Home Redo -- Master Bedroom

Ok, we finally got our bedroom redo pretty much finished, just in time for our out-of-town guests to stay in last week!  As a reminder, here's how it looked before.  Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Please excuse the darkness of these pictures, but here it is now!

This is taken while standing in front of my closet.  In this picture, you can see the support bar coming down.  We still plan to enclose that in a wood pillar.  The yellow room straight ahead is our bathroom.

Here's toward the bed.  I see now that I didn't have pillows on it yet.  Whoops!

Here's in the bathroom.  Yes, we have a piano in our bathroom.  This bathroom is ridiculously huge and open to the main bedroom, so humidity isn't a problem.  I LOVE my piano!!

When we were redoing the bathroom, I wanted to get rid of the ugly light fixtures they had.  I wanted something more rustic looking.  I couldn't find anything I liked that wasn't super expensive.  Finally, on a whim, I checked the outdoor light section at Wal-Mart and found these lights.  They look like lanterns, are adorable, and were only $15 for two of them!!!

I HATE windows in a bathroom.  Our neighbor's back patio is right outside our bathroom window.  One night, while I was showering in our GLASS shower, my cat pulled down the curtains.  I was determined after that to cover the windows.  I found this great window cling pattern at Lowe's.  It goes great with the gold walls.

Here's looking back into the main room from the bathroom.  You can see my husband's desk to the left, my sewing table to the right.

It's so nice to finally be all settled in!!

Redoing Master Suite

When we moved into this house, the room that is now our bedroom had gross carpet in it.  The bathroom had another, even grosser carpet (I think any carpet in a bathroom is gross).

Here is how it looked when we first moved in:

This is standing in the bathroom, looking down into the bedroom.

This is the bathroom.  That medicine cabinet on the wall is the type that's supposed to be set back into the wall.  And it was so high, I could barely see my eyebrows when I looked in it (which isn't saying much, since I'm only 5' tall).

Here are a couple more shots of the bedroom.  The walls were pink on top, wood panel on the bottom, and a couple of other walls were wallpapered.

To make it even better, before they painted it pink, they had this wallpaper:

And I don't have a good picture of it, but the globes around the lights had ducks on them.  I totally like a woodsy theme, but I think squirrels on the walls are a bit much.

This is our bedroom at the moment:

We've ripped up all the nasty carpet, and we pulled down the wood paneling.  The floors will be brown paper flooring, the walls a dark pine green.

This is the bathroom at the moment:

We've already painted these walls a deep gold.  We're also doing brown paper flooring in this room.  I'll show other details in the after pictures.  Hopefully it'll be finished next week...

Home Redo -- Laundry Room

Our house was owned by some very...let's say interesting people.  For those of you who haven't seen my previous redo posts, I've shown our upstairs bathroom, entryway, and living room and kitchen.  The previous home owners had stickers hiding holes in the walls, contact paper instead of wall paper, and various other oddities.

One major oddity was the laundry room.  We have a finished basement, but for some reason, they didn't finish the laundry room.  I totally understand about wanting access to plumbing, electric, etc.  But you know how when you're a kid the basement can be a scary place?  You know it can be dark, dank, full of cobwebs, and who knows what else?  Yeah, our laundry room could have totally been the main feature in your basement nightmares.

That's the only picture we have of it.  Is it any wonder I didn't go all picture happy in that room?  *shudder*  But it was large, and I could see the potential.

It really, really needed some improvement.  First, we added more lighting.  It's amazing what a fluorescent light or two can do!  Then we added some drywall.  (My hubby still wanted easy access to electrical and plumbing, so we didn't finish the ceiling.)  There are no windows in there, and I wanted to bring some sunshine in, so I picked a really bright yellow for the walls (I know, they're more banana than sunshine.  Either way, it still makes me smile.)  There was a long counter on one wall in the kitchen, where we ended up building in the pantries, so we relocated that counter to the laundry room.  

We also added some shelves and hanging bars.  It's still not the most beautiful room in the house, but at least the kids aren't scared to take their dirty laundry down there.  =)

I'm thinking we need to bring the yellow down on the concrete, too.  We also need to paint the floor with some gray concrete paint.  But for now it's clean, bright, and functional.  I'm happy with it!

Home Redo -- Bathroom

This house was very...um...interesting when we bought it.  If you haven't read about the contact paper on the walls or the flea infestation, check it out here and here.  Well, our upstairs bathroom was no exception.  The walls were a very light pink, and it had a very dated, floral border on the walls near the ceiling.

You can't see this in any of the pictures, but above the sink was a very large flower sticker, seemingly randomly stuck on the wall.  I didn't want it there, so I peeled it off.  It was covering a very large hole in the wall.  Yes, they covered a hole in the wall with a sticker.

The bathtub/shower had glass doors.

At first, you might think this was a nice touch.  But they hadn't been properly stuck down to the tub, so water would pour out underneath, no matter how much you caulked around it.  It would get in the tracks and get all underneath them, turning absolutely grimy and propagating all sorts of nastiness, no matter how much you tried to clean them.

We repainted, redid the floors, and pulled off the horrible shower doors.  We also put in an over-the-toilet shelf that's really pretty.  I love my bathroom now!!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!

Home Redo--Entry/Stairs

Our house has a split entry.  I can't stand having a split entry, but there are worse things we could have to deal with.  In a split entry, the stairs are the first thing you see upon entering a house.

I wish I had a before picture, but I don't.  But this picture of the living room will give you an idea.

The stairs were covered with the same horrible, blue carpet that the living room floor had, and the entry walls were covered with the same, horrible, reflective contact paper (if you missed the post on the living room redo, catch it here).  

I strongly dislike carpeted stairs.  Especially when you have a dog who sheds so much it looks like at least 3 dogs and a wookie live here.  And for some reason, the air flow is such that the dog hair seems to congregate on the stairs.  It's almost like the carpet has a carpet.  And those stairs have to be vacuumed.  Who likes to vacuum stairs?  It's one of the most miserable jobs ever.  And my kids weren't old enough to do it themselves yet, so that left it up to me.  No, thank you!

However, laminate has a tendency to be slippery.  And it's expensive to get the extra pieces you need to laminate a flight of stairs.  However, we came up with a better solution.  First, we ripped up the carpet.  What's underneath the carpet?  Wood.  Real wood.  Hard wood.  So we stained it.  I LOVE the rustic look, and the stairs look gorgeous!  And it was CHEAP!  Just a few dollars for a can of stain!  We didn't even bother polyurethaning it.  Again, that would make the stairs slick (not good with a bunch of little kids going up and down).  This way, we just brush on another coat of stain really quickly when it needs it.  Takes about 5 minutes!

And cleaning up all of that dog hair?  Takes just a minute with a broom!  WOO HOO!!

We also redid the landing.  Before, it had a fake parquet linoleum.  Really ugly and gouged up.  We put down a new linoleum that looks like stone tile.  All the beauty of tile, no cleaning of grout!  And, of course, that contact paper was ripped down.

Oh, and that chandelier you see in the original picture up above?  It was coated with nearly 30 years of grime.  At first I couldn't wait to pull that thing down.  But then we washed all of the glass and dusted off all of the brass.  Now it's sparkly and shiny and beautiful!

Here are the stairs now:

Much, much better, no?  Stairs are one of those features that are must-haves in many houses, but you can only do so much with them.  What unique ideas have you come up with for your stairs?

Home Redo--Living Room/Kitchen

We bought our house nearly 7 years ago.  Thankfully, my husband and I were both able to see the potential in the house.  We were looking for good "bones" to work with for the right price, knowing that we'd never find the ready-to-go-perfectly-ideal house for us.  So while there are things that will never be ideal for me in our house (for example, I can't stand our split entry), we knew that we could change most things to fit our tastes.

So, scattered throughout various other projects and random bits of thought on this blog, I figured I would share various redos from our house.  It's an ongoing project, but we have most of the upstairs finished and part of the downstairs finished.  I have lots of before and after pictures and lots of craziness from the original owners (only one family owned the house prior to us--they actually had it built).

I'm going to start today with the kitchen/living room.  This is how the living room looked when we first bought the house:

You may be asking yourself, "Why are those walls so shiny and reflective?"  The answer is that the walls weren't covered by ordinary wallpaper--at least not on the surface.  Oh, no.  That would be way too normal for the people who owned this house.  Instead, they went to the store and bought contact paper.  You know, that peel-and-stick stuff that you always line your drawers with in a new apartment because it seems to somehow create an impenetrable barrier between the previous tenants' germs and your silverware.  Yes, that was all over the walls throughout the living room, entry, and down the hallway.

We also had this lovely blue carpet that was absolutely infested with fleas.  As soon as you walked into the house, you immediately had at least 5 of them on your pants.  But remember in the book The Hiding Place when Corrie Ten Boom shows that they could thank God for the fleas because it kept the guards out of their bunks while they were holding Bible studies?  I also thanked God for the fleas.  This house was the right size for the right price, but it somehow sat empty for 6 months before we bought it, and it was on the market for even longer than that.  I believe that God may have used the fleas to keep other people from buying it so that we could.  Not sure which helped more--the fleas or the contact paper.

Or these wooden spindles:

Don't they just scream out SEVENTIES!?!?!?!?  And that leads us into the kitchen.  It was part wall paper (the real stuff this time), part paint.  

And yes, those are geese on the cabinets.  No offense if you love all things geese.  I have nothing against the real animals.  But I do have something against fake awful-looking ones residing on my cabinets.

So, here's what we did.  Once we took posession of the house, we had less than a month until our apartment lease ran out.  The first thing I did was to grab that contact paper and start ripping it down.  Amazingly, it peels off of walls really easily!  The next thing we did was bomb the fleas.  My hubby's wonderful aunt and cousins came out to help and his cousin Emily scrubbed those horrid geese off of my cabinets.  

Over time came other changes.  We ripped out the wall between the living room and kitchen, making them into one bigger room.  We also pulled out the carpet and redid the floors with a hardwood laminate.  We painted everything a pretty and mellow khaki-green color, removed the counter along the south wall (you'll see it again later, in a different location in the house) and built in pantries.

Here are the living room and kitchen now--no more contact paper glare!  However, it appears that we still need sunglasses in the house.

Here are inside the pantries.  My hubby and his dad put a counter into the one on the right, with outlets.  That way we're able to keep small appliances in there instead of out on the counters.  Brilliant idea, isn't it?

This is the end of part 1 of our house redo.  We got rid of some interesting things the original owners did.  What interesting details and quirks have you found in your house as a result of the prior owners?