Second Floor Renovations Day 1

Day 1 ended with the beginning of a period of mess.

First up on the big renovation agenda is to replace windows and reinsulate our two guest bedrooms. It’s been interesting to live in a house with no rear insulation over the last 3 years (sorry about that, house guests).

Once demolition continues, we’ll have new, energy-efficient windows as well as properly insulated walls.

The night before demolition:

Office

Office pre-demolition

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Bathroom Renovation Step 1

If you know nothing about old home renovations, surely HGTV has taught you one thing, that there are always surprises lurking behind the walls.

Luckily, we got a lot of those out of the way early. Well we’d been building up to get a lot of drywall work done throughout the house. Filling in some gaps of where we took down some walls, filling some holes, replacing some shotty work and so on. A week ago, I woke up, took my normal shower then went downstairs to walk Sophia. That’s when I saw it. A slow drip of water coming from the ceiling, underneath the upstairs bathroom.

Nooooo, how could it be?!?! Well it was. And that’s how our bathroom renovation project came to be.

Although we were intending to live with the pink tub and crappy tile for a bit, we knew we couldn’t take a risk of just patching the problem with the bathroom faucet, and risk ruining the new drywall work we were contemplating.

The bathroom as we found it when we moved in (save a better shower head and CFL bulbs).

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Vanishing Walls

**WARNING: This post depicts an unfinished project. No pretty outcome has resulted…yet.**

By the layout of the walls in our first floor, it is pretty clear that people didn’t like to be around each other in the early 20th century. There was no flow between the kitchen, living and dinning rooms. The opening between the living room and dining room is definitely not original and while that was a good attempt at opening up the first floor we knew there was a lot more potential.

And by potential, that means we had to do some demolition!!! And demolition = fun! Look for yourself:

Just knocking down that wall has made a huge difference in the amount of light that shines through to the dining room.
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