Last Bedroom - again

Okay, so it's been a while, but I've finally got good news on the last bedroom frontier - it's nearly done! And when I say nearly done, I mean that it's like 85-90% finished!

After a brief detour, given one weekend Dad decided that we needed to do something in the kitchen - and truthfully we've always known that the kitchen did need work, but were never sure just what to do in the kitchen - I finally managed to get back to working on the last bedroom upstairs, what used to be my Dad's old office.

If you recall my last post, where I talked about having to known down the closet wall in order to create a bigger closet, I finally finished the drywall and mudding that, in addition to hanging sheetrock on the ceiling and the north wall. Anymore, our $20 paint and texture gun works wonders and really is pretty easy to do, so Dad's more to the mind-set of 'if it's not an easy fix, let's just completely cover the (wall/ceiling/insert whatever have you) with sheetrock and spray it!'. So that's what we've been doing. It looks great on the ceilings, we don't even have to paint over it, and once it drys completely for a few days it's pretty easy to use a roller and paint if you need to even out the walls. So needless to say, the NE bedroom has a new ceiling, bigger closet, and newly textured north wall.

Apart from painting touch-ups on the trim and wall, in addition to putting up the shelves for the built-in bookshelf next to the closet and hanging up the remaining Closet-Maid closet stuff, the room is done. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do for carpet - the carpet that we had in there ended up ruined after paint and other stuff got dumped on it from our previous renters, but as far as I'm concerned that's a last minute fix.

So here are the pictures of the finished product (mostly) in addition to what I started out with once I began tearing out the walls of the old closet.

Last Bedroom

Okay, I know it's been a while since I've updated - my fault. Will try to do better next time.

So what has been going on? Well, work on the last bathroom begun with the destruction of the too small closet. We had about a foot of dead space between the room's door (which you can see in the pictures) and the wall for the closet, so we decided to basically pull out the closet wall a foot to eat up the dead space and have a much roomier closet.

So here are pictures of the project so far. It's slightly on hold until I figure out how I want to run electricity for a light, given that it's now a bigger closet it really should have one. The other issue is that on the left side of the pictures, you'll notice the new wall doesn't go all the way across. This is because that corner of the room is an old fireplace chimney. Since I didn't want to have to try and drill or nail into the bricks (given their age they'd probably crumble or fall apart if I tried), I'm planning on putting in a built in bookshelf there.

Another room finally done!

Well, it's been a while since I've updated but let me say it was worth the wait - because another room is finally done! The Green Room, so aptly named because it has green carpet and partly green walls, has had its face lift completed! (though I should say over the years it's gone by several names, like the music room, the library, informally dad's office, and as of lately, my bedroom before I completely the master suite). It's been a few months since I posted about the green room but the lower walls have had their old lathe and plaster sheetrocked over, the small cracks from the foundation settling have been patched in the walls (or really, just on the south wall), the ceiling has been texturized and you'll never know where it's been completely replaced from ancient water damage (at least I think it may have been water damage - it's possible it could've been from the foundation settling).

Given that the original decor (when we lived here in the 90s) was a wallpapered top, green painted bottom, and wallpaper boarder acting as a chair-rail (below I have a small snippet of what it looked like), when it came to redoing the room, I felt it necessary to do something similar to the old look, given that I can't really change the green carpet and the old look made the green room one of my favorite rooms in the house. AND knowing that my wallpapering skills really aren't that great - well, let's just face it, it's messy - really messy - I decided simply to paint the room while giving it a similar feel, so I opted for a simple forest green color for the lower half of the wall while painting the upper half a light almond which was the closest color I could get to the old wallpaper my mom used twenty years ago. The wood work, which had been painted brown (who knows why given the wood matches the rest of the first floor wood work), was repainted so it matched the chair-rail I put up to act as the border.

And now I can finally say it's done, apart from some minor touch-ups on paint and the gas fireplace hookup which Dad will do on some trip down here. I do wish it was finished, cause it'd be so nice to sit by the fireplace while it snows outside - it's such a nice picture, isn't it?

<-- (Old wallpaper and border)

Another bedroom done

Just thought I'd update with some pics of a recent project I've finished - the SE bedroom. However, if I'm truthful there is one more thing that needs to be done - putting the ceiling fan and light back up, but I let the boss do that cause he took it down. :)

You may wonder why I picked gray for the wall color, cause honestly it wouldn't be my first color choice for a bedroom - but in an effort to keep the rooms somewhat connected via decor, the walls now match the bathroom walls, thus these two rooms plus the north bedroom which has the same gray accents as a wall border (which you can see on the door below) all match! The gray also comes from the slight gray/silver color in the second upstairs bathroom tile, which also includes a pink hue in the tile, so another reason for the north bedroom to be painted a light pink (also, the pink carpet also made that decision for me!)

I've also begun tile work in the shower in the hallway (second) bathroom, now that I've found more tile (and it was even on sale! Happy Days!). However, I did come across a slight issue. Once I put up the backerboard, which ended up resting on the shower basin's top edge, I discovered that there wasn't anything allowing the first row of tile to rest on while it dried because the tile now overhangs the basin. So I had to come up with a clever way to keep the tile from slipping while the mortar dried. Enter some 2x4s, wood laminate floor scraps, and kitchen Tupperware :) The only sad thing is that I can only do one wall at a time, but once all three sides have a bottom row, the rest of the job should go pretty quick!

More pictures :)

It's finished! The dining room floor, apart from trim and quarter-round being returned to their spots, is finished! I don't think I have to say anything more about it - the picture pretty much says it all.

I also thought I'd showcase some of the decoration I've done to the kitchen, since I've told some of you but have yet to post pictures, so here you go! I've always had a thing about sunflowers in the kitchen, so that's the decor I decided for in the kitchen. Because I couldn't find a sunflower stencil, I found a picture of one online, printed it off on file paper, cut out all the little sections (not that much fun), and began painting! Apart from some trim edging under the cabinets and around the doors (which need to be trimmed at the bottom to open), the counter-tops are the only project which still needs to be finished.

What is it about floors?

What is it about working on floors recently? My last post told about how the downstairs bathroom floor was done, and now I can report that the rest of the laundry room floor is now done too! Yippie! So on to the next floor! That's right, I just can't seem to get enough of working on floors. And so work began on the dining room floor today.

The plans of the dining room have changed several times over the last several months. Carpeted when we moved into the house in 1990 (I think they were - we did re-carpet most of the house after we moved in so I don't really remember if it was carpeted), Dad decided that with hardwood floors being the current fad in the housing market we would remove the carpet in the dining room and see if we could refinish the original wood floor (which actually has a very neat design to it). So we rented a sander and let the work began. The'work' lasted about ten minutes. Apparently what ever type of varnish house builders in the late 1800s used on wood floors is really good stuff and lasts a long time, cause even with the coarsest grit we had on the sander (a 20 - the lower the number, the rougher the grit for those who aren't Tim 'Tool Man' Taylor savvy), the old varnish just wouldn't come up. We even had one of the pads get so hot that it melted onto the floor. Oops.

I even ran to the hardware store and got some chemical stuff that claimed to stripe hardwood floor varnishes. Did it work? Ahhhh, nope. So, needless to say the plan to redo the hardwood floors in the dining room quickly changed to 'How much wood flooring does Menards have left (to match what we put in the kitchen and nook)?' Thus, the covering of the wood floor with wood floor now begins.

Downstairs Bathroom - Welcome Back!

Well, technically the bathroom never went away and was partly functional while the floor was being redone (there was a toilet just no sink), but the good news is that the floor has returned! The once tiled floor - which was ruined after a sewage backup several years ago - now has a new OSB sub-flooring and a wood laminate covering! Yippie!

The downstairs bathroom was built in the SW room of the house, which while we lived here full time from 1990-2000 was used as a laundry room and storage/closet area, and the larger room now houses the bathroom and laundry room. And since the tile in the bathroom had to be replaced, it was just easier (in the long run I suppose, though it really doesn't seem like that while I'm working on it) to tear up all the tile and redo the floor.

A slight problem I encountered while preparing to lay down OSB for the sub-flooring was the original wood floor absorbing the water and moisture from the sewage 'flood' and thus expanding and not laying level. So, while I didn't really wanna get under the floor through the crawl space under the floor (I'm not a fan of spiders. My answer to that was the shop-vac and vacuuming all the spiderwebs before I got down there LOL *pic1*), I discovered part of the problem with the floor not laying flat - ended up being a support brace that was actually lifting up the floor and keeping it from being screwed down flat and level *pic2*. So after digging out the base and taking a hammer to the 2x4 support that was nailed in, I re-positioned it and screwed it back in place. But once that hour or two detour was finished, the floor laid down great and I was able to go ahead and get the OSB subfloor down in preparation for the laminate.

Luckily for me, since we redid the flooring in the breakfast nook and kitchen, the original laminate we put down was just about the right size for the bathroom and laundry room. Unfortunately, being a bathroom I had to break out the jigsaw to cut around the toilet, heating vent, and all the 'FUN' that goes along with laying floor! LOL

But needless to say, after two days of working on hands and knees, the bathroom floor and half of the laundry room floor is down and done! (apart from trim and threshold pieces) Now let the fun part begin: moving the washer and dryer so I can finish the floor!