Part I of our Home Remodel

402 N. Lincoln St.

A year ago this month, we moved into our wonderful home. A 2,100 sq. ft. craftsman. 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths on a big, shady, corner lot. The real estate flyer said it was a charming house with lots of potential- just needed a little TLC. HAHA!! Hasn't that's been the understatement of the year! 
I want to post some pictures of before and after so those who are interested and have asked for photos can see some of the work we've done and so I can see some of the work we've done. When you live inside a project, it's easy to enjoy one accomplishment for like 7 seconds before you're making a to-do list for the next project.

 Here is a view through our living room to the dining room. It was so dark and musty in there! The wallpaper was in really bad shape- faded and dirty. The carpet was three layers thick. In fact, our real estate agent was sure there were no wood floors on the first day we saw the house. We were bummed but we figured we would rip out the carpet and have wood floors laid.

The day we closed we took a box cutter and deep down under lots of cat-urine carpet was-wood! It had to be refinished but that's a lot cheaper than having new wood flooring put in and kept the original feel of the house.

Well here is Day 1. The day we closed we started taking down drapes and stripping wallpaper. We thought this would take a day or two. Look at all the energy and pep we have.

30 weeks pregnant with Coco, thus the mask.

So, we had to strip the wall paper in the master bedroom, front bedroom, kitchen, and main bathroom (second full bath is in the basement). We estimated this would take us a weekend-tops. Then we were going to move onto painting, then have the floors refinished and voila- our simple "flip" would allow us to move in and tackle the kitchen and bath remodels at a later date. Well, weren't we novices?



The wallpaper may have been faded and dirty but it was NOT peeling. No, it was stuck to those walls with the best Bay-of-Pigs-era glue ever manufactured. Goody for us.

Oh and in some rooms there were multiple layer and the master bedroom had wallpaper on the ceiling.

Master Bedroom

Peeling off the Master Bedroom wallpaper layers

These cute kids kept us entertained. I can't believe June was just a little over a year here! And Coco is now just a couple months away from her first birthday and wearing some of the same clothes June is

  wearing in this picture. How fast things change!

Junebug

Tiny pieces of wallpaper slowly coming off

You'll notice the dropped, sound tile ceilings but that's a project coming up later.

Oh, these are painful pictures to see. Here is a panoramic of our living room after we had stripped the wallpaper. A task that took many days. The wallpaper came off in pieces the size of a bar of soap. This main room is about 50'x35'. We used our steamer and many varieties of special solutions. In the end, the magic was just a lot of arm muscle. 

The wallpaper removal left scabs all over the original plaster which lead to our next stage. We had to mud over the walls in most of the house with plaster. This took 3 weeks. 3 weeks for a project we had no idea we would even have to do!

So much for a quick fix! This is what our next three weeks looked like.

Mudding all the walls in the livingroom and dining room

Given, we did do most of the work ourselves (or Brian did a lot of work on his own). We had some very kind, generous friends and we hired a few guys here and there to help. Thanks to Joel, Mike, Ellis, Caleb, Sean, Levi, my Dad, Zak and Matt for helping Brian on some of those long nights. And for Hope and Margeaux for helping me when it was my turn!

So, it's not that it was that complicated of a project, just time intensive and we were learning as we went. I was not as much help as I had intended to be. We had some pretty terrible days where we had trouble smiling about all this. It seemed like the more work we did the more work we discovered we had to do.

Brian after a long, discouraging day.

But we kept going and we had some sweet little helpers. Lucy always wanted to be in the middle of it using some power tool. She takes a genuine interest in our work which I love.













 
I have no idea where my before pictures of the girls' bedrooms and the kitchen and bath went. I know I took some so they must have gotten lost or downloaded somewhere else. 
But here is what the flooring looked like in the bedrooms- vinyl (and old newspaper underneath) and then carpet in the upstairs bathroom...ewww.

Coming up in Part II...ceiling sound tile removal, painting, floor refinishing and finally moving in.