Our New Old House

Today Our New Old House smells like the following:

• CitriStrip
• Mineral Spirits
• Fabric Softener
• Laundry Detergent
• Bleach
• Rustoleum spray paint
• Tea tree oil & lavender
• Nachos

It’s been a busy weekend in Our New Old House. We set ourselves a deadline of Dec. 19 to have the living room and dining room done – or at least done enough to host a big holiday party. That meant we have to get the following list of things done:

• Strip paint off woodwork
• Finish scraping up crustified carpet padding
• Paint the walls
• Rearrange the cables and electronics in the bookcase
• Paint the cold air return grate
• Make everything tidy and pretty

I think we’re on track to make all of those things happen. Dining room is painted. Today Brandon primed the last bit of the living room that needed it. I spray painted the grate. Woodwork is done except for a couple of troublesome spots with stubborn paint. Sections of carpet padding in the dining room are soaking, to be scraped tomorrow after work.  I bought the supplies I’ll need to stain parts of the woodwork and polyurethane it, but I think those final steps will have to wait until after the party. For now, the woodwork looks lovely just stripped of paint. It’s got a nice rich color and a smooth finish so that’s good enough for now.

It’s time for me to take a shower and get to bed. I’m exhausted, but I can’t wait to show off our progress. I’ll have some pictures soon of our living room and dining room, as well as a little treasure Brandon found behind one of the built-in bookcases.

Finally! Some photos of our kitchen looking closer than ever to being done! At least it looks clean and usable now.

Ok time for before and after!

Woo hoo!  I have my kitchen back!  We still have plans to add cabinets over the stove and fridge,  refinish and paint the existing cabinets, and actually paint the walls something other than white, but we’re getting closer!

[tags]cabinets, paint, plaster, future plans, kitchen, ceiling, light fixtures, flooring, dishwasher, drywall, refrigerator, photos[/tags]

I wanted to take a picture of this before it got painted over. The living room and dining room both had this trim around the top of the wall.

I had to do a lot of plaster work in this room. I’m particularly proud of reconstructing this corner that had crumbled away as the house settled.

Here’s a before picture:

One side of the wall over the fireplace needed some major repair:

I started attacking the gunk on the floor with a new vengeance, doing garbage bag sized sections rather than grocery bag sized ones.

Mom came over with some of my friends to help me put primer on the walls.

We bought a new rug, cleaned everything up, and arranged the furniture and here’s the result! It’s not finished, but I can see the finish line from here!

Phew! We can actually live in the living room now! Paint colors for the wall are being planned, also I’m going to restore the bookcases with leaded glass windows.

[tags] built-ins, photos, plaster, furniture, paint, future plans, ceiling fan, flooring, living room, fireplace, cabinets[/tags]

Some shots of the hallway looking a little bit closer to being finished:

My plans for this area include:

• Stripping the woodwork
• Painting the walls a nice color
• Refinishing the floor
• Restoring the telephone stand and built-in cabinet/drawers

[tags]photos, hallway, flooring[/tags]

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]