Remodel 101 Part 3 - Bathroom

You know how I said the kitchen remodel wasn't very exciting?  Well, the bathroom remodel was definitely exciting, or something resembling exciting.  I've grown to love remodeling bathrooms, but it was not so much of a love, or even a love-hate relationship.  You'll see why.  No complete before pictures here either, but you'll get the idea.

Problem #1: Painted tile.

What?  Yes, that's right.  They painted the original ceramic tile, a rust color circa 1956, with ordinary beige interior paint. Also original was the bathroom vanity, as I am sure you can see.

And yes, they painted the wall tile, too.

The toilet had at least been replaced since then, so we kept it. The previous owner installed ceramic floor tile, so I'm sure they replaced the toilet at that point. 

 This thing absolutely had to go.  There was nothing for it. And here starts the exciting part.  I don't really like plumbing. I have only ever done fixture plumbing, basically no rough plumbing. There are so many things not to like.  Obviously the mess from past water damage is high on the list.  The musty smell helps some, you know. And then all the tight spaces below knee level. That really saves your knees and back.

This is what it looked like after I removed the vanity and surrounding tile. I had a fair amount of clean-up to do before I could install the new vanity. This was a long weekend.  I wasn't very familiar with the parts I needed, so I probably took 4 or 5 trips to Home Depot in the course of 2 days.

Here are a few shots of the finished project.  You'll notice a pattern with the further use of green.  You can only see part of the new vanity here. Some new bath hardware in the new towel rod and ring.

I installed white bead-board and some trim over the previously tiled area. I was pretty pleased with the end-result.  The room just felt cleaner.

There were a number of smaller projects, but we were not very good at capturing pictures, so I'll describe a few.  

New paint throughout the house, with a few back-and-forth attempts with darker and lighter paint in the living room.  This ultimately led to a two-tone room.

This was some of Laura's work.  She used some stencils to paint on an Americana border.  I think it turned out well.

The rest of the house got some neutral colors.

The next project was pretty fun, and very pleasing.  The doors were original, plain, hollow wood panel doors.  They were terribly outdated, had several coats of paint on them, brass knobs, chipped.  You get the point.

I replaced all of the closet and entry doors through the house with 6 panel, moulded doors.

Remodel 101 Part 2 - Kitchen

Back to remodeling.  We did a couple more projects in our first house, remodeling the kitchen and the bathroom.  Yes, a single bathroom.  Not sure how we survived that.  We moved into this house and they had two of our favorite decor items: wallpaper and borders.  Yes, I'm being sarcastic.  Unfortunately we don't have any good "before" pictures, only during and after. 

 Here is a nice shot after it was peeled from one wall.

This wall was half wallpaper, with a border above the green paint. Thanks to Laura's hard work and persistence, the pugnacious paper was peeled from our walls.

We primed the walls so we had a clean slate to start from.

At this point in our lives, Laura was still into ivy patterns, so we went with a green that coordinated well with it.

Then I added a chair rail around part of the room. We also replace the old linoleum with some nicer vinyl tile.  I was still not adventurous enough to attempt laying actual floor tile. 

We added some color on wood panels above the kitchen cabinets as well.

Not a terribly exciting remodel here, but it was a big improvement and brightened up a rather dull-looking room.

Remodel 101 Part 1 - Landscaping

The year after college graduation my wife and I were convinced we needed to buy a house.  Not the best idea, probably, but I know a lot of people do it.  Like most recent college grads we suddenly had some money to burn, so why not burn it on the largest debt we will likely ever incur?  If only I would have listened to Dave Ramsey back then.  Oh well.

So we bought our first house in an area between North Kansas City and Gladstone, but in Kansas City city limits.  There were a lot of really interesting older homes in the area, but we didn't buy one.  I was afraid of older homes.  It was a small raised (and I mean REALLY raised) ranch.  You will see in the pictures below the steps from the middle of the driveway up to the front door number something like 17, plus the property still dropped another 6 or 8 feet to street level from the bottom of the stairs.

The house was about 50 years old at the time, in generally good condition but just needed a lot of updating.  Original doors, 10 year old linoleum in the kitchen, no trim updates, original bathroom EVERYTHING.  Well, almost original bathroom.  They did paint the peach and rust-colored wall-tile beige with standard interior latex paint, which was peeling.

For a young, newly-wed couple this was an ideal first house, though.  We could have left it mostly alone and it would have still been a comfortable place to live.

This was really my introduction to remodeling.  I didn't attempt anything too terribly complex in this house, but at least challenged myself a bit.  As you will see, I can't leave well-enough alone when it comes to my own home, so naturally I started to tap into those instincts once I was a home owner.

Landscaping


This was a fun project.  Somehow I got Laura convinced to help me.  Three pallets of blocks and a couple tons of dirt later, we had flower beds.  I convinced the dirt guy to drop the dirt at the top of our hill on the left side of the house, but we carried all of the blocks up one at a time from the driveway.  I actually fell off the 1st terrace of the concrete wall to the second terrace and fractured the top of my tibia during this project. 

Overall this was a very pleasing project.  It gave some curb appeal to what was an otherwise boring front-yard.  Unfortunately the next owner(s) let it all go to weeds.

One more thing.  As you can probably see, mowing this front lawn was not fun.  We had a self-propelled mower for a while, but ended up buying a push mower because the self-propulsion wasn't strong enough to overcome the effects of the hill combined with the mower's own weight.  Go figure.

This is how the house looked originally.  

Notice the frost on the driveway...

and the fact that there is no car in it.  

We literally parked sometimes a block or two away

because the hills around our home were that steep.

We added landscaping blocks to terrace the beds 

inside the concrete walls

View from the other side

Beds to the left of the porch.

Bed to the right of the porch

Side of the house

Off back patio into the yard.  We constantly had dirt 

washing down onto the patio, so this helped prevent 

erosion in this area.