Making a Nursery - Demo, Reno & Painting

With a little one on the way (eta 5.11.14!),
we decided to turn our smallest bedroom into a nursery.
Previously we had used it as a room for the kitties,
but sadly they got displaced to the mudroom, hehe.

The room is pretty small - about 12 x 7. This included
a long closet that spanned the entirety of the back wall. A
closet that was not particularly useful as storage and really
diminished the amount of usable space in the room.

Before we started painting any potential baby colors 
(wee!), I really wanted to nix the useless closet. Sure, 

without a closet it's not *technically* a bedroom,

but it's a lot more usable. And if push comes to shove 

we can always build in a small closet later on down 

the road for resale or something.

So after consulting Clint's brother - who

confirmed that ripping the closet out would be a 

piece of cake - Clint and I went to town on the demolition.

Erin said it would take like 20 minutes.  Ha. Ha.

Maybe it would have taken Erin 20 minutes,

but it took us 2 or 3 hours, hehe.

What Erin didn't mention was how hard fixing the room

would be after we ripped the closet out... The house is old 
and settled. When we replaced the drywall, the walls/seams were NOT flat and the ceiling was NOT level.  After copious amounts of mudding - probably about 5 rounds worth (and about 5 rounds less than was really needed) - we called it good enough.  :)

Post mudding, pre-painting.

Finally after we finished the mudding (thanks to a 
lot of help from Erin!!), we painted the room.  Yay!
And when we painted the walls and the ceiling a lot of
the unperfect and uneven elements nearly disappeared.
  

We went with a brown/taupe color palette.  
We won't know the gender for another month or so,
but we decided to just get started on the painting early 
and go fairly gender neutral. I think either baby 
blue or pink will look great with brown!

Here's the room after the painting:

Of course we did reveal more ugly flooring after
we ripped out the closet (as noted in a previous post).

We didn't make the flooring look any better with
the mud we spilled all over.  :)

Fortunately we made sure to do all the demo/reno 

work before the was carpeting installed so these kinds of 
messes wouldn't matter!  Once we got the carpet in,

the room looked so much better!

We still have to replace the floor boards which should give the room a much cleaner look overall. All of the accent painting/decor still needs to be completed too, but that will have to wait until after we learn the gender of baby nugget... and until we clear all the bathroom stuff out of the nursery!

Hopefully we can get the bathroom reno

rolling so we can finish the nursery soon too :)

Updates to come!

Carpeting Upstairs in the Bedrooms

Much like the hardwoods in our hallway, the flooring in our bedrooms upstairs wasn't in the best of shape.  We had always envisioned that we'd carpet more than just the hallway, and the time had finally come to make that vision a reality.

So we went back to Lowe's and matched the Stainmaster carpet we had previously installed, for a seamless look.

We actually opted not to carpet our master bedroom at this time because carpeting the master bedroom alone was $1300.
Since we're also about to renovate our main bath
we figured we'd rather spend that 1300 there.
We can always carpet our room later!

A couple notable problem areas that we did cover:

Again, what treasures lie below?

Unfortunately, the problem with carpeting after you

move in (and carpeting rooms filled with stuff), is that

you have to move a bunch of stuff.  Our upstairs (and some parts of the downstairs) was a total DISASTER zone!!

But it was all worth it after the carpet got installed! Carpeting the bedrooms immediately made them feel warm and comforting, the way a bedroom should feel. :) The kitties love spending time in the other bedrooms now.  The carpet also really improved the flow between the hallway and the 2 bedrooms. Take a look at the difference in one of the bedrooms!
Before:

After:

While getting carpeting installed isn't a huge home renovation project by any stretch (and all we really did was move furniture), every little thing that we do to improve the house gives us a sense of satisfaction, and makes us feel that much happier with our home.  Especially when we can cover up bad floors and make our farmhouse more presentable.
Now that we have the carpeting in place, we're really excited to move onto bigger and better projects, like the bathroom renovation.  Demolition starts this weekend!  Yay!

Replacing Grossness with Lovely Carpet!

When we moved into our house, there were definitely some areas that seemed *very* questionable.  Things that were so ... unattractively highlighted in the real estate advertisements that we almost didn't look at the house.  Seriously.  

One such area was the 2nd floor stairwell landing/hallway.  As you can see below, the original wood flooring sustained some serious damage at some point in the farmhouse's history.  

My beloved Poco examines the terrible flooring.  
Unfortunately, Poco passed after 16 years with me in Oct 2012.  <3

A portion of the floor was nearly black - I'm assuming some sort of water damage since the floor is right next to the bathroom, though in all honesty I have no idea what happened. Clearly large portions of the floor had been removed and replaced - with newer hardwoods and straight up plywood.  Needless to say, both solutions looked hideous! Hehe. I googled our address and I actually found the realtor pictures from 2008, when the previous owner bought the house from the owners that preceded her.  In those photos, the entire upstairs was carpeted (and it looked WAY better), so we figured out that the lady before us must have ripped out the carpet in an effort to get to the original hardwoods below, but found THIS.  

There's a similar makeshift flooring solution in our 2nd bedroom...
part of me really wants to take up the floor and see if
there's buried treasure under these wacko floorboards!

It's not terribly terribly obvious in the photos, but there's also a full step - at least 3-4 inches - between our hallway and the bathroom... while we couldn't really address that with carpet, I DO hope to eradicate that with the upcoming main bath renovation!  (Woot! Stay tuned for that!)  Our hallway also had a huge slope - this 100+ year old house has settled, and the flooring reflected that.  It kind of made me seasick.  

Naturally, we needed a fix.  Since the hall is upstairs where the bedrooms are, we opted to go to with carpeting.  We chose a luxurious Stainmaster carpet from Lowe's. It was definitely one of their more expensive carpets (at least within the Lowe's selection), but it was so worth it - it feels like heaven underneath the feet!  We chose the 'Capri Place Comic Plush' carpeting, and it was lovely!

As the name says, it's really plush, and the only downside is that footprints are very visible, as you can see!

We didn't overtly address the sloping, but after carpet padding and carpet, the slope virtually disappeared.  It still exists, but its barely noticeable now. 

At the time, we only carpeted the hallway and not the bedrooms - only because carpeting is pretty absurdly expensive.  We did, however, take a runner down the stairs to prevent falls for us and our 4 legged friends.  Safety first!

The carpet looks way browner here.
I guess it's the lighting.

We're actually about to install carpeting in two of our upstairs bedrooms, but not our master yet, mainly because its an extra 1k just to carpet one room, and the original wood flooring in the master is actually pretty nice.  I'm excited to get that done and start making some of the other bedrooms nice, instead of random receptacles of storage. :)