The Panic Room

The spare bathroom did not disappoint when it came to the list of items for updating.

1) I call it the panic room because there was no color to it. Cream walls, cream tile, white cabinet and countertop.  I'm usually one for neutrals, but this was too neutral even for me! We lucked out on the tile color though. Several houses built during this time had colorful tile that can be difficult to update around. (You know, the avocado, light blue, pepto-pink, etc. ) Mostly the bathroom needed a good scrub, fresh paint, and a couple fixtures. 

2) There was no overhead light in the bathroom. Only a fan in the ceiling. We learned this while we were painting the room one night. 

3) The toilet was old and had to go. Enough said. (Excuse Lucy in the picture.) 

4) The tiled soap, toilet paper, toothbrush, and towel holders had to be removed. This was Stephen's job. He was great at removing each with minimal wall damage and then patching each hole with drywall and mud. 

5) Then we painted! Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams is the perfect bathroom color. It's amazing what paint can do! 

This is not a complete room transformation. We still plan to remove the cabinet and add granite countertops. I'll update this original post when it's complete. 

Painted Doors

I decided to paint and update our interior doors.  My husband thought I was nuts and just making up things for us to do.  I, on the other hand, knew that I couldn't live one more day with plain, white, shiny doors. And so, another project began:

In our home we have the standard 6 panel doors. There WAS absolutely nothing special about them. I fixed that!

This is from our hallway remodel, but you can see what they looked like before. We had brass knobs and hinges throughout the house. I mistakenly thought that painting the interior doors and changing hardware would be a 'cheap and easy' fix. Boy, was I wrong!!  It was time consuming and expensive. Once you change the hardware on one door, you have to change every other door in the house. We had two additional closet doors as well as two bathroom doors to change hardware on; these  doors would not be painted the accent color like the 6 facing the hallway. They were painted the trim color. 

We decided to use dark room by Sherwin Williams. (We had the color matched at Home Depot and used Bher paint.) An interior decorator in the family helped with the selection. I can assure you that I never would have picked the color on my own.  I'm not that good...yet! 

As you can see, the color has a brownish-purple hue.

I researched how to paint 6 panel doors and my personal opinion is a combination of several other blogs I consulted. 

Steps I took:

1) Take the door off the hinges. (This makes the painting much easier!)

2) Remove all hardware. (For us, we had to do this anyway, but it makes the paint job seamless.)

3) Brush paint the trim of the six panels. 

4) Then use a small roller for the rest of the door. Roller each panel, next roller the center vertical sections, move to horizontal sections, and finally the two putter vertical sections. You'll be able to see the 'wood' texture of the door to help you with each step. 

This is the side view of the hallway door. I wrapped the paint on all sides. 

All door backs are the same color as the trim.

We also painted the bi-fold closet doors and updated the knobs. I found these cute silver ones at World Market for $3.99 each. A small price to pay for an updated look! 

Before and After bi-fold door knobs

My thoughts after this project: 
It was very time consuming and not as cost effective as I had hoped, but I'm definitely happy with the updated look.  

On to the next project! 

Garage update

I know it's not the most important space to update in a home, but in our case, it was necessary. The garage is not only where we store items and park our cars, it's the 'laundry room'.  When we first saw the house this room scared me.

Imagine (because I did not accurately document the 'before') that there was a wall behind Stephen at the back of the garage. You can see the doorway framing still remaining after he took the sledgehammer to the rest of the wall. It was too much fun for him!  Behind Stephen in the very back corner of the garage was where the dryer was vented and placed. 

On the opposite side of this skinny little back room was where the hot/cold water hook-ups were located for the washer. 

 

This didn't work for several reasons.
1) We couldn't use the space I between to store anything because it would be in our way whenever we needed to do laundry.
2) Who wants to carry wet laundry from one side of a room to another. We already don't like to do laundry period. Add that to it and we would never have clean clothes.
3) It was cold and scary out there. Eek!

One plus - there was a brand new window. :)

Do I need to point out that the wall never was drywalled. It was insulation and 2x4s always. The back existing wall with insulation had not been touched by the time I took this picture.  Cute, right? I think not!

Last year at Christmas time, we finally got around to moving the piping so that we could actually have our own washer/dryer at our house. (We were taking laundry to the in-laws on Sunday while we had dinner. It was very 'college' of us.) 

I learned a lot about plumbing from my brother, who has been a major help on all stages of this garage transformation.  I learned how to cut copper pipe. I learned how expensive plumbing supplies are.  I learned how to attached PVC pipes. I learned how to solder pipes.  Educational experience for me for sure! 

  

This is the vent pipe going through the roof. 

We had to get the pipes to run along the back wall so that we didn't have floor to ceiling pipes in our way. We knew we would have to enclose what we couldn't put on the back wall with a knee high wall.

.....Thennnnn our garage stayed like this for a year. I used to be so embarrassed by our garage that I didn't even want to leave our garage doors open.  BUT, we were able to have our very own washer/dryer. I didn't even care if they were in the garage. 

And, I cheated on this picture too. I had done a test of the pallets on the far left. 

Ok, now onto the fun stuff. The most difficult part of the project was breaking apart the darn pallets. It was worth it in the end. The outcome is better than I imagined. The first pictures are of the knee high wall enclosing the pipes and then it's the progression of the wall being built. 

We left a little door so we could access the shut-offs for the water. We're smart. We know. 

We are still in search of a nice piece of reclaimed wood for the top of the knee high wall.

  The finished product! We'll add rustic shelves, window framing, and paint the ceiling.

No one wants to peel wallpaper...no one.

We've been fortunate to be blessed with family and friends that want to come lend a hand with the yard, home improvement projects, and decorating.  However, when it came to the hallway, there was no help because no one wants to peel wallpaper.  I did not like the shiny paint that was used in the hallway. It simply showed each and every imperfection.  Clearly, you could see that wallpaper was under the paint.

This is the best 'before' picture I could find of the hallway. (Sorry for the photobomb from our dog, Lucy!)  

So, let's get to the story of the hallway.  It was a freezing, cold Sunday, as we had become accustom to this winter, and I started 'piddling' around the house.  (According to my husband, Stephen, that's what happens when I sit too long around here.)  At any rate, I decided to peel the wallpaper and get the hallway transformation in motion. I knew I wasn't going to get it all done in one day, but I knew that starting was the hardest part. As I started my peeling, I was also thinking to myself This will be a nice little Sunday project. WRONG!  The first layer came off easily.  The second layer - not so much.  This was only the surface! Turns out, as I kept peeling, we had four - count it - FOUR, layers of wallpaper under that shiny paint.  No wonder no one tried this before.  Had I known this during the construction I would have had our contractor take down the drywall and rehang it in the hallway.  That would have been much easier than the can of worms I opened up.  

Stephen jumped in to help when he realized I had bit off more than I could chew.  We spent the rest of the day working our fingers to the bones as we tried to get all four layers off the wall.  Below are the different decades we 'peeled through'. 

The black wavy lines are from the 70's. Then we have the textured paper of the 80's.

Then we have the mauve color of the 90's. Then paint on top of it all.

After about a week of peeling paper for a few hours here and there, we decided to just take the top two layers off the wall.  We were tearing up the sheetrock trying to get the bottom two layers off.  After much trial, we found that warm to hot water and vinegar was the best mixture for removing the paper that we needed.  

We peeled only to top of the hallway above the chair rail for obvious reasons.  We left the hallway looking completely disheveled for about a month. (Don't judge me.) We affectionately referred to it as our 'Silent Hill Hallway' because it looked like something straight out of a horror movie. 

I did have a painter come to give me a quote to do the hallway for us.  He never called back. I figured the job was way over his head so, hey, I could do it!  After some research online I had a plan. Now it was time to try it out!  Stephen had plans to leave town the weekend I decided I could take the hallway no more, so I called in my reinforcements, my brother, AJ.  

Our game plan was to mud the rough spots on the wall, sand, prime it, mud the rough spots, sand, prime it again.  We did this over and over until we thought the walls were smooth enough to take flat paint.  I started the process on Friday night and AJ showed up on Saturday morning. We sanded the first coat before heading to Home Depot to get the necessary supplies for the job.  

Chair rail removed. Walls sanded. 

At Home Depot we purchased: 

Wainscoting, liquid nails, finishing nails (for the nail gun - best tool ever!), caulk, and new chair rail.  

Since we were trying to finish this in one weekend we decided to get a little help from the guys at Home Depot.  We knew the height of the wainscoting before we left.  After picking out the boards, we took them to the handy-dandy cutting machine in the store.  Best move of the weekend! 

After sanding and priming and mudding a few more times, we were ready to hang the wainscoting.  I can truly say this was the easiest part of the whole project.  Easy to cut and easy to hang.  Luckily, we didn't have any plugs on the bottom of the walls to cut around.  

Our directions for hanging wainscoting:  Put liquid nails on the back of the board and some on the wall.  Press to the wall and use a nail gun with finishing nails to attach.  Be sure to leave about an eighth of an inch or so for the boards to expand during warmer weather.  This will keep the boards from buckling. 

Wainscoting - hung and unpainted.

Next came the chair rail.  I opted for the new plain rectangular trim.  This would give me the more updated finished look I was going for.  Again, hanging this was easy.  This is the same process as the wainscoting without the liquid nails. 

Chair rail hung.  Everything primed.  White on white on white! 

After caulking all the seams and trim, we had to paint.  I used the same color, Sherwin Williams - pediment, as the rest of our house.   While there are still some textured places from the wallpaper and a few imperfections, our hallway is miles better than when we started.  I actually don't have to apologize to people as they walk through it. :)   It's the small victories.  

We completely finished our project at 8:00 pm on Sunday night.  It truly was a weekend effort.  A big thanks goes out to my brother for always wanting to lend a helping hand! 

Finished Hallway.  Now to paint to hallway doors. :) 

Thank you for reading and keeping up with our home projects.  It's really starting to feel like home.

Before and After

It's all completely done! The following pictures are for the entry, kitchen, and the master bathroom.  I will post the living room later.

From the front door looking at the coat closet. (Before)

Front door looking in. (After)

Please excuse the decor. I'm still working on styling the front entrance.  My point of this before and after set is to show that we took the space in the coat closet and walled it off as well as extended the wall to the left in order to create our larger master bathroom on the other side.  When you remodel a home it's all about give and take.  Sometimes if you take a bit of space from one room it can still add value to your home by giving space to a room that needs it more.  For us, that was a master bathroom! 

The next several pictures show the master bathroom changes.  

 This is the old master bathroom + powder room.  There were two doors leading into the master bathroom.  One entrance was from the master bedroom and the other was from the den off the kitchen.  This bathroom originally served as the powder room for guests and the master bathroom.  We weren't too fond of having our guests use our bathroom AND guests being able to look straight into our master bedroom when visiting. Sometimes you only get the clean the main spaces of the house when you have people over - don't judge! I'm sure you know how it is!
  When we extended the wall (on the right hand side of the sink) we enclosed the bathroom so that it was no longer accessible from the kitchen area.  Our visitors now use the second bathroom at the end of the hall.  Please forgive us for making you walk ten more steps to use the restroom when you are visiting! :)  The counter height in the old master also hit Stephen around the mid-thigh area...it was way to short for him! Out it came! Here are a few more pictures of the bathroom before.

With help from our contractor we decided to switch the location of the shower and the toilet.  When we extended the wall it gave us more room to work with as well.  We have a separate room for the toilet and the shower now has the window in it to give us natural light.  

Here are the after pictures. :) Bright, white, and nice! 

We have a recessed fan/light combo above the shower. 

I chose classic tile combinations. 

Our sinks are rectangular to give a bit of a modern feel. 

Double vanity - Oh how I've longed for these! 

12 x 24 Tile (Wall color: Pediment by Sherwin Williams)

New layout of toilet and shower. 

Now for the final reveal of the kitchen.  My favorite room in the house! 

View from the front door. Old Kitchen. (Don't you love the brick planter box?!?)

New view from the front door!

Here are more before and afters of the kitchen.

Closer view before.  The brick wall was removed.

The brick wall spanned from about the hood to the right side of the refrigerator.

Our floor to ceiling pantry is where the white shelves were originally. 

Old kitchen window view.

New kitchen window view.

Pendant lights 

 Hope you enjoyed the 'big reveal'!

I'm currently working on updating our hallway.  You'll never guess how many layers of wallpaper we are peeling!