One Year Update

Listing Photos

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!

Starting Point

New Light Fixtures

New Kitchen Faucet

Update and Mistakes

DIY Hidden Pantry

New Dining Room Light

Removing Wallpaper

Closet Work

Bathroom Transformation

Dishwasher to Storage

Kitchen Cabinet Updating

Raised Beds

New Kitchen Vent Hood

A New Big Project: Laminate Plank Flooring

Green Room Flooring

Finishing Our Guest Room

New Kitchen Shelf

Finishing Our Guest Room

Our guest room, if you could even call it that before, was used mostly for storage, but it also had our cat’s supplies and Josh’s desk. Now that the floor was complete, we came up with some plans for the room to be a guest room and at home office. With this in minds, the first thing we did was decide how to paint the room. We decided that since we had no orange in the house it would be a good choice. I wasn’t a big fan of orange as a color, but I wanted a new and unique color for the room. We picked up a sample of a saturated and bold orange. I had planned to just paint one spot, but I ended up using almost the entire can, and created what we decided would be an accent wall.

Because the accent wall was hand painted instead of rollered on, it had lots of inconsistencies in color and had lots of texture. I personally loved the effect and decided to leave it that way. So, since that was our accent wall, we wanted something neutral but also slightly orange in order to match the existing wall. That is when we decided on Belgian Waffle. The color was slightly darker and orange compared to the existing color, but it was subtle enough to barely notice it was painted if it had been a while since you saw the room.

Finally, I painted the trim pieces with a new layer of white paint, and Josh installed them with a air brad nailer. Finally, we moved in from our room. In the future, we have a spare bed that will be going were our bed is. Our spare is a full instead of the queen that we have. I plan on leaving the open nightstand where it is against the wall after the legs get finished. On the other side of the bed we will have enough room to fit Josh’s desk against the wall with the window, and there should be enough room to add my cedar chest at the foot of the bed. The rug we bought specifically for this space. It’s a 6 ft x 9 ft rug, and we plan to have it stick out at the foot of the bed, as it is seen here. Josh and I are temporarily moved in here as we are working to redo the floors in our room next.

Thanks for reading!

Removing Wallpaper

When we moved in, there was a wall that ran through the house that was covered in wallpaper. It ran from the utility room through the kitchen, dining room, living room, and the hallway outside the bathroom and two bedrooms. It literally went throughout the whole house. We have been working for weeks to remove some the wallpaper and to figure out how to deal with some spots that were giving us some problems. First, there was not just one layer of wallpaper, but two layers of the exact same wallpaper! Second, there were spots where they plastered over the wallpaper extensively to cover all damage, now we were stuck with spots that had plaster on top of the two layers of wallpaper!

Before New Year’s, we were able to strip the wallpaper almost completely off of 1/3 of the wallpapered surfaces in the house. We recently were able to finish that first third by sanding off the plaster, removing the underlying wallpaper, plastering spots that were damaged, sanding again, washing the walls, then finally painting the wall. Thankfully, this wallpaper can be removed with water, so that has been very helpful, but it was still a lot of work. Take a look at the work so far, and keep an eye out as we still have 2/3 left to go!

The next two photos show some flaws in the wall after painting. I’ll let you know what we do about that in the future, but for now we’re gonna leave it since you can only really see the flaws at night in artificial lighting.

Clock Movement Replacement

This was a small project that was pretty easy. We had to measure the depth of the face and then just follow the installation instructions on the back of the package. This is a very special clock though to me, because my husband made it about a year after we started dating in high school and he stained the whole clock a dark color, because I love the richness of dark wood. He also stained the 12, 3, 6, and 9 a red color because red is my favorite color. It meant a lot to me at the time, and I’m glad to have it hanging in our house and working.

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