Today marks the official two year anniversary of owning this old house of ours. Today I wanted to look back at this past year, year two, and see all of the things we accomplished. I’m going to share a few (not all) of the big projects we’ve done in the last 365 days.
If you’ve never seen the before pictures of our house, you might want to start there, just for fun. This last year kind of unintentionally became the year of getting the upstairs more livable. One year ago, our master bedroom was downstairs and the only thing we had done upstairs was our son’s room. In the fall, we updated one of the bedrooms upstairs and moved the master up there.
Then, over my winter break from school, I decided to do a bit of work on our upstairs bathroom.
We also worked on finishing the third bedroom upstairs this year when we found out we were expecting our second child. The nursery is one of my favorite rooms in the house, and I cannot wait to get to use it very soon!
During Spring Break (are we sensing a pattern here? it seems like every time there was a break from school, I did a project!) I painted the porch floors on all three of our porches. That ended up being a lot of work over an extended period of time, but made a huge impact.
In a spur of the moment decision late last summer, I decided to paint some dalmatian spots on the wall between our living room and dining room. Best decision ever!
We’ve also done tons of work in the yard, and countless small projects around the house to help move the progress along. It’s crazy to see how far we’ve come. They say that people overestimate how much they can get done in a day, but underestimate how much they can get done in a year, and it’s so true! Last summer I could not have imagined the progress we have made. I can’t wait to see where we are by the end of year three! Hopefully some work in the downstairs areas… I’m getting real sick of looking at a few things downstairs. LOL! Well, that’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!
Hi there! Thanks so much for stopping by today! Boy oh boy, do I have a before and after for you today! First, let’s get the backstory. We bought our home from a realtor who had purchased the house at auction following a foreclosure. That realtor listed it for sale, but went back and forth about whether he wanted to flip it himself. When we bought it, there were a few random half hearted attempts at restoration work. One random door frame stripped of paint, carpeting partially pulled up, wallpaper torn off in just a small section of a room. That was the case in the room I’m going to show you guys today.
So the upstairs of our house has three bedrooms and a full bathroom. When we did our first big amount of work in the months before we moved in, the only room we touched upstairs was the first bedroom for our son, leaving the bathroom and two bedrooms untouched. The house was built in 1895 with no indoor plumbing, and therefore no bathrooms. I’m not sure at what point it was added, but at sometime, a bathroom was poorly shoved into what would have once been a spacious hallway between the three upstairs bedrooms. This leaves us a bit perplexed as to what to even do with the bathroom, because the floorplan of the second story is a bit wonky. I’d love to someday see that turned back into a hallway, but alas, we need more than the outhouse that was originally here. Knowing that this bathroom was going to involve some structural changes, and that our needs in the house/bedrooms may change as we have more kids etc., the upstairs bathroom was literally at the bottom of the priority list. Out of sight, out of mind.
Until, that is, we moved the master bedroom upstairs. Then all of a sudden this upstairs bathroom was a little more on the forefront of my mind. I lovingly nicknamed this room “the dungeon bathroom,” because I was so scared to use it. Everything was fully functional, but the carpet (yep, this thing had carpet) that had been in there had been waterlogged and soaked through the subfloor. My brother actually pulled up the carpet and old subfloor and laid down new plywood. And that’s the extent of work we had done in the dungeon bathroom. But now our bedroom was right next to it, and it was a pain to go all the way down the creaky stairs right outside of our son’s room in the event that I needed to go to the restroom in the middle of the night. So I knew I needed to do something. But again, of all the “big projects” we have planned for the next couple years, this one is quite literally the last one on the list. So I decided to give it a little cosmetic facelift, a Phase One makeover to tide us over until we would eventually remodel this bathroom. So, without further ado, here is the dungeon bathroom.
For days, I worked during naptime and after my son went to bed to scrape wallpaper. Most of the wall had two layers of paper, but in some areas, I found four different papers laid on top of each other. It was grueling. I used a handheld steamer and a wallpaper scraper and would work in tiny six inch square sections. It took a long time, and my arms arched.
As I scraped the wallpaper, I found that some of the drywall had been damaged, and had simply been disguised by the paper. That meant we had to do some patch work on the walls. I had to sand it all down to get the gunky wallpaper paste completely gone. All of this was before I ever started painting!
I originally planned on only using products that I had on hand to do this bathroom, but I ended up purchasing the wall color because I didn’t have as much paint in the garage as I thought I did. The color is Behr French Colony, and I think it’s a lovely blue-grey.
A shower curtain over the shower stall helps disguise that whole lotta ugly.
I also painted the plywood subfloor using some paint I had on hand. The floor is painted with Behr Tanglewood.
As you can see, I didn’t change any of the fixtures, the only thing I changed was paint. Isn’t that crazy?! Paint is so powerful!
Because this room is directly next to our bedroom that’s painted such a bold color, I was really concerned about how these two colors would look when coming up the stairs and they were both visible. I think they go complement each other nicely. (Bedroom is Behr Thermal.)
The 1920’s light fixtures stayed, and I think they look so much more elegant now without the dated wallpaper.
All of this to say this: just don’t wait. I would have loathed this bathroom another two to three years until it finally was time to gut it. Instead, I can enjoy the space, and it doesn’t give me the heebee-jeebees every time I go in there! I think there is power in a can of paint, and so much power in doing a “Phase One” project, something that is just enough to tide you over while you’re waiting for the big project.
Before we go, here’s one more before and after from the same angle. I can’t even believe the only difference is paint.
Alright guys, that’s all for today. Have a fabulous day!
