Christmas cards were only an idea this year. Wait, Valentine’s cards were only an idea this year as well!!!!! People keep asking me how things are going in our renovation, and I keep thinking about posts to write! Since Christmas (and Valentine’s) has come and gone, I can at least start posting on the blog again and show off some of our before and afters.
The first thing we did upon getting the keys is to clean the empty house. Once it was all clean, we proceeded to cover the whole place in a layer or two of dust! Well, drywall dust was one layer, the other was from sanding the wood floors down.
No furniture, no problem!
It was important to us to get much of the flooring finished before we moved our furniture in. No one wants to move furniture multiple times! We had a few days when we thought we were going to have to have to rent a sander and do the work ourselves, but luckily we were able to line up having them sanded, stained and polyurethaned which gave us a few days to do some things with the kids not home improvement related.
The wood floors were all at least 25 years old if not 45 and original to the house. One bedroom still had carpet, we ripped that out as a part of the cleaning day.
The kids had a ton of fun in the empty rooms, when they weren’t outside making new friends, that is.
The wood floors were sanded down and gaps or holes were filled. Then all three styles of floors were stained Dark Walnut and finished with a few coats of semi-gloss polyurethane. I LOVE them!
It turns out plywood can be beautiful, who knew.
Hidden gem?
The office/den was the second room in the house with carpet. Unfortunately, there were no hidden wood floors underneath. We did know ahead of time that it was linoleum, turned out to be TWO layers of linoleum, ugly covered in ugly. We took it down to the subfloor. That’s when we found the water damage! Oh, there’s the surprise… still not the one we were looking for. Lots of water damage….
Initially we had wanted to lay hardwood and stain it to match the rest of the house. But since the water damage was not the only surprise we had already encountered, we opted for a laminate in as close to the rest of the house we could find. Since the room will eventually have glass doors, a perfect match wasn’t really necessary, but we did go for as close as we could get.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the after pictures before we put the furniture and area rug in the office…. maybe I didn’t take them…. oops! But, the hall closets were the same situation and we used the left over laminate to bring them into this century!
The garage floor was another story!
There was actually a crack in the cement, causing it to sink and pitch towards the center of the garage. Actually, the cement had sunk several inches, but you can’t really tell that from the picture. Not exactly good if we had rain or snow get in. And, since the garage doors were in need of replacing (and then actually broke on us about a month after moving in) we decided to have this taken care of too.
I’ll spare you the after, because it’s just a picture of a big slab of cement, not that exciting. But since it’s not everyday a cement truck pulls in your driveway, that WAS pretty exciting.
Then there was the basement
This area was completely unfinished, but we wanted a place where our teen and soon to be teen girls could hang out with their friends. A place where they wanted to be but also wouldn’t have a problem with their little brother playing. We don’t plan on finishing the basement fully, at least not any time soon. We DID however, paint the walls, ceiling; basically, everything I could get with the paint sprayer. It really opened up the space. Then we addressed the floor before doing anything else down there.
We used these foam floor tiles in our other house and they really make the basement great! Not only do they make the cement floor so much nicer to walk on, but they actually make the whole basement feel warmer! We put area rugs on top of it in a few parts of the basement, and the foam tiles are the perfect barrier for walking on cold basement cement. Bonus, if the kids are goofing off and fall the floor is padded nicely!
Last, but not least…
Yes, that is the floor of my powder room, after the toilet decided to crack! It was the smallest space but the most work! I’m hoping to post a reveal of the whole powder room after I few a do more things in there.
Stay tuned…..
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