Where to Start

So first thing to think of walking into a 30 year old house that hasn’t been updated in…..about 30 years, is where do we start? What is the priority?  Easily knocked off the list was the basement.  Although the colgate green wall colour isn’t on our list of favourite hues, overall the basement was ok.   The paneling is a grey colour, which is better than the ugly brown wood that is most paneling.  And the carpet was fairly new due to a flood in the basement in the spring, so it was livable.

So that leaves the main floor.  We didn’t really narrow that down too much….Basically we wanted to redo the whole main floor.  We needed new flooring in the living room (as it was pink), the hallway and master (as it was forest green), and in the 2 other bedrooms as (as they were shag).  I thought I could live with the kitchen linoleum and the sun room carpet.  Then we looked into hardwood, and it turned out it wasn’t going to be much more expensive than carpet.  So we decided that we would get new flooring for the whole main floor. 

So here’s the plan:

Hardwood basically all of the main living spaces.  Living room, kitchen, hallway, sun room, all 3 bedrooms.

Ceramic tile in the entrance way so that wet shoes don’t ruin the wood.

Carpet in the 3 bedrooms.

(The only floor that’s staying is the bathroom since its decent and looks fairly new)

The whole main floor has to be painted.

Kitchen isn’t being redone, but there is some rearranging since we don’t love the layout, and want to ensure that the hardwood gets everywhere it needs to be for when we do the kitchen down the road.

So back to the question.  Where do we start? Do we start with a specific room? Which room is most important? Answer: all of them.  Really, all of the rooms are a priority.  We wanted paint on the walls before flooring went down.  Ceramic could be done right away, followed by hardwood, then carpet.  But since we needed to get the paint done and that was a big task, we basically had to take on the whole house at once. Yay for us!  It was also just logical to do this since all the walls needed to be washed, and then primed.  And we used the same 2 colours in most of the rooms.  It’s very overwhelming to know that you need to pain 1100 square feet all at once.  I shouldn’t talk; Ryan has done most of it.  But still, I feel for him…(and that’s 1100 square feet on the floor, multiply that by the 4 walls, ceiling, as well as priming, and doing multiple coats of paint)….

This is Ryan painting.  Except none of our walls are orange.