It’s been a while since I’ve updated on how the house is going. So far we haven’t been able to do any more new flooring. The holidays and winter in general has made it hard for us to continue that project. Our next flooring room will be to add the new flooring into the orange room’s closet, then we’ll be doing the hallway and hall closet as our second segment. We are still trying to make decisions on whether we can do the living room and dining room together or whether we have to add a threshold, or if it would be easier to add one. Our living room is about 14 ft by 16 ft, and our dining room is about 9 ft by 7 ft.
Otherwise, we have been working on projects. We’ve updated our kitchen light, dining room light, and hall light. We’ve also bought a new bathroom faucet and push drain. We were able to get these accomplished in a weekend and it was just a small project to keep us busy at home. We’ve been busy doing some work for family lately. Josh has been building a server for a business, and we’ve had a few smaller projects we’ve been dealing with. Josh also bought a 3D printer, the Ender 3 Pro, so we’ve been fiddling with that most recently.
It all started with my Starting Point post. There I wrote my initial thoughts and ideas for this house as recorded last November. We bought this house and found many things wrong with it. We starting putting work into the house starting last October/November, and below is what we were able to accomplish so far.
Current Progress
As you can see just between the first set of photos and the second, we’ve made some big changes. We removes trees and bushes, put in raised beds, added an exterior door on the garage, and changed the accent color on the house from red to teal. Inside, we removed a lot of the latex paint off the utility room walls, we built and removed our builtin pantry, and installed a storage shelf instead. We removed the broken dishwasher and sealed the space to be used for my canning stuff. We also upgraded the light in the kitchen, painted cabinets, remove the old range microwave and added a new range-hood, as well as replaced the old leaking kitchen faucet. In the dining room, we refinished the wall after removing about 1/3 of the wallpaper in the house, and we also created a lampshade for our single handing bulb from a lantern we used at our wedding reception. We haven’t done too much to the living room yet; we added a projector screen and are mainly using it for storing some of our extra stuff until we finish the master bedroom. We replaced the light fixture in the hall, and upgraded all the light switches in the house to the rocker style. We repainted the bathroom, removed the medicine cabinet, changed the light fixture, and painted the vanity and changed the hardware. We also added a new shower curtain to match. In the original green room, due to it’s carpet color, we originally replaced the floor in the closet with vinyl planking. After seeing how easy it was, we took on the task of redoing the entire rooms floor, which was not an easy task. we remove the wood from the closet to be replaced with matching floor eventually, I also painted the bedroom the two shades of orange, we moved in, and that is the state of our orange room. Finally, our current project is the master bedroom, or our new green room. We just finished laying the flooring on Saturday. There is still a lot of work we want to do in that room before the new unveiling, but I hope this helps build some excitement for the next unveiling, which will be coming in the next two weeks or so.
A Year’s Worth of Projects
A year is so long, yet so short. We were able to accomplish so much because of the blessing we’ve received this year and from taking things in stride. We are happy for our new experiences and are content with this house even as we continue to find more problems. We aren’t sure if we’ll keep this house forever, but we are happy for all the good things this house is providing for us. This Lustron gives my husband and I something to do together, to bond over, and to dream for. We hope for nothing but the best for this house in the future, and we hope our fingerprint on this house improves the beauty of this old Lustron, rather than hinders it’s potential.
For more on our home improvement posts from this year, feel free to check out any of this posts below. If not, I’ll see you again soon!
The faucet has always been on the top of my project list. The existing faucet leaked where the handle attached causing nutrient build up on the sink. The faucet also caused uneven water flow (hence the head attachment), and as you can see, it’s a very low faucet. I could barely fit a sheet pan or casserole dish in to clean it, and it was incredibly hard to fill up my larger stock pot. Along with that, the water fountain to the left of the sink wasn’t working when we moved in, leaking everywhere, and looking at it’s condition coming off, it probably never did work! It was an “add a line” fixture that was meant to attach to your existing lines without having to run new piping, but it’s more gimmicky than practical.
Removing the old faucet was one of the biggest challenges that came with this project. It must have been a very long time since it had last been changed because all of the bolts were rusted and seized. Also everything was very cramped with how tight our pipes are under our sink. Besides that, Josh was also trying to be very careful removing everything in case the new faucet leaked and we would have to put the old faucet back on.
The faucet we found was only $60 on amazon, and though it’s not a name brand, it was our style, and at least half the price of any similar name brand products we were seeing (all ranging from $120-$240). If you are interested, you can find it here.
This new faucet also has buttons on the head but the buttons face the other direction. Just another quirk of non-name brand. There is a button you have to press and hold that stops the water flow. There is also a rocker switch that changes the flow from standard stream to a shower/sprayer stream. The finish is also not perfect on the new faucet, but that doesn’t really matter to us all that much. We tend to care more that it functions and will hold up for a while, and this appears to do both.
Before and After comparison
What do you think? Josh and I are doing things to hopefully improve the overall house value, do you thing this may have done that even a little? Thanks again for your time and hope to see you again soon!
Our Lustron Home 