Progress/ After: The Bedroom

The Bedroom is another room I can't call "after" yet because there are still a few things I want to (re)do to it. But it's come a long way, and I'm excited to show off the progress!

Progress/ After: Office/ Playroom

Remember these?

I couldn't call these pictures a true "after" yet because there's still a few things I want to do in this room. It definitely looks and feels unfinished. However I won't be working on it for awhile so here are some pictures of what it looks like today...

Progress: Outside [The Back Yard]

The backyard did not seem to be in terrible shape when we moved in. As you'll see in the next few pictures it looked green and lush. We figured that we'd just have to remove all the weird landscaping debris from the backyard and we'd be good to go.

Of course that's not even close to how it went.

Progress: Outside [Front Yard]

Although the landscaping was badly outdated and damaged, the yards at the house were surprisingly in not-the-worst shape. Considering some of the weed forests I've seen in this neighborhood, what the yards looked like before was downright presentable!

The house had a sprinkler system already hooked up, but the previous owners had never used it. I.E. it went untouched for 15 years. When Nate tried to turn it a giant jet of water exploded from under the deck, and everywhere else was just as chaotic. We tried our best to hand-water the yards, but ended up turning each of them into a crispy field of weeds. So not only did we have to re-do the landscaping but we had to install completely new yards.

Oh, and N killed the tree. :)

Progress: Outside [Painting and Windows]

This was the picture of our house that I found off Google Maps before we bought it. It's hard to tell from this picture but the outside of the house was almost in sorrier shape than the inside. The previous owners had lived in it for 15 years (the house is 30 years old), and it was very clear that they did little upkeep inside and out.

The house needed to be repainted, it BADLY needed new windows, and it also needed to be re-landscaped but when we moved in we had to focus on the inside- the areas we'd actually be you know, touching on a daily basis. The outside of the house had to wait, as much as that depressed me. But we declared the year 2012 as the year of the outside of the house. And we got to work!

Progress: The Beginnings [The Nursery]

The third bedroom in our house was going to be a guest room, but my surprise pregnancy with R had us convert it into a nursery a little earlier than we anticipated. Actually, the pregnancy happened so quickly after we had moved in that there was really nothing to convert. The room was a blank canvas ready for me to design.

When I found out R was a girl I immediately had big dreams of a PINK nursery with lots of frilly accents. I have never been a girly girl myself and this only encouraged me to go as girly as possible with R's nursery. These were the days before Pintrest (well, before it was popular at least) so I didn't have many good ideas to go off of. I started searching for the anchor of the room- the perfect crib set- and I just didn't find much that I liked. In hindsight I wish I would have gone the Etsy route, but the crib set I ended up choosing, and then planning the nursery around, was/ is perfect.

Progress: The Beginnings [The Bathroom]

As I said before the bathroom was definitely in the worst shape of all the rooms in the house. When we moved in we hoped it was one of the rooms that we could completely renovate right away (we did buy a new toilet before we moved in), but due to some unforeseen events we ended up having to put it off.

We moved into our house in mid-July of 2010 and then got married on July 24, 2010. In the beginning of August we had an immense family tragedy occur, and only a few weeks after that we learned that *SURPRISE* we were pregnant! That is all a story for another post, but it has to do with the bathroom renovation story because I got so, so sick during my pregnancy that I ended up having to spend a lot of time in that awful, awful bathroom. We bought a shower mat for the horrible stained bathtub and I remember very clearly crouching down on that mat, not daring to put a toe off of it, and crying about how miserable the situation was. First world problems of course, but hey, I was really hormonal.

In late March of the following year (I was due in early May in case you're curious) we got our tax refund back a bit early and decided it was finally time to re-do the bathroom. Well, I'm not sure N had much of a choice in the matter, but it did have to be done. Because it was our only bathroom and I was peeing close to every 5 minutes I went to stay at my parents house while N did the work.

Progress: The Beginnings [The Kitchen]

The tale of our kitchen cabinets is a sad one. I am partial to white cabinets and was elated to see that they had already been painted white, but was quickly brought back down to earth when I saw the condition they were in. But they needed to be primed anyway to rid them of the house stink.

Progress: The Beginnings [Flooring]

Since we had to ditch all the carpet we decided to use laminate wood flooring on the middle level, and new carpet throughout the rest of the house. We really would have liked to do real wood floors, but as I said before our budget was very small and we had heard a lot of great things about laminate.

Spoiler alter: None of those things were true and that floor today is the bane of my existence.

Anyway, we decided to go with a laminate that was a little bit pricier but looked like the dark wood floors that I've coveted all my life. To be fair, they are very beautiful- when they are clean. Because they aren't textured they will show even the mark of a clean bare foot and so they get dirty VERY easily. And the only way to clean them is to go over them once with water to get the dirt off, and then with a vinegar mixture and a microfiber cloth to leave them streak free. They also damage (warp and scratch) much more easily than we were told. If we were going to stay here for longer than we plan I think I'd consider putting down that tile that looks like wood. In any other house we buy it's going to be real wood or bust.

Progress: The Beginnings [Painting]

After priming we painted the walls (with color) and textured the ceilings. Here is where we have and had most of our regrets.

Progress: The Beginnings [Priming, Priming & More Priming]

After the ceilings and carpet were gone it was time to clean, prime, and paint. And man oh man we did a lot of each. Have you ever mopped the walls of a house? Have you ever mopped the walls of a house and watched the water turn brown as it trickled back to the floor. I'll say this: if you don't think second hand smoke effects other people's bodies you should see what it will do to a house!

After the scrubbing it was time to prime. We went with Killz because it has a reputation for eliminating odors, and we had a LOT of odors that needed to be sent back to the hell from whence they came. We went through buckets and buckets of the stuff, and at one point it almost killed Nate as he insisted he could prime the inside of a closet without wearing a mask. But it did its job and it did its job well.

Progress: The Beginnings [Ceiling & Carpet Removal]

I learned quickly that our house was going to need a lot more than a fresh coat of paint. In fact, it was going to need 2 thick coats of Killz primer before that paint even went on!

Here was our list of things to do before we moved in:

- Scrape off the popcorn ceilings (they were heavily smoke damaged)

- Remove and trash all doors and trim (also heavily smoke damaged)

- Clean every surface

- Prime every surface

- Paint

- Install new flooring

- Refinish kitchen cabinets (and get new hardware)

- Replace all electrical outlets and light switches

- Do as much as possible to the bathroom (luckily we got a new toilet right away)