Painting

Renovation Update

/ Varza / 1 Comment

The renovation is going very very slow right now. DH is working on the cabinets trying to get them painted but the paint you need to use is very thin and takes forever to dry. So its going little by little. He and his friend were able to finally get the floor clean from the vinyl tiles and once the wood floors are done we can get that tiled. Right now, the floors have been sanded and the first layer of varnish is on and drying. Tomorrow Footprints Floors will be going back and putting on the final coat. I can’t wait to post the final pictures. Here are some pictures of the pre refinished floors:

Living Room Floors

Future Office Floors w/cat pee stains

As you can see with the future office picture of the floors there are a lot of stains BUT they should be gone except for a few of them that will be too deep to take off. One you can see on the bottom near the wall. That isn’t cat pee but a water stain from possible a potted plant being there. So I guess that will be “character” for the floors.

Bathroom – Upstairs

I did finish the painting in the upstairs bathroom. I think I stated before that we had 3 or 4 different colors in this tiny tiny tiny bathrom. They were shades of green with one white wall. Now I love green, it is my favorite color. We are painting our kitchen & dining area green and possibly my office and downstairs. Our living room will be the green the old owners had painted it until we have the time to paint it another color. So, I wanted to find something to match but brighten it up. The yellow I found is light but once it was done it has made the bathroom feel so much brighter and bigger. It will help make the space more liveable until we can renovate the entire space and make it more our own. I mentioned before that they had repainted the cabinet and mirror very badly, I decided that I will take the paint for the molding/base and try to fix it some. Here are some photos from the bathroom:

Shower Corner - Pre painting

Shower Corner - After Painting

Vanity Area - Pre painting

Vanity Area - After Painting

Now – it wasn’t 100% done when I took these photos but it is now. Once its fully decorated I will post a photo… now to look for a new shower curtain.

Kitchen Walls

Here is the texture that was on the walls before we had them fixed:

sand texture paint

The guys redid the walls and fixed some bad dry wall work. They also patched this giant whole:

Look thru to the back wall

That was where the old backsplash was. And then they fixed this:

Giant crack in the ceiling

But now our home looks like this after all the guys hard work last week:

new ceiling

But everything is coming together, even if it is slowly happening the main thing is that it is happening. On Monday morning the LO and I are heading to Albuquerque to get furniture and the last of my stuff from my parents house. While I am gone my awesome hubby will still be working so that when we get back we can work on getting things moved. I have recruited my dad to help me out with some things at the house, I figure he and I can finish painting the kitchen, dining area and the master bedroom. I also will need to install the bead board on the walls in the dining area and on the back of the cabinets in the bar area. You can see it in the above picture of the kitchen wall before the new drywall was installed.

Hopefully I will have one more update before I leave town.

And a few more days

/ Varza / Leave a comment

A few more days have gone by on the renovation and things are happening but I while I have a bunch of photos… I really don’t have the time to upload and post right now since I am squeezing this in while the LO sleeps and I do some cleaning. And I have no idea where my camera is at the moment… I may make a post later with just photos for you to go thru.

Tuesday

A good friend of ours came over and babysat for us while I headed to the house to do some work and watch more work get done. Our drywall guys came as did the plumber. We now have new drywall where the old backsplash was and they repaired our ceiling crack, as well as the horrible texture walls. We have gas in our laundry room and in the kitchen thanks to Steve at Anchor Plumbing. I met with the floor renovation people from Footprints Floors to get an estimate and schedule a time to start the renovation. He did recommend waiting to paint in the areas where they will be working but I did go ahead and start the painting in the bathroom upstairs.

I went with a yellow – its a bit bright but its a VERY small bathroom and it helps make it feel bigger. The walls were originally 3 or 4 different colors – one for each wall: white, olive green, sage green and khaki green. I ripped part of the sheet rock off when I took the shower curtain rod down – luckily I had some people on hand to help me with that… I got most of it done. I need to take the light fixture down, I tried to paint around it and yeah so not gonna happen. I had to wait to the area around the wall damage to dry so that isn’t painted and I didn’t edge the top of the walls. I am hoping to get back there on Sunday to finish it. I wanted to continue but was suffering from a major migraine and just wanted to get home.

Wednesday

Omar had to work super late and I still had a migraine so this was a rest day

Thursday

Omar’s day off so he headed over and did some work at the house. I headed to the store and spent money – woohoo! I picked up our new faucet… the Pfister Elevate:

Its pretty cool. I did a lot research on Wednesday to find the best priced one and found it Lowe’s for $198.00 – and since I used my Lowe’s card, I got an additional 5% off. Its pretty cool – it goes from 8″ to 9 1/2″ to 11″ in height. I love the taller faucets for pot filling but they always seem to overtake the view of the kitchen. Its a basic simple design that I think will match our kitchen well.

I also picked up a new light fixture for our kitchen. Right now we have a large 4 1/2′ long florescent light fixture that takes like 4 bulbs with a large wooded frame around it. It is humongous! Anyways, we decided to change it. I found a 28″ swaure florescent light fixture with a white frame around it – its bigger then I really wanted but it works for the kitchen and the design. It takes 2 lights instead of 4 at least and shorter. Wider though but because its square we think we can center it better on the ceiling and it should blend into the ceiling better.Unfortunately, after buying it I read a lot of bad reviews – not sure what to do now but alas I guess we will try it out first.

And the paint color for the walls – I had originally gone in with some samples of colours I wanted to use but neither one looked right with the countertop. Luckily since we were at Lowe’s and purchased our countertop from Lowe’s it was just a quick jaunt from the counter department to the paint department to grab some more samples. And I found a great one – it works great with the countertops, the white counters, the white beadboard and the dark wood kitchen table we already have. Its called “Brown Buzz” from the National Trust Collection thru Valspar (http://valsparpaint.com):

(image borrowed from myperfectcolor.com). Its a neutral green color.

We also had the countertop people show up and take the template for the counters – we should have them in about 2 weeks. Hopefully the Wednesday before Turkey Day but most likely afterwards. Not sure how that will affect the day – we may have to move it back a few days because we won’t even have a sink to use for cooking.

Omar spent a good portion of the day getting the vinyl tiles up. He got about half and did some other things – not really sure but things he needed.

We also go our backsplash tiles in – and looks like we will need more then we anticipated originally but have come up with a few ways to cut some of the area we need to use the tiles. We have a high area at the sink with smaller high cabinets with a lot of empty space in front of it. So, we are going to build a small shelf there to put things like the dish soap, etc and keep them out of small hands. Instead of tiling behind it we will paint it the same color as the walls. That takes out 3 sq feet of tiling expense. We will still need to spend more then I want but Omar really loves their look and we are going to go ahead with it.

Today, Friday

Omar and his friends are at the house – I am watching the LO. They go the rest of the floor up and headed out to pick up the new flooring. Omar stated that one of the benefits of taking up the old floors is there is a grid on the floors from where the tiles were placed. They are also prepping the cabinets and getting them started on being refinished. Now, our cabinets are not the best made cabinets and I hope to one day be able to trade them out for nicer ones but at least the fronts are solid wood so we are able to refinish them. The ends are going to be harder then the front since the sides are laminate. May have to come up with something interesting to cover them up.

Time to run, someone is up for their nap and mommy still hasn’t eaten lunch.