Last week I cleared my junk out of the middle bedroom. Yesterday roomie experimented with scraping off the cottage cheese ceiling. She says it’s coming off nicely, and she should be able to do the whole ceiling in an hour. The drywall ceiling is green. I thought that was only used for bathrooms? Anyway, she’s suggesting that once the ceiling is stripped we should give it an ‘orange peel’ texture. She did this in her last house by applying drywall mud with a paint roller, and she said it looked nice. The wallpaper needs to come down, the closet needs to be demolished, and the carpets have to come up. We haven’t decided on a colour yet. As far as I’m concerned, it can be painted white. I’ll leave that decision to her. I think we’re not going to have an ‘accent wall’.
Just a bedroom, right? Well, we were sitting out by the fire in a sprinkling of rain (figures, don’t it?) and she said, ‘You know… We may as well do the laundry room while we’re at it. That way it will tie in with the two back bedrooms, and the whole back of the house will be done.’ My bedroom will be a serious job. The chimney and fireplace need to be demolished, and the floors need to be leveled. I’ve been told that that will be tackled last. ‘The living room needs…’ she said, ‘Well, you just leave that to me. You’ll like it.’
You all know how much I like to cook. I’d like to do the kitchen. I dread that. The cabinets will need to come out, and be replaced with some nice Scandinavian Modern ones. Naturally, new appliances will be in order. (And a dishwasher!) My friend, from whom I bought the house, used the same carpet in over half of the kitchen that he’d used in the front room, and has black vinyl flooring by the cooking and sink area. I’m thinking off-white tile. (Actually, I’d like to continue the tile into the laundry room.)
But for right now, the renovation of the middle bedroom is starting.
Heh. I got shanghai’ed into ripping out and refurbishing a half-bath this week. I’m the one who knows how to lay tile, so I did, and it looks really nice, and installing a new toilet and sink isn’t going to be a tough job, nor is painting the walls, but next week we’re refinishing a hardwood floor…
A little update. The closet is out. Roomie demolished it while I was at work one day. (I helped with a stubborn bit when I got home.) Monday we went and got some drywall from the hardware store and covered where the closet used to be. See, the back of the closet was beadboard. Fortunately, the wall outside of the closet has drywall, and it’s above the level of the beadboard; so it was a simple matter to just put some 1/2" sheetrock up to match it. There was a ‘window’ in the back of the closet, that has one sheet of wood at the back. This is apparently the back of the kitchen cupboard. The sheetrock neatly covered that. I couldn’t resist getting out a Sharpie and writing ‘HIYA! 22 AUG, 2011 [signed us]’ before covering it.
She’s in the room now, getting off the last of the wallpaper. The paint underneath it is so tough that we originally thought the walls were covered with plywood instead of sheetrock. (It wouldn’t surprise me, in this house.) But it is sheetrock. Damn, that’s some touch paint! It’s holding up to the scraping as she gets the wallpaper off.
The carpet. Aiyiyiyiyi… It’s nailed down. Like the overbuilt closet, someone wanted this carpet to stay put. It’s going to be a chore pulling it up. We’re going to mud the wall first, though.
And the bill came for the new fridge. It’s paid for now.
To keep it affordable and not be without a kitchen for even longer, I wanted to point you tothis renovation. The cabinets LOOK totally different but painting and new hardware really changes things entirely. The rest of the kitchen is IKEA.
So my pitch is “Won’t somebody think of (saving) the cabinets?”
Don’t hesitate to head to yer local scratch 'n dent appliance store either for the rest of your appliances…my stuff ranges from 35-50% off for a coupla dings, some of which aren’t visible unless you’ve got it in a 360 view… A few thousand saved is nothing to scoff at.
I’ve been doing a remodel of the main floor of our house for the last 6 weeks. All I have left to do is paint the trim in one room. I’ll finish that tonight, and I’m done. I went into it a tad begrudgingly, but boy am I glad I did it/was coerced into doing it.
Your project is more complex than mine. I’m sure your going to love it.
Negative. This is what you might call a ‘craftsman’ house. Not Craftsmen-style. Something you might make in high school wood shop. It was originally a cabin, built in 1934. (There appears to be a pipe for a water pump out back, and a cement basin to catch it.) It’s had three additions over the decades, and some real DIY ‘There, I Fixed It’ construction. For example:
The recently-removed closet. Note the beadboard in back. (You can’t see the ‘window’ shelf because the door’s in the way.) They didn’t even bother to put drywall up. The sliding doors were just big slabs of wood with divots carved out for ‘handles’. No rollers, rudimentary tracks. If I were making a closet, I’d frame it with 2x4s, apply sheetrock, and buy track and doors. Easy-peasy. Whoever made this one built some sort of bizarro frame for the wall, and then had pieces of wood on top put together like a puzzle; plus his built a floor instead of using the existing floor. (Maybe he wanted to make the floor level with his ‘door tracks’?)
And the bedroom is misshapen. Here’s a shot looking through the door to the laundry room, little bedroom, and bathroom, through the door to the living room and to the back French doors. The short ‘hall’ is necessary because of the addition of the ‘little bedroom’, but the door opens onto the wall of the closet and you have to jag to get into the room proper. It’s just weird. At least I replaced the clunky old door with a new, efficient one like in the little bedroom. And the god-awful curtains are gone.
So what does this have to do with cabinets? Well, they’re the same Weekend Handyman construction. Weirdly shaped, non-standard dimensions, totally lacking in style. And the (three) drawers slide wood-on-wood. Which is to say, they are not exactly user-friendly. There’s not enough cabinet space, not enough drawer space, and not enough counter space. And I hate the sink.
My husband has owned this house since 1984 - when he first bought it he had to do some major work on floors and walls because it had been a rental and had, among other things, a bedroom done in dark purple, gold flocked wallpaper in the dining room, that wall to wall green and blue shag that needed to be raked (and it hadn’t been in a very very long time) and other problems.
However, since about 1986 until around 2000, nothing had been done. First, we ripped out all of the carpet in the house which was four bedrooms, the front room, the dining room and the front hall and put in wood. This is S Cal, we don’t need no stinkin’ carpet! Then we repainted the kitchen cabinets, redid the counter tops and put in a subway tile backsplash, as well as replacing appliances with stainless steel as the old ones die. Lately we’ve been redoing the guest rooms, which included covering over the popcorn on the ceiling as we have asbestos so they can’t be scraped.
The downstairs needs to be painted and the front and side windows need replacing, then we might be done for awhile. Ah, the joys of home ownership!
Well, not yet. But it’s getting there. The photos in my previous post are from a while ago. (As I said, the exterior door has been replaced since then.) The work is only starting. Fortunately, roomie volunteered to take the cottage cheese off of the ceiling and the wallpaper off of the walls.
The little bedroom looked pretty much like the middle bedroom, to give you an idea. The closet took the same space as the water heater cabinet and the wardrobe, and it was as clunky as the closet in the middle bedroom. A friend removed it while I was away, and did the blue paint. I framed and drywalled the water heater enclosure, put down the wood veneer flooring, and did the white paint. The bed (and blanket and pillows), table, wardrobe, and flooring are all from Ikea. I updated old iMac ‘guest computer’ with OS X and a wireless card. (It’s no longer in there, as roomie needed the space.) The exterior door has double-paned glass and enclosed blinds. I put a new doorknob on the interior door, and it’s keyed the same as the ‘lever-style’ doorknob on the exterior door – which is a different key from the front and back doors to the house, so anyone staying there can have privacy. One interior door and the exterior door to the middle bedroom are the same way.
The middle bedroom will have the same flooring and two of the wardrobes (with the nice birch doors). Roomie thinks we should just paint the room white. She has a poster bed in storage we’ll put in there.
I meant nice job in taking the plunge and doing it yourself. I had some pretty interesting applications in this house too. I really enjoy doing it to a point. The really repetitive stuff that takes forever like taping and painting bores me to tears. It’s worth it in the end though.
Not for cause. It’s just that roomie is proud of her mad drywalling skillz and would take affront if I tried to help. (OK, I do get to hold the tape to the ceiling.)
Wow that sounds nuts. The carpet being nailed down would be enough for me to say “ehhhhh…later” when later means never. How long have you been in the house?
I’ve been here eight years. There’s a lot I’ve wanted to do, but really it’s been a Guy Cave™. No incentive to do anything non-functional. (Except for the little bedroom.) Now that there’s a female in the house, why not do some of the things I’ve wanted to? I’m not planning on selling, but it would be nice to increase the value anyway.
