Finishing up the walls and the Bathroom

After the sheetrock was hung on the 2x4s nailed into the concrete walls, we taped them up and mudded them so they could be ready for paint. We went ahead and painted the staircase because we knew that that would be the hardest. Oh yea, and before that we sprayed orange peel on the sheetrock for a little bit of texture. We didn't want to paint all of the walls just yet though because we didn't want the freshly painted walls to be covered in dust from sanding the floors.

So here you can see, the floors finally sanded and all the walls still bare. This was my husband's project. Mine was finishing up the bathroom. Once the walls were built, the plumbing was run, and the cement board was hung, I tiled the bathroom, laid the laminate floor down, and painted the walls (well with help, of course :D).

 

So here is a picture of my beautiful new bathroom, and just in case you forgot what it used to look like, I put a before picture below it. Amazing difference HUH?! If you are wondering where everything is (besides our ginormous shower!) the toilet is behind the shower, to the left of that small door (which goes to our closet), the bathtub is in front of the shower (in the very front left of the picture), and you can see one vanity on the right (the other vanity is behind our exposed brick chimney. 

Here's a picture of the vanity. Matthew is still working on them, but they will be done soon. It's just nice to get an idea of what they will look like when they are done and that's why they have the sink on top.

 

The bathroom door used to be the old front door of the upstair apartment that it once was. I like it for the bathroom door because of the glass (some may feel the opposite haha). Anywho, at this point all was coming together quite nicely.

Steffane B.

Fixing problems and creating solutions

After the bathroom was quickly coming together, we were able to look a little closer into the master bedroom. The house had a termite problem 30 years before it was given to us but that problem was quickly managed. The remains of the damage, however, was left behind and needed to be fixed so that bigger problems wouldn't happen in the future. When Matthew went into the attic he was able to see that some of the support beams needed to be reinforced. But along with the beams it looked like termites liked to damage sheetrock also. So down came the ceiling over the stairway we tried to salvage.

Here you can see Matthew taking the old nails out of the beams so we could install new sheetrock for the ceiling. Behind him is the beams for wall separating the master bedroom and the bathroom. You can see to the left, behind my mother-in-law, the old door opening that went into the old kitchen. 

So after that problem was fixed we noticed that there were no outlets on ANY of the walls in the master bedroom. How do put outlets into concrete walls you ask? You build a floating wall. We had to nail 2x4s 6 inches apart, run wiring through the ceiling and down the walls, and then nail sheetrock to the 2x4s. Now we have new walls that I can easily hang pictures on and outlets for lamps :).

Steffane B.

Constructing the Bathroom

After seeing how simple it was to build and install the bones of a wall, my next task was to build the walls of the shower and the wall hiding the toilet. I started with the toilet wall because it seemed to be the most simplest at the time. Normally, a house would have level ceilings so the wall I had to build would just consist of my nailing 2x4s to the ends of 3 7.5' 2x4 boards. But of course, this was not the case. I had to individually measure each board, cut it, and then make sure it fit before nailing on the ends that got nailed to the ceiling and the floor. 

In this view you are looking into the the corner of the bathroom. The door to get into the bathroom is to the right (not shown) and the door you do see is the door to the closet filled with 2x4s. After building the toilet wall, I now had to construct the shower walls. I decided to make them 4' tall. At this point we aren't sure if we are going to put glass on the tops of the walls or if we are just going to leave them bare. I guess it just depends on if too much water splashes out. Anywho, These walls were by far the easiest to complete. 

The window you see in the right of the picture is where the toilet is (getting a visual?). That white post sticking out of the floor is where the shower water will be coming from. If you are wondering what is on the walls, the walls are concrete and what you see is a mix of light blue paint and glue for the old bathroom shower, oh and who can forget the tar on the wall. 

Here's a pic of me building one of the shower walls. You can see the bathroom door behind me. And if you are wondering what that brick thing is behind me, it is the chimney for the old fireplace that used to be downstairs but was later removed. The chimney was covered with concrete but I wanted to expose it in the bathroom and set the vanities on either side. It's just added character to this awesome old house.

Steffane B

Small changes but still seeing progress

Compared to what we had done before what I'm about to talk about, it seems as if we took a lot of time off, but I think what most people don't realize is that when you are re-doing a house it takes a lot of time. If you want to make sure it is done properly and you don't want problems further down the road, that takes extra time. None the less, after we finished the ceiling and the floors in the bathroom we were ready to see that baby come to life. The first thing that came in was our bathtub and ohhhhhh is it niiiice.

I didn't want to get out of it! It's the perfect size for two people who want to relax and take a big bubble bath. But I couldn't just lay there, we had to get work done! So the next thing on our check list was to clear out the soon-to-be closet (originally a bedroom). We had to remove carpet and carpet padding and we thought we were going to uncover more beautiful 40 year old hardwood floors but sadly they were covered in 20 year old green vinyl.

We decided to leave them in that state for the time being and use that room to keep our tools and such in. On to the next item on the check list! The banister. At this point the stairway was encased by floor to ceiling walls with a small doorway to let you into the upstairs, we decided to change all of that. We knocked down the walls, saving what wood we could and turned it into a half wall.

Just to let you know it is not completed in this picture. We did cover it with drywall later but we'll get to that at a different day. So the reason that we couldn't salvage the wood from the wall that we previously had was due to termite damage that had happened 30 years before we got the house. Thankfully the damage was localized in one small portion of the house and was able to be fixed/replaced. Well that's all for today folks, until next time.

Steffane B 

Prepping the house

I forgot to post a before picture of the kitchen/bathroom in my last post so I decided to do it this time:

The wall to the right in the first picture was knocked out to make the adjacent bathroom bigger (plus we don't need an extra kitchen in our bedroom) and even though the floor in the bottom picture looks clean and ready to go it definitely was not when we pulled up the vinyl floor in the old kitchen. It was covered in tar and just awful. Anyway, after we gutted the house we had to take down the closets that were left to finish up the bedroom.

Now it was time to work on that bathroom! The kitchen that was previously there was missing the ceiling because my husbands grandfather was in the process of remodeling the kitchen so this was in need of replacing. But before we could put up a new ceiling we had to take out the old tongue and groove floor which was not repairable (plus we didn't want wood floors in our bathroom). We ripped those out and replaced them with plywood. Unfortunately in old houses much of the beams inside the walls and floors are rough cut which makes them very uneven, making our new bathroom floors very uneven. After replacing the floors, we then got started on the ceiling. Being in the middle of the summer in the South and replacing a ceiling in an old house which doesn't have any A/C made work very uncomfortable.

The boys were a big hot sweaty mess but we finally got things squared away and things were looking up.

Steffane B

To make a home you need a house

Me and my husband have always had the dream to own a home that needed some fixing up and that want was turned into a have when, sadly, my husbands grandfather passed away and the old house was given to us. The house was built in 1940s (I think 1948) and has a lot of issues that needed fixin'.

Most people looked at the house and told us that we should just bulldoze it down but we saw it as a diamond in the rough. Everything in the house (including the floors and doors) are all original, meaning they are as old as the house. Why would I want to bulldoze something so old that just needed to be polished up? Anyway we decided to start with the upstairs and instantly began ripping down walls and ripping out carpet.

The upstairs was at some point turned into an apartment consisting of a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a sunroom/porch, and two bedrooms. We seperated this into one bedroom by combining a bedroom and the living room, kept the sunroom, a massive closet that used to be a bedroom, and a bathroom from the old bathroom and kitchen by knocking down a couple walls.

The other cool thing is that when we ripped up the carpet the original hardwood floors were underneath. Needless to say we decided to keep the hardwood floors. After the whole place was cleared out and swept clean we were left with a clean slate.

Steffane B