House Renovations - How It's Going

For those of you who haven't heard, I am moving in March and all this month is getting the house fixed up because a) it's a fairly old house but more importantly b) it has had renters in it for the last eight years and they haven't taken the best care of it. Plus, there are just updates we want to make to a sixty-year-old house.

February 1st we started the demolition. There are three bedrooms (more like two and a half bedrooms) and all of them got the carpet torn out. Then the tack strips had to be removed, which, thankfully, only two rooms had those because they did NOT want to come out. All the trim in the bedrooms and the living/dining room came off (some easier than others) and we tore out the flooring in the hallway/living/dining room. A friend came over and she was a machine with the pry bar on that flooring!

We are putting in a new floor in the basement and it's really cool interlocking tiles that you just use a rubber mallet to hammer together. Off all the projects, it is the easiest because it actually does what it's supposed to do. I think it's rather fun :) In two different times working on it (the first time our friend helped me), we got half the basement covered. Just a couple of hours of work. It goes so fast.

We are putting in new vinyl plank flooring upstairs, getting a new tub in the bathroom, and putting up a plywood ceiling in the basement. Other improvements include moving/adding heat vents, adding some outlets to bedrooms, new window treatments, and, of course, painting.

The demo went much faster than we expected, which is good, but the improvements are interesting because there are a few things that kind of all have to happen at once but my dad has to do all of them. Obviously this creates some logistical problems but the good thing is, we don't have a deadline to move so if it gets pushed back a week or two, it gets pushed back a week or two.

It's hard to do much cleaning while you're doing demo and construction, but we have cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the existing debris from tearing things out, and washed the windows.

I'll probably wait and do a full blog post with pictures from beginning to end, since we are notoriously bad at taking enough photos, so I won't have enough from a post at each step of the process. Plus, then you can just see it all at once! We're definitely making progress, and it is nice that some things don't have to get worse before they look better (the basement floor). When it's all done, the house is going to look fantastic!

What would you like to know/see regarding the house and the projects in future posts? Let me know in the comments!



Top photo by Julie Molliver on Unsplash