchen, where a couple weeks ago Ray and I tore out 12 layers of wallpaper off the walls! To understand the 12 layers, you have to understand the history of the house. Ray's mother spent the last 15 years, I'm not really certain of the timeframe, caring for her ill husband and mother-in-law. Without any outside help she'd spend an evening after they'd fallen asleep wallpapering as quickly as she could just to have a change of scenery or a fresh look in the kitchen, which was the main gathering area of the house. So, as you can imagine, there wasn't much time to worry about stripping paper, or in some corners, even pulling china cabinets out. So, where in some places there were 8 layers of paper, in other places, maybe there were just 5.

So, we've torn down the wallpaper and are left with bare walls, which we're going to waterproof and drywall, and hopefully never paste another strip of wallpaper to again! Unfortunately, it'll be a couple of weeks until we get that far. But in the meantime we've bought a new fridge which was delivered yesterday. We probably needed it more than anything else in the entire house, as the old one didn't have any doors which were actually attached to it. They would fall off if you opened them carelessly.

With all that said, I leave you with photos!

Tv Room- Done!

Here are photos of the new tv room. It's pretty much done, but the curtains aren't the ones we've put up because they needed about 3 feet taken off them. To see the before photos, look at my last blog entry.

Deep Purple.

We have a small, empty room in the house that we're turning into a cozy family room. Yesterday Ray and I painted it, and next week we're spending a day at IKEA to buy everything we'll need to furnish the room. I don't have good pics, as I just used the iPhone (yeah, I really need to start using the proper digital camera, I know!). Here's what I have though. It turned out fabulous! We're totally in love with it, and totally proud! I can't wait to get the furniture in, can't wait to hang out in it, less than a month to go till we move.

As It Looks Now

These are 2 pics of the house as it is now, yes I did this in The Sims 3. It's not completely to scale, if anything the house is a tiny bit larger than I did it in the game, and there are some details and corners and stuff that I didn't include because I couldn't get them to scale properly. Also, I don't have the staircase in it, because it wouldn't scale properly either, but here's a rough idea of how the house looks now. You can click on each picture to make it larger.

When we're done, we hope to have 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (which we already have, but the one upstairs will be moved completely and larger as well hopefully!), a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a study.

The Scullery Redone.

I don't have really good photos of the scullery because the light wasn't that great, and I was using the iphone instead of a regular digital camera. Ray did a fabulous job plastering and painting, and I chose colors and together we bought a few necessary kitchen accessories. Here are before and after photos. The wall to the right will eventually be torn down to make a larger room, and the kitchen will be in another area of the house altogether, with much more space, but this was a temporary fix.

The First Post.

Ray and I are at the house for the weekend, Rita and I are cleaning out bedrooms and Ray has a hell of a job on his hands, plastering walls in the scullery before he paints. It looks horrible in there, but they've stripped down 50 years of wallpaper and dirt. We're learning that a bit of putty probably isn't going to do the job, but mind you this IS our first home improvement project EVAH and we have a lot to learn! We really need to just redo the entire walls with plasterboard, but we're not wanting to spend a lot of money on the scullery since we're going to tear out the big wall between that room and the downstairs bedroom within the next few months. So for now, it just gets a paint job, even if it is going to turn out ugly. But there's ugly, and there's not as ugly, so it's a step in the right direction.

Here are some photos of outside, the surrounding neighborhood, and the scullery while Ray is working on it. The house is going to be twice the size it is now when we're finished.