The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel....Floors, Trim, furniture

I've been in hiding from blogger other than a few cheap post but I've been busy around here.  Things are getting accomplished though!

We finally got around to {almost} finishing this project.  I am so, so, so excited to have one HUGE thing checked off my list!

A few weeks ago we decided using a belt sander to sand the floors just wasn't gettin' the job done, so we shelled out the 65 bucks and rented a huge floor sander and an edge sander and got the sanding done in a matter of hours!  Amazing what tool's made for the job can do!

After we sanded I vacuumed the dust, and vacuumed more dust and cleaned a little more before I put down a coat of stain.  I used Minwax in Walnut.

After the stain had plenty of time to dry (because we were stalling on buying the 50 dollar gallon of Polyurethane)  I cleaned the floor yet again to free it of any dust, and started applying coats of Minwax Oil Modified Water Based Polyurethane in Semi-Gloss. After each coat of poly had a chance to dry (min four hours) I lightly sanded and applied the next coat, a total of four.  And I am in love with it.  I failed to take anything but iPhone pictures of the shiny floor :)

I spend the last few nights after work painting the trim boards that I had primered and patched up last year so that we could get them installed.  We did that after work yesterday, and today I patched/painted over nail holes and window trim.  All that is left now is to replace/get some outlet covers and we need to cut new window sills (my dad offered to do this for us so just waiting on him to come take some measurements)  because the old ones were rotted when we pulled them out during demo.  Photo bomb to follow:

I LOVE IT!  Glad we decided to go the way we did with everything.  And I can have my bedroom back as soon as the finishing touches are done!

Things are looking shiny!

3rd and hopefully final coat is on and drying.

Check another one for me off that list!

The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel...Where We Are Now

So we finally found someone who could come over and do the knock down on the ceiling, only its not really knock down more like a regular textured ceiling.  Regardless it helps to hide the fact that its an old house and the ceiling was never really even.  As soon as the plaster had time to dry we cut back into things I could do.  So we returned the texture spray hopper thing that we bought and didn't have to use for the ceiling and bought custom colored green paint to match the green in her bedding.  I started by coating everything but the floors in 2 coats of primer then hit up the ceiling with some Dutch Boy Ceiling Solutions Paint, awesome stuff goes on purple (so you can't miss a spot) dries white!  Then I got to finally put some color on those long awaited walls!  Two coats of the green when on, I love the color its wonderful for one made at the color match station.  Dad also came over in  between coats 1 and 2 of green to help Tony install the Ceiling fan/light.  

primer-ing.

you can kind of see the texturedness of the ceiling here.  Use your imagination.

1st coat of paint and a ceiling fan up!

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

2 coats of paint, don't worry the trim will cover the bottom!

I love it!

There's that pretty hallway paper again!

Now that the paint is up I am awaiting the arrival of a sander for the floors so I can get started on sanding and refinishing them.  It's finally all coming together! I can't wait to see the trim up, the contrast of the white and green makes me happy.  Now I'm glad we went with white bedroom furniture!

The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel...Getting Ready for Paint.

After the walls and ceiling were up it was time for mud and tape, or is that tape and mud?  Anyway our friend Lee came over to help with this part and I think Nate did too once.  They got it all taped and it sat like that for MONTHS...really MONTHS.  Mostly because Addison was born it was mid summer and hot and a lack of urge to get it done.  

Getting all taped up

July 19th, pre-Addison Just have to cover the screw holes and sand it down

And then comes the part where NOTHING happened for months.  We needed help with the ceiling because we wanted to do knock down but didn't have a clue how to do it.  We had a few people offer to help which never seemed to work out or we had other things going on when it did work out.  So there it sat.  

Then one day at the end of September Addison decided she wanted her picture taken in her room...Just to remind Daddy that it was so not finished yet. 

Uh...Hey guys...when do I get my own room?!?

After the pictures Daddy did some screw hole patching and a whole lot of sanding, so it was ready for the ceiling to be done so Mommy could start doing more of her part. The other part of the room that I did during all of the things I couldn't do was to remove all the old square nails, patch up, glue/repair all the trim that we saved.  I did this back in June with a little help from my mom, dad, and brother one afternoon and spend the next day getting it all primed.  It is still sitting in the garage waiting to be brought into the house to be painted just before we reinstall it.  (I don't want to risk having it scratched up once painted.)  

After a little burst of motivation came Michigan winter....cold...and we haven't heated the upstairs since moving into the house and figured why start now when she's sleeping downstairs with us anyhow.  So nothing was accomplished all winter on the room because of the negative degrees and the fact that you can see your breath up there most days.  

The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel...Demo Part 2

After we got all the plaster knocked down we started removing the lathe boards.  What a pain in the butt that was.  Each board had to be pulled out individually, held in by far too many nails.  Then we had to get the boards with a billion nails in them out of the house.  Just look how many there were...

 We decided to leave the ceiling in due to the amount of attic crap that was falling through the  lathe boards.  We put up a sheet of plastic to prevent more from falling an then Tony framed out a new ceiling right below the existing one.  

UGH!  Lucky for me I was pregnant and I got out of all the hard stuff.  

Puttin' the Baby Belly to work.

Tony did most of the moving boards out of the house part, and probably far more of the pulling nails and boards down, but I did my fair share also!

Getting another load ready to drag out of the house.  

One wall all done.  And look outside wall, ZERO insulation!!!

We discovered that if we saved some of the lathe boards to tack to the stud's we wouldn't need drywall as thick in order to match up to the window frames.  We made sure to save some for this purpose.  

Tony put up the lathe boards on the studs as you can see here.

 After the lathe was out it was on to electric.  Here you can kind of see the starts of wire being ran for electrical outlets and you can't see it here but lighting! 

Tony Proud of his work.

The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel...Demolition Time!

March 20th, 2010 marked demo day one.  

We had heard that you could just knock off the plaster and leave up the lathe, somehow fish through insulation behind the lathe and just drywall over the lathe....about a day day into it we discovered the lathe was far from level enough to hang drywall over the top of and there was no way to get insulation behind it so we ended up deciding that we would demo that too.  

after carefully removing all the trim work from the room we began the demo process....Of course in proper construction attire, facemask...check... sandals, err...check...

removing the plaster was a lot of work but once we figured out to beat it with a hammer first then use the pry bar behind it to knock off large chunks it went much faster.  

I think I quit helping around this point with demo on the plaster as the ceiling was creating far too much dust for me.  

we got the plaster out of the house by lowering the garbage can out the window to pregnant me standing in a trailer with a tarp on it, I'd dump it and back up Tony would drag the can to fill it again.  

What a mess!

As dirty, dusty, messy and sweaty as demo is, its also fun, the best way to relieve frustration is to whack at a wall with a hammer or what ever tool you need to use.  (It came at a perfect time in pregnancy where I just started to get in the mood where I didn't want to deal with people's crap, which makes for great force behind your hits)  In just one day we managed to knock down the plaster from all but the top 1/8 of the walls and the ceiling.  Tony did that part by himself  over the next week because of the incredible amount of dust.  Who knows how horrible that was to breathe in while I was pregnant, even with a mask it clung to your clothing and hair like you wouldn't believe.  

The Never Ending Bedroom Remodel...where we started.

The house we live in was once my Great-Grandparents house, my own Grandpa was raised in this house.  Needless to say its old, and I love it.  Being old also needs an incredible amount of updates, nothing is horrid but most things are out of date, incredibly out of date and by no means modern.  The worst off of the whole house is the upstairs, there is a bedroom downstairs so no one has used the upstairs at all in at least 11 or so years, possibly more.  I would venture a guess that the upstairs hasn't been updated since my Great Grandparents bought the house.  Its pretty bad.  We did a quick clean on it when we moved in and wanted to get ourselves moved up there but quickly lost steam on the ripping down wallpaper when we realized the walls all needed to be demoed since they were lathe and plaster and just falling apart in some rooms and cracked beyond repair in others.  Not to mention the fact that there is ZERO insulation between the walls and the exterior of the house...This is Michigan it gets pretty freekin' cold up there in the winter.  The only heat source for the upstairs are floor vents that allow the heat to rise from the downstairs area.  (I told you it was old.)

Around month 4 of my pregnancy we decided it was time to start thinking about preparing a nursery. (A nursery that at 7 months of age we are still yet to finish for a baby to use!) :)  We chose the smallest of the 4 upstairs bedrooms thinking that when Addison gets older, needs a larger room and/or we have another child who needs a crib we will remodel another room for her to have a big girl room and keep the nursery for a second baby.  So the nursery will be a gender neutral theme for anything that can be reused for another baby, thinking yellow or green walls and farm animal theme.  That's the plan.  The room we picked is small, when I say small I mean small, its roughly 8ft by 11ft or something like that (I'll pay more attention to that detail when I need a rug I promise.)  There is no closet, two tall floor to almost ceiling windows, and no electrical outlets.  This room is actually the room that was my Grandpa's bedroom when he was a kid.  I joked with him that he couldn't have owned much more than a dresser and a twin bed its so small!

Before we got started on demo we cleared the room of everything and snapped some before shots.  The photos are at weird angles because of the size of the room its impossible to photograph in one shot.

wood floors need refinishing, light sconce on the wall is the only light/electricity source in the room, walls have got to go!
I am in love with the old wood trim so we salvaged it so that I could repair and reuse it.  

trim has pretty detail in the corners but is hard to see because of old pealing wall paper, also showing the floor vent and more of the old floors. 

Floor vent, I will be refinishing this I believe white though I haven't decided yet.  

there are lots of areas in this house where there wasn't room for complete trim around door/window frames, this will remain the same as there is no fix other than moving the door.

even the ceiling was blessed with wallpaper

More of the door frame/window combination

other window frame.

These were taken March 19, 2010....Stay tuned for our slow progress over the past year!