Upstairs Bath Renovation - Part 1

I loved my house from the day we moved in. Really. But I HATED the upstairs bathroom. It was pink tile. Everywhere. Every surface. And was stuck somewhere around 1989. I did the best I could with it for a year and a half, but always felt it wasn't even close to the level of awesomeness as the rest of our house.

Although we have a full bath on the first floor (with a stall shower), the upstairs bathroom is the only other full bathroom (and only tub) and is shared among all the bedrooms, including the master on the third floor. So basically - it gets a ton of use. I was literally counting the days until we could dig in and make it a place I want to retreat to with some bubbles and a glass of wine.

Here are some before shots of the pink atrocity:







We waited until May to start. The downstairs bathroom just isn't that warm in the cooler weather, plus we're out of a tub so I figured I could just bathe the kid in the yard once in a while if it was really hot :)

First step - remove all the fixtures! We are keeping the toilet and tub, as they are in good condition and a totally non-offensive white. Everything else is going to be sold/given away depending on its condition.



Now for the messy part - demo. It was done in two parts - the main part of the room first, then the tub area. So Andrew first took care of the demolition of the non-tub walls and the floor, and I cleaned up every couple hours to keep him from drowning in broken tile and dust. We had to wear masks and gloves and still ended up coughing, sneezing, and a little cut up. By the end of Memorial Day weekend, however, the bathroom was down to the studs and subflooring.

Andrew immediately started putting the greenboard up (drywall with a water-resistant paper covering) on the non-tub/shower walls. Our son had decided to become potty trained that week and I desperately wanted the upstairs toilet to be back in commission.







It certainly seems like a mess at this point (and oh boy, it is), but I also think it looks better already. My two men are working nonstop to make "spa" bathroom a reality!

Groundskeeping

I'll start by saying that we don't have a lot of property. Pretty much no one in our area does. You can practically reach out of the playroom window and touch my neighbor's house. I don't mind it much and it certainly keeps property maintenance at a reasonable level.

Here are some pics from the week we moved in - October 2007:

The people who flipped our house kept things pretty simple. They cleaned up the yards, threw down some sod, and set up some simple gardens with reddish mulch to define them.



They added a great little deck to the back of the house, which we absolutely love. Just enough for a table and chairs set and a grill. And Pepper loves to lounge on it.







Summer of '08: We kicked off the warm weather by putting in a fence. It goes along the property line on the far side of our driveway and crosses over the driveway to the deck with a double gate. We only needed to install a gate on the other side of the house, as our house is only several feet from our neighbor's fence. The back of our property was already fenced in - we spruced it up a bit to make it dog-proof.



I added scalloped cement blocks (that I discovered hiding behind our garage) to the front garden to define it better, threw down some fresh mulch, and added a few perrenials.





I hated the scrubby little deck garden - I feel like they randomly chose 6 plants and plopped them in there haphazardly - so I moved what was in it to the front and back gardens and created a play area for Tyler. We also stained the deck, which ended up being a bust because it did NOT wear well over the next year. Oh well... live and learn!





The back garden got a general cleanup, some annuals and perennials, and a bag or two of mulch. We also added some latticework to the wire fence back there - it's a lot more inviting and hopefully the ivy I planted will crawl up it and afford us some more privacy.





Summer of '09: No huge changes out front really. I added twice as many annuals this year, some solar lights, and "decorated" the front porch with a shrub and a cute little chair Tyler sits on to wait for his father to come home. The grass looks awesome because Andrew treats it like one of his children. I think we've succeeded in having some decent curb appeal!





We decided to address the deck again. After stripping it (which was no small feat) Andrew restained the floor of the deck. I primed and painted the railings white, which turned out even better than I thought it would.





Tyler's play area got a facelift as well with the addition of a clubhouse and picnic table. The box by the deck stairs contains all of his miscellaneous outdoor toys.



I decided to finally start my vegetable garden this year. I put it over on the side of the house, where it gets tons of sun and grass doesn't grow anyhow. I planted 2 tomato plants, two cucumber plants, one yellow pepper plant, and one zuchinni plant.





The back garden got a facelift as well, with the addition of several more annuals, a white fence, and more solar lights. This garden is particularly hard to maintain... the weeds are unstoppable and the trees above it dump branches down every time a storm blows through. Still, I love staring at this garden from my kitchen window while I'm at the sink. I'm still waiting for the ivy to cover my neighbor's old garage though.





We don't have many more plans for our property besides a few odds and ends, such as patching the bare spots in the yard (mostly a result of the dog) and adding a sprinkler system some day. As I said, we don't have much... but I'd like to think we made the most of what we have.

Fireplace Cover & Recessed Lighting

When we moved in I was ecstatic over the color our living room was already painted - I LOVE a red/burgundy room. I think the color is actually Merlot by Olympic. Between that and the stone wall created for the fireplace, I was in love.

Our furniture, however, didn't work so well with the space. The TV we had was too big for the room, so we had to put our bedroom TV downstairs (see previous post where I said "don't ask" about the drive-in movie theater in our room) and find a proper stand for it. In order to view the TV and not completely screw up the flow of the room - the only way to get to the kitchen/dining area from the stairs or front door is through my living room - we had to, for the time being, put our loveseat in front of the fireplace opening. It didn't come with doors anyhow, and Tyler was only a year old... so we figured it was best until we could address it.

Here are some shots of the living room when we first moved in:





First thing I did was hang a few things and address the windows - quick fixes (well, drilling into the stone wall was some work). The next step was a bit pricey - new furniture - and as a result I applied for the teaching job I have now. I basically returned to work to buy a new couch :)

We purchased a cream couch, a funky chair, and some ottomans. They really brightened up the space, since the other couch and loveseat are a deep green. We moved them into the sunroom, which you can see in my previous post.

Once last fall rolled around and it started getting chilly, I insisted that we get a fireplace cover. We chose a black (surprise, surprise), somewhat contemporary set of doors. They had to be special ordered since, like everything else in an older house, they weren't a standard size. I absolutely love them and think they make the stone wall more of a focal point in the room.

The final step (well, almost.. I'll explain at the end) in our minor living room renovation was to add recessed lighting. For some reason this room was the only one that did not have its own light source - every other room has some sort of fixture in the ceiling. Even with 3 lamps in the room it seemed dim in the room at night and, since we don't have a family room and thus spend a great deal of time in there, we thought it was a prime candidate for 4 recessed lights and a dimmer switch.

It was a VERY messy project. The ceilings are plaster and literally crumble and turn into piles of dust. It gets EVERYWHERE. I vacuumed every day 3 times a day for a while. And, while cutting the holes in the ceiling, we hit a snag. Right smack in the middle of one of them was a wire running into the playroom - it was the old armored cable typical of the time period and had absolutely no slack. There went our perfectly symmetrical square of lights. We moved the ones over the couch back towards the window a few inches and in towards one another a few inches - so they form more of a trapezoid than a square. In the end it worked out fine... the lights actually shine right down on the couch, making it easy to read there at night.

So, without further ado, pics of the final results:











Our final step will be replacing the carpet. Ivory carpet + dog + toddler = disaster. And our new lights highlight every. single. stain. We hope to replace it with something a few shades darker and a bit more durable... but after our kid gets rid of the hole in his chin.

Crown Moulding, Hardware, and Paint... Oh My!

Although it's a fairly small area, I love our kitchen. It's galley style, with a bathroom on the one end and an open dining area on the other. We don't have a formal dining room, which is fine with me. To the rear of the dining area is a sunroom with a sliding door out onto our deck.

When we moved in we hardly had enough furniture to fill the area. I didn't have a china cabinet, so the countertops were littered with our wedding gifts for weeks.

I love the light fixtures in the dining area and sunroom, love that there are TONS of windows, love the travertine floors, and love the earthy granite countertops. The cabinets are fine - standard Home Depot stuff - and the appliances were stainless - my preference. We had to purchase a fridge, as the one that came with the house was a leftover white one from the workers flipping our house. I'm not a huge fan of the fluorescent kitchen light and I'm sure that one day we'll be putting in recessed lighting.

Some shots of the kitchen/dining area/sunroom the week we moved in (10/07):



The light in the dining area wasn't centered with the opening to the living room for some reason - we put this on our punch list. It was fixed, but took a bit of work and we now have a finishing plate on our ceiling. It doesn't stick out too badly... and is most definitely less noticeable than the light's placement beforehand.



Kitchen, complete with mismatched fridge and china that has never been used.







Sunroom, furnished with a futon that we tried to pretend wasn't Pepper's bed (but she quickly claimed it as such).



We like that 3/4 of the kitchen & dining area is tiled, as it made for less to paint and is easy to keep clean of cooking remnants. However, whoever was on tile duty the day our kitchen was updated didn't do the best job along the edges and I really wanted to disguise some of the unevenness along the top. So Andrew took a Saturday and put up some crown molding. It solved any ragged edges and made the space a bit more formal, which is nice since we don't have that dining room.





Then, in an effort to dress up the very basic cabinets a bit, we added some stainless steel knobs to all of the drawers and doors. It took a couple of hours and made more of a difference than I expected.





We painted the one wall of the dining area and the sunroom a rich beige, bought some new furniture, added some window treatments, and moved the old living room furniture into the sunroom once we bought a new couch and armchair. We also put up a gate to keep Pepper out of trouble when we're out or have guests over. Notice that she still has claim to a piece of our furniture (the green loveseat with the crib sheet on it - a lame attempt to curb the drool).











The changes we made were only cosmetic, but well worth it for an area I spend nearly half my day in. I hope our guests find it as warm and inviting as we do!