From the Top Down

Often over the last two months, I've wondered what it would feel like to sit down to close on a house and feel a sense of accomplishment and finality. Because at ours, it was like someone just handed us a permission slip to start working. :)  When we closed, there was not much anticipation of moving, settling, nesting. It was all plans for what to get started on first.

Through the closing process, I had found a contractor that I really gelled with and trusted, though for no apparent reason. :)  I just liked him because his bid was incredibly detailed on a massive spreadsheet with prices, taxes, product names and everything. I knew we would get along. So once I had seen what all each project would cost, we were able to narrow down what we could do ourselves and what we needed the professional to do.  Let's start with the top floor.

Upstairs has three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Two of the bedrooms are larger than average, and one is a pretty normal size. :) There wasn't much that needed to be done in the bedrooms aside from new paint and finishing the windows.  The carpet was in fine shape, but needed to be stretched and cleaned.  Our contractor did the shower tiling, installed a new window in the only window in the whole house that was not replaced to match the rest, and sanded down the master bath ceiling.  Otherwise, we did the rest up here ourselves.

The bathrooms were another story.  The main hall bath had no flooring and was down to the studs around the shower. The master bath technically was usable, but the shower hadn't been cleaned in I don't know how long and was disgusting.  The floor was pretty bad, and the vanity was not an ideal master bath vanity.  So I basically wanted to gut it (but leave the standing shower and nice glass doors if they could be cleaned up).  The first thing I did when we got the keys was come and clean that shower to see if it was salvageable.

Guess what??

It was totally salvageable! It looked nearly brand new after a good scrubbing! :)  We also ripped up the old linoleum, put down new, and got a new vanity and paint.  Here's the before and afters

And, after: 

One thing that was a major chore was the ceiling in this bathroom. It was like a stucco that was horribly inconsistent that I could not chisel off. I ended up having our contractor, David, sand it all down flat so we could paint the ceiling. Ew. That was a chore and left a huge mess! But, glad we did it. :)

For the kids bathroom, we changed everything but the cabinet and the toilet. New vanity top, new shower, new window trim, new paint, new floor!

Before:

If you followed along on Facebook you saw some of the baby steps in this bathroom, but here's the final product, After!

One thing I was sure of was that I did not want grout in the bathroom floors. We chose a vinyl sheet for our bathroom and the laundry room, and went with slightly nicer vinyl tiles for the kids bathroom. I'm pleased with both of them!

Here's the before and after pictures of the upstairs bedrooms!

These are the only two pictures we have of Meryn's room before its mini-makeover, but here's her room now!

It was painted with Valspar Brushed Lavender, carpet cleaned, replaced and window trimmed. 

This is the boys bedroom. It is one huge room, with double closets. In here, we painted Sherwin Williams Dorian Gray, with the dormer window walls painted Magnetic Gray, trimmed windows, cleaned carpet. 

And for the last room upstairs, the Master bedroom! As with the other bedrooms, all we did was paint, clean and stretch the carpets, and trim the windows, and in this room we added a light fixture. 

The only thing left to do upstairs is to figure out what to do for window coverings for the dormer window in our bedroom. I have two panels of curtains from India, the burgundy and gold ones hanging on the larger window, that I really love.  My options are to keep those and buy a roll down shade for the dormer, since there's hardly any wall on either side of i anyway.  Or simply get four matching panels. I'm leaning towards a shade that wouldn't cover the beautiful window frame.  What say you? :) 

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