Family Room

First you need to scroll down to read all about our adventures while renovating the family room. Then you can read this extensive list of what we accomplished to finish off that room.

Removed Paneling
Found mold!
Tore out drywall
Tore out insulation
Tore out built in bookshelf
Tore out beams
New drywall
New insulation
Sanded textured walls
Painted walls
Painted fireplace
Sanded mantel smooth
Painted mantel
Put in new baseboard trim
Put in new casings around windows and doors
Rebuilt built in bookshelf
Rebuilt built in cabinet
New carpet
New outlet installed for television

Family Room Before and After

The Family Room Trauma

Photos taken after closing but before moving. You see paneling, wood strips all over the walls, textured plaster over the drywall, wood beams. It looked like a hunting lodge. In fact, the previous owners did have a deer head mounted to the right of the fireplace. We are deer friendly folks and needed the hunting theme gone! :) Our plan was to remove paneling - crossing our fingers that there was drywall behind it, sand the walls, paint and then move on to the kitchen.

On New Years Day, 9 days after we moved in, we started to remove the paneling. I was thrilled to see the drywall behind it. In fact, I've been quoted several times saying, "This is the BEST day of my life!" :) Insert eerie music...because whenever someone says something like that, it is always immediately followed by bad news, right?

What is that, you say? Oh, its plastic, sealing off the downstairs walls. Why? Because we found mold. Lots of mold. It was all along the walls with the windows behind the paneling. That is the lower level of our house - halfway under ground - and anything that was underground was wet. The house never smelled musty until we moved in. It was not caught during inspection because
all of the mold was hidden. Mind you, we had lived here for 9 days at this point. We had been living in this room. We moved all of our furniture up into the formal living room (soon to be our dining room). It was cramped and crowded and uncomfortable, but there we stayed while we tore out all of the moldy drywall and wet (frozen!) insulation and had a lot of work done to fix anything that was allowing water into the house. We left the walls open for several weeks (no insulation in the dead of winter) to watch for moisture and once we were sure we had solved the problem we re-drywalled.

Here you see at the bottom where we had a drain added. The dark gray is wet cement. You can see the weep holes on the wall where moisture was still coming in, but the drain would catch it and send it straight to the sump pump.

It seemed to take forever but eventually we were ready to drywall.

Here is the wall that had full paneling on it - and my spackle job to get rid of the many tiny nail holes. I am quite the spackler these days. :)

A little out of order (see the beam is still there but in the top picture they had been removed). I wanted to show a close shot of this wall - behind the paneling there was unfinished drywall and you can see the former built in that the previous owners had.

New Door

I know that photo is horrible and blurry but I had to use it to show proof that the door that went from our toyroom to the garage was an interior, hollow wood door! That room was always freezing...for 30+ years no one ever decided to put a proper door in there. Crazy. That was one of the first things we did after moving in and what a difference it made. By the way, code is that a door has to be fire-safe, which obviously that wasn't so it didn't pass our homeowners inspection. We opted to do fix it ourselves. Door is out! Shaun is cold!

Ahhh, much better!

A family affair

Ben's room before...

And Ben's room after...

Part 1: The Kids' Rooms

Several nights right after we closed and before we moved in Shaun would come over after work to paint the ceilings. Then we took the weekend to paint the kids' rooms and replace the trim, casing and doors. Of course nothing ever goes as quickly as you think it will, but eventually it was done.

You can see the nasty hollow wood doors we had. We also had those in my house growing up which is appropriate since our house now is the exact same age that I am. :) However these doors were really damaged - holes in them, etc. So glad to have them gone forever.

Avery's room before.

And after....

Getting Started

So to make a long story short - it took over a year to sell our old house in a really bad housing market. We were a bit desperate to get out as our oldest would be starting school and we weren't in a very good school district. We wanted to move somewhere that, hopefully, our kids can go all the way from elementary through high school without having to move. After selling our house we couldn't find any houses to buy so we decided to rent an apartment short term. We kept looking for houses. Unfortunately in our price range with our list of must-haves, there just wasn't a lot available in the town where we moved. We really wanted acreage, more square footage, a basement, bigger bedrooms. After watching the listings for almost 2 years we ended up settling. We found a house that was definitely a fixer, with a way too small kitchen...but it was on 3.27 acres of land and just a couple of minutes from shopping and the interstate. We had no idea what we were getting in to....but more on that later! :)

We closed a few weeks before our lease ended so that we could get in and clean and update the kids rooms before moving in. We wanted them to have their own space that was completed.

Our "To Do" list looked a little something like this:

Bedrooms (3, Upper Level):
Paint ceilings in bedrooms
Paint bedrooms
Tear out old dark, hollow wood, damaged doors
Tear out baseboard trim
Tear out old door and window casing
Put in new, solid wood, six panel doors
Put in new, crisp, white trim and casing
Put new closet doors in the kids' rooms (they were missing)

Lower Level (Family Room, Bathroom, Laundry Room, Play Room):
Tear out hideous dark, rough paneling and baseboard trim (hoping that there is drywall behind!)
Tear out beams
Paint

Kitchen:
Remove wall separating kitchen and dining room
Completely renovate doubling the size of the previous kitchen
Turn former living room into new dining room

Bathrooms:
New vanities, flooring and paint

Rest of the house (halls, stairs, etc):
Paint and replace all doors, trim and casing

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? We had really planned for the first two steps to move fairly quickly. The kitchen was an absolute must - you'll see why later. I'm trying to go in order, after all. :) Stay tuned!

Welcome!

I recently decided I need a way to share with others what we're doing to the house as well as a way to keep track of what we do for our own sanity. One day I was feeling really bummed about how much we still have to do (hello...kitchen!?!?) and so I sat down and made a list of what we HAVE done. In one year, we've done a lot. Especially if you consider that we really only work on the house on the weekends...if then. I have a lot of catching up to do to get you up to date on what we've done over the past year...but we're still going strong so I'll have regular (hopefully) updates to post, too.

So welcome! Please leave comments when you visit! It makes me feel like my blogging time is worthwhile! :)