Since the floors are finished, it’s time to start moving in furniture! Needless to say, we are super excited. Over the moon kind of excited. We were at the storage unit last night assessing the mass of furniture that was once our cozy, two bedroom apartment, when I got a phone call from my dad saying he was going to come help us for a bit. The more the merrier when it comes to moving, right?! Five minutes later he pulled up in this beauty…
Two hours later, our storage unit was completely empty, and less than 2 hours after that, everything was unloaded into the middle of the living room floor. Obviously, we are excited about the furniture coming out of captivity, but we’re also fond of the idea of not shelling out $130 a month for storage. Later today (assuming Greg can get off from work a tad early), we are going to be unpacking, cleaning everything, and moving each piece of furniture into its permanent place.
To prepare for the moving in process, we picked up a roll of paper at Lowe’s for about $10 (it’s near the big plastic sheeting, not the painting drip cloth, like we originally thought), then used it to line the walkway from the back door to the hallway. This way, our new floors won’t get damaged in the moving process.
We also set up a “tool table” in the kitchen to have a designated area for tools, furniture pads, etc. while this chaos is in progress. Oh, and that’s our Christmas tree in the box in the corner. Can’t wait to decide where to put it!
I best get going and finish prepping the house for Operation: Move In!
U-Haul photo courtesy of Randsco… seeing as how it was way too dark to get a photo of our actual truck.
The day has come! The happiest day ever — well, at least the happiest day in the last eight months. The other day, we got to walk through the house (in sock-feet of course) and take a look at the newly stained floors. It felt like walking into the house for the first time. Our house. Now that the floors are finished, we can finally start moving our furniture that has been locked up in a climate controlled storage unit since APRIL. I still can’t believe it’s been that long.
If you remember, we started out with carpet in the three bedrooms and tile in the kitchen. We also has a closet or two that had linoleum flooring (check out the full floor plan breakdown here). In order to improve the overall flow of the house, we decided to rip out the carpet and tile and put hardwood floors in these areas. We also chose to have the existing hardwood floors refinished (more about that process here, here and here). Check out what the house looked like when we purchased it (for the complete recap, check out the house tour):
After a really good cleaning, new fixtures here and there, a lot of paint, old fashioned elbow grease and, of course, the new floors, here is what the house looks like today:
Since we don’t have all of our light fixtures up yet, the floor color looks as though it goes between brown and reddish brown. In natural light (which is what we love) it’s definitely brown brown, though. Some of the old light bulbs (bright white, industrial CFLs that we’re not big fans of) make the flooring look more red. That’s really not what we want, so we’ll be putting in some different light bulbs in the near future.
We are so pleased with how the new kitchen floors look! Before, the area was broken up by the tile, which made the kitchen look so much smaller. Now that the wood has replaced the tile in the kitchen, it really opens up the space! Read more about our plans for the kitchen here.
The already long hallway seems even longer now with the dark flooring:
Before the floors were refinished, we were worried that the new paint color in the guest bedroom would be way to bright. But now that the floors are a nice dark walnut, it has toned down the wall color tremendously:
Here’s Greg’s soon-to-be office and a sliver of the master bedroom through the door:
We really love how the floor color looks with the new tile in the bathrooms:
The master bedroom. I can’t wait to move our bedroom furniture in!
What was the price tag on this house-wide project? Here’s the breakdown…
BUDGET BREAKDOWN:
Felt Floor Lining $47.98
Shoe Molding for entire house: $278.71
Red Oak Flooring(886 sq ft): $1,955.54
Ripping up Carpet/Tile & Installing Hardwood Flooring (886 sq ft): $1,400
Refinishing & Staining (approx. 1,800 sq ft): $2,600 GRAND TOTAL: $6,282.23
Worth. Every. Penny. In our opinion, the house doesn’t even look like the same place. With our paint, hardware and flooring choices, it feels like our house rather than the previous owner’s. Now that everything is finished, paid for and photographed; it is time to celebrate. Tonight, we are celebrating with takeout and a movie (on a laptop) in the house that feels more ours than it ever has!
So this wouldn’t be considered the longest blog post known to man, we decided to share our step by step flooring process in a separate post later this week.
Here we are for part two of the big master bathroom renovation! We’ve been anxiously waiting for the hardwood floors to dry so we could see what the ultra-talented tile guy did in our master bathroom while we were on vacation. As soon as we got the official “go ahead” from the floor guy yesterday, we grabbed the camera and headed over to the house to check it out:
There’s a little preview of the finished floors, too! We love them and could not be happier with the result. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow and give you the full rundown as well as a final budget figures. Anyway, back to the room at hand!
Let’s take a little trip down memory lane. Here is what the bathroom looked like when we purchased the house:
The vanity area was actually in the bedroom, while the shower and toilet were in their own separate room. Knowing this wouldn’t work for us, we decided to reconfigure the layout. (Read more about that process here.)
Aside from waiting for the hardwood floors to dry so we could finally take a look, the tiling process in the master bathroom seemed like it happened in no time at all. What once was a room full of drywall and 2x4s was quickly transformed– fully tiled and awaiting fixtures — in the course of just a few days. It’s amazing how some backer board and tile can totally redefine a room. It doesn’t even feel like the same place!
There are two specific decisions that we are especially proud of: First, we decided to add a bench to the shower. Second, at the last minute, we told the tile guy we wanted small square tiles on the shower floor. Now that all of the tile as been installed, we are really happy with both decisions.
One of my personal favorite features of the bathroom, though a small detail, is the hidden niche in the shower wall. Rather than having a niche in the middle of the full wall where everyone can see it when they walk in, we opted to have one installed in the half wall, next to the bench. This way, the shower won’t look cluttered with shampoo bottles and soap.
We decided to tile the ceiling not only in the shower area, but the entire bathroom. (Another reason we decided not to tackle this project ourselves.) This gives the bathroom a more spa-like atmosphere, and though you might think it would make our smaller bathroom feel more cramped, it actually makes the room feel larger and taller.
To improve the resale value (though that seems like one of those never-going-to-happen scenarios at this point!), we decided to add a second sink since we the plumbing was being moved, anyway. We’re most likely going to use small oval sinks in order to maximize counter space.
We’re really loving how the tile looks with the paint color in the bedroom and the new floors. It really brings out the dark veins in the tile and also creates a lot of contrast to the master bedroom. That’s exactly what we were aiming for, but since we hadn’t seen all of the materials side-by-side before the installation, we were a bit anxious to see what it would actually look like.
The next step in this renovation is to find a vanity and plumbing fixtures. Since the vanity for this bathroom won’t be as large as the one in the hall bathroom, rather than designing one and having it made, we are going to see what options our local stores have in stock. This should be faster; not to mention easier on the wallet.
