3 Reasons Why I Shouldn't Be Spending Time on a Blog

This course....will be the death of me.

Although I am way behind on my blogging of what we have done upstairs, we are ready to move upstairs.  But this is all of our stuff, still in the basement.

Pile of thank you notes.....

Maybe this weekend I will find time to do all of them?

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.

House Tour - Part 2

The house tour continues! I don't know what was going on last week, but these pictures uploaded in less than 5 minutes.  (girl doing happy dance)

The Kitchen

This is the kitchen/dining area from the front entrance.  Straight through are pocket doors into the sunroom.

 The Kitchen

The actual kitchen.  Lovely wallpaper and all.

The Sunroom

Kind of an awkward size.  But we think it has potential.

 

The Rec Room

Don't be too judgemental....this is staying as is for the time being.  At some point I will have to go into detail about all the fantastic aspects of this basement that we need to change.

The Basement from another angle

To the left is the bar, at the far end is the bathroom.  The door on the far wall is the laundry room.  The door on the right is one of 2 entrances into the unfinished side. 

The Bar

The Basement Bathroom

The Laundry Room

This looks worse than it is.  It's fairly clean.  That's drywall on the walls, it just hasn't been painted.  Project? Maybe.

Unfinished Basement

I see storage, Ryan sees drinking games.

So that's all of it pre-renovation.  See how much there is to do? Not much can stay.  The basement will remain as is for now, until everything upstairs becomes livable.  



House Tour - Part 1

So I guess that the first step in this would be a new house tour.  These pictures are before any of the action took place.  This is what we saw the first time we went through it! Now I preface all of this by saying that we basically knew when we viewed the house that we were going to buy it and that it was going to be a disaster on the inside.  And yes, that doesn’t mean it was any less overwhelming when we went through it.  The basement basically saved the house for us because there was at least one room that I could live with (for now).

You see, we live in a very small town.  My parents live right outside of it; Ryan bought his house there a couple of years ago, and Ryan works there as well and can walk to work.  He likes this feature and didn’t really want to compromise and move anywhere else.  And I’m kinda attached to our small hick town as well.  So we knew we wanted to stay.  Problem with a small town is, the number of houses on the market is limited.  You don’t just call up the realtor and say you wanna look around at all the house options.  Months can go by where there isn’t a house for sale at all.  Then when there is one, it’s probably in the new subdivision where houses are over $500,000 (out of our price range that’s for sure).  People don’t move out of this town.  They die.  Is that morbid? Maybe, but it’s true.   So the only way to get a house, is to wait for that to happen.  Or that's how it seems to me anyways.

So anyways, a month before our wedding, I noticed on my way home one day that there was a for sale sign on the lawn of this house.  The next day Ryan called the realtor and we went to look at it.  We put in an offer a couple days later.  They received 2 offers at the same time, so we went in with our best offer and we got it! On the condition that our home would sell.  5 days later, we get notice that they have another offer (2 or 3 actually, I forget how many).  We had 48 hours to remove our conditions.  So we did.  Meaning, we bought this house without knowing for sure that the old one had sold.  Meaning we could own two houses.  Meaning we could be poor.  Luckily, everything worked out (after some very stressful times and pushing back closing). 

So here she is. Or he.  I don’t know if our house is a girl or boy.  I think it was an old lady when we started.  We will have to wait and see what it is when we get closer to completion.

Here we go, starting with The entranceway:

The lovey whatchamacallit in the entranceway.

The entranceway- from the living room

Master Bedroom

I have the pictures from our walkthrough in here, so they have furniture in them.  I figure you get a better idea of bedroom size if there is furniture in it.

2nd bedroom - or office

 3rd Bedroom

Upstairs Bathroom

The rest will come later. Mostly because I'm having issues uploading pictures, and now my font has changed and I can't get it changed back.  It has literally taken me a week to get those pictures uploaded....gah as if I'm not behind on this blog already!