My Big Fat Renovation
 

***DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT LET YOUR WIFE SEE THIS THREAD. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE ANOTHER FREE MOMENT TO WORK ON YOUR TRUCK EVER AGAIN!***


You have been warned!

:lol:

My wife and I had been "house shopping" for quite some time. Even though I lost my job, my wife's income as a Vet is nice and we had a big chunk of money sittin' in the bank. We wanted space, peace and quiet, some land and all close to Greenville or a major road... I know, :crazy: right?

Nope, we found this little 2300sf charmer on exactly 1.0 acre, located less than 2 miles from highway 29, so we're less than 5 miles from almost any store or restaurant we could want to go to, 10 mins from 385 and 10 mins from I-85. My wife is a whopping FOUR MILES from her job and it's a great location for me to work in Greenville, Spartanburg, possibly Anderson, and anywhere in between. It's also on a circle road so there is essentially ZERO traffic. It's SO QUIET! I love it.

We got a great deal, between the seller and the bank all of our closing costs were paid for, and we got a 4.375% interest rate. When all is said and done with taxes and insurance included in the payment we're only paying about $30/mo more than our 2 bedroom apartment. Even the electric bill has only been about $40 more per month.

So anyway, with nothing to do in this crappy economy, we decided to use the 8 grand the gobment gave us just for buying the place to completely renovate it. By "we" I mean "I" will be doing almost all of the work. She even sucks at painting. Oh well.

The first pics are of the outside and our sweet view. Only one neighbor on the right side.

...Notice the truck in the garage??? That's the FIRST TIME she's had a permanent home in a garage since I've owned her... I think this November will be a full 13 years!

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More outside:

If you stand in the back corner, we have a really pretty mountain view thanks to the Duke Power Easement :D

The 3rd pic shows the tree I have to have cut down someday, the base is getting rotten and it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too close to the house.

4th pic is of the tree house they built using dead trees? It was completely rotten so I tore the whole thing down and cut the trees down.

All tolled, there's approximately 20+ stumps I have to pull out of the ground. About half are only a few inches in diameter, but unfortunately the rest are all about 6-8" with a couple being greater than a foot. It's good to have friends with backhoes :D I just don't want him to do the work until I'm ready (financially) to make the pad for my new shop too :D

The last pic is with the tree house cut down!

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First order of business, buy a riding lawnmower and mow the lawn----then drive it up here and mow mine (although mine looks mowed compared to yours, LOL)

Nice place, was it a forclosure? just looks like the outside was let go. What kind of renovations are you going to be doing? I have plenty here, but our house is about 110 years old.

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Thanks! We got the place on May 5th. I had until June 30th before we had to move out of our apartment and I made use of EVERY day I had. Don't worry, I've got about 5 months worth of pictures I'll be posting today/tomorrow and as I continue.

No, surprisingly, not a forclosure. They had actually paid off more than 50K in only 2 years on their loan. YES, they let the inside and outside "go"! My uncle owns a pressure washing business and when I'm done putting fans in the windows to suck out dust, etc I'll have him pressure wash the whole house. Oh, and the house was built in '99 too. Yes, we did get a "steal" on it. We paid over 20K less than what the house was worth and what other homes in the neighborhood had sold for in the past 2 years. Just 6 months before we bought our house, the neighbors just bought theirs and paid 15K more than we did and our lot is almost double theirs.

The yard... my father in law had a bunch of old lawn care stuff he wasn't using anymore and he gave it all to me, but it was almost 2 months after we bought the house before I had a chance to make the 7 hour round trip to pick it all up. I have a riding mower and I now keep the yard nice and short :D

First, I have to show y'all how gross the carpets were. The entire upstairs was carpeted, along with the living room downstairs, the rest being real hardwood. EVERY room looked like this.

After cleaning out my storage unit so I could eliminate that bill, and putting it all in my garage, I pulled out all 1600+SF of stinky and stained carpet from the house... and the renovation has begun! :metal:

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I guess I need to show y'all the "before" pics so you have an idea what I'm doing.

Overview:

The house has 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. There is a huge bonus room over the garage, LOTS of closet space with a big walk in closet off the master bathroom, a living room, formal dining room, and a kitchen/great room that span the whole length of the house.

Mind you, these photographs were taken by the seller and PHOTOSHOPPED, yes, photoshopped. It looked nowhere near this nice in person and the downstairs/kitchen smelled like old Taco Bell.

I'll correspond the pics with what I call the renovated rooms.

1. 3rd bedroom/computer room. This room is not very big. It's 10x11.

2 & 3. Formal Dining room. It's cool they made it a "pool room" but you try and tell your wife you want to buy a pool table and keep it like the previous owners had it... yeah... that was a no go...

4. 2nd bedroom/guestroom. This room is also 10x11.

5. This is the bonus room over the garage. We will not be making this a bedroom. This room is currently being used for storage and will be "left for last" until the rest of the interior is done. Plans are for it to be a an exercise/PS3/chill room. I think this room was 14x22.

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1. Bonus room again.

2 & 3. Kitchen. They took all of the appliances. They were very adament on this during negotiations. They were kind of dirty, so we paid less $ for the house instead of getting the appliances. I found out why a couple months later. I got a letter in the mail from Lowes for a waaaaay overdue bill for almost 2K. Lowes sells a lot of Frigidaire appliances and the amount was about what appliances go for, I figure that's why they took them. They left the country too, BTW. Sucks for Lowes. I opened the letter not paying attention to the name on it thinking it was MY lowes card statement. I was a little freaked out until I saw the PO's name on it!

4. The "Great Room." I have no clue what to call this room. I guess that's what people call it. We'll probably have a flat screen over the fireplace and a small leather love seat and rocker with a nice throw rug in front of the fireplace. That's what I've seen others do and it looks pretty cool.

5. Looking over the staircase into the living room.

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1 & 2. Living room pics. The red carpet and pink walls were a little much for us. This carpet was stained too. The leather furniture was nice, I kinda hoped they would leave it :lol:

3 & 4. Master bathroom. Kinda nice. Going to leave this alone for now. There's a soaker tub and stand up shower.

5. Hallway.

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1. 1st bedroom. This will be the main guestroom. It's the biggest room at about 11x12.

2. Master bedroom. It's a pretty big room, it's 15x15. It fits a king size bed with lots of room to spare.

3. Master bath again.

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***DISCLAIMER: This house overall is in VERY GOOD condition. Almost everything I've done has been cosmetic. For some crazy reason my camera took a lot of "Fun House" looking photos where doorways, walls, windows, etc all look wavy and crooked. This is not the case. It is the camera. No idea why it did that, but the house is very straight and level. It's off a hair here and there, but all houses are.

Enjoy the following :D

I guess the easiest way to do this is to go room by room...

Living Room!

This room is about 14x15.

1, 2, & 3. What I started with. This was only 1 of 2 rooms in the entire house that had all 4 walls painted the same color. Every other room was "two toned" where 2 walls were painted one color and the other 2 were a different color. I guess that used to be popular, but I'm not a fan of it.

4. Carpet out. The house had squeaky floors and I had my suspicions as to why and I was proven correct when I pulled the rugs. The floor was put down using liquid nails with only about 10 nails per board. That's fine when a house is new, but over time the bond loosens and you get squeaky floors. My solution was 3 boxes of decking screws (for the entire house). Seems to have worked well. It was very time consuming though! And it takes one heck of a toll on your knees!!! This room is now squeak free.

5. You can't really tell, but the ceiling has one coat of primer and 2 coats of paint. The walls are primed as well. Even though the pink was a light color it still took 2 coats of primer to cover it.

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1. Another floor and primer pic. There was some decent sized gaps in the floor so I put some caulking in them then filled them in the rest of the way with some wall mud... just trying to make the floors as smooth as possible.

2. This was the only major f-up in the entire house? That's self leveling floor cement, the area is about 6'x6'. The floor above this area is level, and the floor on the other side of the wall is level, so how this happened??? I went under the house and the joists in that area seemed to have dipped. I leveled out the dirt and put concrete and wood blocks under the floor to prevent further movement. Once that was done, I used the self leveling cement to smooth the area out. There was almost a 3/4" drop from the doorway to the corner of the room. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed it, but it drove me nuts.

3. New carpet!!! We went with the 8lb padding and stainmaster rug. Very expensive... but we also had to do 1600sf of floor! This was farmed out to a local flooring company, Greer Flooring. They did a great job.

4. Color!!!

5. More progress.

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The final set of pics of the living room is where it is now. You'll notice that in all of my pics there is no base board. I'm going to go back and replace that last. It's going to be time consuming and a not cheap, so I decided to just wait and do all of the completed rooms at once. Plus, I need my garage cleaned up to get my saw set up... it's full of crap right now.

The last pic is with the furniture/new blinds. I love the new blinds. They're custom Bali's. They're "privacy" blinds where there are no holes in the slats. I installed them in the entire house. Lowe's was running a special for 15% off plus one free upgrade (we use that for the top trim piece) and we got an extra 10% off from a card I got in the mail for moving. We did 16 windows for only $1,100 (2 of those were "double windows" and another 2 were "custom sizes".)

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Master Bedroom!

I absolutely hated this room. I thought it looked really fugly. Gold fan. 2 dark pink walls, 2 light pink walls, they even put some of the dark pink on the ceiling!

The floors were screwed down tight. There are no squeaks in this room anymore.

You can see all of the little holes and dings I found on the walls. Once the mud was sanded smooth I used a roller and mud to texture over the repair spots and then sanded that back down and it blends well with the existing texture. Once primed and painted you could only see where the repairs were made with a bright spot light, but even then, you have to know what you're looking for. I did this in EVERY room.

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1 & 2. Primed walls.

3. Floors screwed down tight, any big gaps were filled.

4. Another primer shot, looking towards the door. Which, by the way, made bringing furniture in difficult :banghead:

5. Ceiling actually painted.

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1 & 2. More shots of the repaired floors before the carpet went down.

3 & 5. New carpet installed! Again, just to reiterate, we had the carpet installed with an 8lb pad. You could feel the difference in the old pad vs the new pad under the carpet. The new one feels much better on your feet.

4. The new cherry and brushed nickel Harbor Breeze fans. We bought 6 of these fans. 4 for the bedrooms, one in the bonus room, and the last one will be installed downstairs in the great room.

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Wohooo! This was the first room to get color! I painted it the day after the carpet was installed.

I LOVE waking up in this room on a sunny day, when the sun is trying to poke through the blinds, the colors are so warm and calming.

Pic #2 is probably closest to what the color looks like "in person."

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This is our walk in closet. It's pretty big. I tore out all of the old wire shelves and will be making my own someday. It does have carpet now, the walls are primed, and the ceiling is painted. In the last pic you can see the new light fixture, this will also be used in the hallways, the entryway, and the laundry room. I don't have the time or $ to build the closet like I want, so we bought some cheap stand up laundry clothes hangers that hang all of our clothes. That's keeping my wife quiet for now!

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This is the first guestroom. It's the biggest guest room at 11x12.

1 & 2. Carpets removed, lower molding removed, and what a mess :D

3 & 4. Closet stripped. I'll be redoing ALL of the closets someday. For now, they all have new carpet, primed walls, and painted ceilings.

5. Old fans. Just not a fan of gold...

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1. Well this sucks... I'm glad this was the ONLY room... but the previous owners painted over an old border. It looked like poo so I had to scrape it all off, mud and texture the whole top of the wall around the entire room.

2, 3, & 4. Walls and ceiling primed, ceiling painted.

5. Floors cleaned up, cracks filled, and screwed down tight. This floor was squeak free too when finished.

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1. Another pic of prepped floor.

2 & 3. New carpet!

4 & 5. Tape up and wall color starting to go on.

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1, 2, & 3. Painted! The pics didn't come out too great, the color is a tick darker than in the pics, it's one of my favorite colors in the house, it looks sweet in person. This room will probably get a white furniture set.

4. That's my old bed. It's a queen sized Serta pillow top. Our guests will have a sweet bed to sleep on.

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I missed a couple "before" photos:

The first three are the master bedroom before I started and the last two are the first guest bedroom before I started.

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Guest Bedroom #2. This room is only 11x10.

1. What I started with. ANOTHER two toned room. Check out the HUGE stains on the carpet!

2. More floor stains and the noisy fan. It squealed when it ran.

3 & 4. Lots of wall prep. After it was all smooth I textured over it, then sanded that down some.

5. Walls and ceiling primed!

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1. Walls primed.

2. Floors screwed down tight, with big cracks filled in. This room also ended up being squeak free!

3. Closet done, floors screwed down, walls primed.

4 & 5. I painted the ceiling in here before the carpet was installed... pics of carpet installed!

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1. Finished room. This room is a little on the small side, so the bed is only a single sized bed. There's room for some furniture, but not much. I like the green. It looks better in person as well.

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Guest bedroom #3, which is now the computer room. This room is an exact mirror image of the 2nd guest bedroom and is also only 11x10.

1. What I started with. I hated these colors, yes colors, another two tone job :lol:

2. Nasty carpet removed.

3, 4, & 5. This room had THE WORSE amount of wall damage of any room. There was actually holes punched into the wall (angry kids?) and lots and lots and lots and lots of staple and push pin holes. Lots of time mudding, sanding, and texturing this room!

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1. Closet.

2. Walls primed.

3. This is looking out of the room across the hall into the 1st guest bedroom.

4. Floors screwed down tight as I could get them. Unfortunately, this room is over the kitchen/great room which is one huge open area, so no matter how many screws I put in the floor, it still has a few different squeaks in it. It sucks, but it's the best I could get it.

5. Close up of the blinds we bought for the house. EVERY window will have a blind that looks like this. I made a deal with my wife, we buy nice expensive privacy blinds, and I don't have to put up any fugly curtains on my new, pretty painted walls :D After having the blinds up in the finished rooms for the past several months, I really like the clean look. Also, I would have had to put up blinds anyway, now we just have to clean blinds, not blinds and curtains!

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1. Painting in progress!

2. I painted the ceiling in this room before the carpet was installed as well. New fan, just like all the other rooms.

3. Room finished. Again, this is another color that looks better in person.

4. The blinds were REALLY expensive (didn't have the $ to buy them yet), and so is the electric bill in July, so I made some home made blinds for the upstairs windows to keep the rooms cool when the A/C was on, it made a HUGE difference, the A/C ran a lot less with the blinds installed.

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Hallway & Staircase.

1 & 2. Just a couple pics of what the stairs and hallway looked like before we started. This was a really cheap material and the gold on the staircase looked really cheasy. They used a thick soft pad under the wood floor so it felt like you were floating when you walked up the stairs and over the hallway... it was weird.

3. Floors stripped.

4. Floor screwed down and looking toward the bonus room.

5. Floor screwed down and looking toward the master bedroom.

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1. New carpet on the staircase.

2. New carpet in the hallway. I haven't done any wall work to the hallway yet. I figure it's not important and I want to get all of the furniture upstairs (still have to buy most of it) before I do the final paint job on the hallway. It will eventuelly be the same color as the living room and great room.

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kitchen/great room:

Ahhhhh, the greatest pain in the ass of all!

1. Look to the right of the pic and you'll see a couple funky looking doors on the right side of the wall. Not cool. They didn't "go with" anything. Someone cut a hole into the luandry rooms wall (the area appeared as if it was originally intended to be a coat/shoe area to put your stuff when you came in from the garage, as well as a laundry room.)

2. Overview of the kitchen. I hated that white light. I even broke it not too long ago, I accidentally whacked it with the ladder, whoops :lol: See the large door on the right? There's a HUGE pantry in there... so why the fugly one in pic 1. was ever added...???? I guess they didn't want to walk 10 more feet?

3. Checkin' how level the cabinets were...and found out "not at all." :lol: Apparently the first owners of the home installed all of the hardwoods downstairs (thanks guys, seriously!) BUT they neglected to properly relevel the cabinets. The corners where the countertops met weren't flush at all, or sealed, which also cause the countertops to warp.

4. Mustard wall. That's the opening to the living room on the left.

5. Overview of the "great room." I thought the thing above the fireplace was ok at first...

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1. Right side of the room. If you notice, the french looking doors are not french doors, and it also opens on the left side. Not gonna work for me. I'm going to swap this door out for a right side opening french door. This will accomplish a couple things. It will move the door away from the countertop/bar area that we will be putting bar stools against and utilizing as a bar/kitchen eating area. We will have the formal dining room, but will not have a table in the kitchen. We want to put a plasma above the fireplace with a rug in front of it, with a leather love seat and rocking chair for chilling, and based on my measurements, with the door and all, there won't be room for a table.

2. The other side of the wall I was mentioning. They built this thing out of plywood and 2x4's. I had a heck of a time tearing it down! This area used to be a coat/shoe area, but we'll be using it as a stand up freezer area.

3. Nice hole!

4. Hole from the kitchen side. This will be closed off.

5. Like I mentioned above... I kinda liked it at first, but that wore off after about a day, then I decided I hated it and tore it down. Plus, it would kind of interefere with my big TV going above the gas fireplace :D

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1. Everything above the fireplace removed.

2. The wall framed in and ready for sheet rock.

3. I'm really good at making messes.

4. Base trim starting to pile up. I decided to not reuse this stuff. There was several poorly done coats of paint on them, wich also had dirt and pieces of rug stuck in it. It's not that expensive per room, so I also decided to go with the taller trim for a more fancy look. The current trim was 3.5" and the new trim will look the same, but be 4.5" instead.

5. After seeing how stupid expensive cabinets were, we decided to repaint the existing ones. What a pain in the...

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1. Here's WHY I had to repaint the cabinets. This is after SEVERAL attempts to get them clean (remember, I didn't WANT to paint them, so I tried really hard to get them clean!)

2. Laundry room area framed in.

3. Area above fireplace framed in. Here's a tip! Don't get in a hurry and forget to tape over the cracks. I had the tape, I had done other areas with the tape, but for some reason (it was probably 2am or something) I forgot to use the tape and a couple days later there was cracks all the way around on every joint. So I had to dig the area back out and tape it. THAT SUCKED!

4. Kitched side covered up!

5. Upper cabinets painted. It took 3 coats to cover them well... sheesh! Check out that fridge! Thanks mom and dad inlaw!

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1. Other side showing the cabinets painted. Whoever built our kitchen wasn't thinking.... when the doors are on the single cabinet on the left... and open... it's ridonkulous trying to reach over the countertop, around the cabinet door, and try to get something out. This cabinet may be left empty :lol:

2. I rolled the backside of the doors with a roller. They got 3 coats. With the roller, they coated well, and quickly, but not "perfect," but I didn't care because it was the back side.

3 & 4. My drying rack. I used a wagoner sprayer to get a nice even finish on these. It was so hot out when I painted they were dry to the touch in about 15 minutes. I also sprayed 3 coats on these as well.

5. Close up of a couple of doors.

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1. I painted the doors to the small cabinet between the stove and the fridge. Check out the color difference.

2. Starting to put the doors back up. We went with a brushed nickel mushroom handle. I picked it out :D

3. All the cabinets were lined after they were painted. This should keep the cabinets nice and make them a little easier to clean.

4. The cabinets had some expensive adjustable door hardware, so I just cleaned it up and reused it. I was also able to get some nice gaps after I got the adjustments figured out!

5. Starting to yank the old countertops!

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1 & 2. Doors pulled off of the lower cabinets.

3. New dishwasher. I think it sat in that spot for like 3 months :lol:

4 & 5. Doors installed back on the upper cabinets! :metal:

I love 'em, I think they came out better than expected!

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1. Well, the walls weren't perfect, so to get the old countertops to fit, they cut out a section of the wall and pushed it in :rolleyes:

2. Blinds installed over the door. This door is going to stay for a while, the replacement is going to be pricey, so it may be a few more months...

3. Window blind installed.

4. I'm good at making messes...

5. Just imagine the look on your wife's face when she got home from work... I wish I had the camera ready... it was priceless :lol: It was a mix of "I want to kill you" and "It's going to look sweet when it's done!"

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1-5... just a bunch of pics of the work I did to the walls...

Even though I did the best I could to keep the dust down, it still got all over the house. This was with the living room completely taped off... very unhappy wife :lol:

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1 & 2. More mud work shots...

3, 4, & 5. The countertop surprise is coming soon so I had to get the lower cabinets back in place, so I primed the lower kitchen walls. You can see the very first lower cabinet back in place. Believe it or not, this was the highest spot in the kitchen around the walls where the cabinets were going, so lots of shims after this one was installed.

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1 & 2. Lower cabinets going back in!

3. Like I mentioned before, the entire kitched smelled like a taco bell. To ensure the smell was 100% gone I painted ALL of the lower cabinets, inside and out, top to bottom, front to back! Overkill? Probably, but you smell old taco bell for a few months and see if you don't snap!

4. Bulk of the cabinets in place... with... what's that... the DISHWASHER? Oh snap!

5. I had to build a front plate for the dishwasher to get screwed to... because I can't drill holes in the new countertop ;) These cabinets were also "cheap" so I also had to put a plate along the back wall for the countertop to sit on.