Sunday, February 27, 2011

UPDATED: Master Bathroom

I hired someone to do the renovation for the master bathroom.  I know I know... I've tried to do everything myself, but the reason I've tried to do everything myself is so I could have someone professionally handle the master bath.  So.. here we go... Master Bath progress

From This:









To this!


and now this



Saturday, February 26, 2011

Master Bedroom Befores and Afters

This room use to be the room my grandfather used as an office or generally to store his ... "stuff" in. When I came back home from California this is what it looked like.   I'll never forget picking up pieces of paper to find roaches scurrying around.... ahh those were the days....





When I started cleaning out the .. hoarding... he had a hard time letting go of a lot of stuff. So I told him he could keep it if he put it in "his room" meaning his office. The good thing about that is I got rid of about 4 porch loads full of stuff but the bad part is I ended up with a room in the house filled to the ceiling with shit.

Finally, I convinced my mom to help one afternoon and Mom, my step-dad, and my friend Josh and I went in there like a swat team while he was at work and started pitching and loading stuff onto the porch. 3 big black trash bags full of junk we threw away and another porch load of stuff we donated to AmVets. I dusted, painted, painted molding and baseboards, the windows of course are new, I ripped up the carpet, sanded the floors, finished them, put on a layer of poly (I've since been told I need like... six layers of poly so I'll do that) and installed new wall sconces from lamps I converted so I could put them on the wall.

Still need to buy a bed frame and paint the ceiling, but here's where we are now.





The evolution of what once was and now is the downstairs master bedroom.



Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Stairs Sanded, stained, poly

Ohhhh those were the days.  Here's what I did to the stairs.  The biggest problem with refinishing hardwoods on the stairs is you can't use that giant machine that is so effective.  I had to hand sand them all with the orbital sander and by hand.  Booo!  But they're done now :)


That's my grandfather - he's helping.

 ew
This is them cleaned off and sanded
Then stained
Then Poly put on - so far 3 layers... I need 6 - you'd be surprised how hard it is to find 8-9 hours where no one would be using the stairs or the hallway...


Where all the magic happens

Or at the very least where all my stuff is...  My bedroom is closer and closer to being finished.  The lighting went in and I painted my ceiling but ran out of paint for one area... oops... so closer and closer.

This is taken from the front window - except I moved the book shelf to the triangle


Giant triangle where I moved the bookshelf and added another one as well as wall shelves 
 Pic of the other side of the room - the "sitting area" this is taken from sitting on my bed

The new lights!  There use to be a ceiling fan here ... but it's gone now and it's got 4 lights in the ceiling rather than hanging down.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

UPDATED: Office Floors Sanded... stained

And poly put on:


Bring on the awesome floors.  Here's the thing about these floors - they're incredibly light.  So the stain that I mixed for the living room floors didn't work at all not a match - not even close.  So I tried to mix it darker that wasn't right, then mixed it again darker... still nothing.  But the darker can of stain was too dark.  So basically I ended up dipping my brush in the dark stain, then the light stain and then mixing the color each brush stroke at a time.  Hopefully this doesn't end up looking bad.

You can kind of see the lightest parts where it was dry.  You're supposed to wipe them down with water before you put the stain on.  I think it's supposed to "open the grain" er somethin...



 
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