Why Renovate the House I Live In. . .

. . . when I can renovate the house someone else gets to live in?

My biggest complaint about our house renovation is the very   s l  o o o o w   progress. No room ever gets done all in one shot, let alone the entire house.  I have a hard time finishing even small projects, like the slip covers for my dining room chairs I started LAST November. I got one done.  Now I have a whole new table and set of chairs! Luckily they need slipcovers so we will try again.  I also have a half done laundry room, a living room with no furniture and a list of things to do a mile long.

But I have been steadily checking things off another list I made a while back.  And I can sort of check #15 off that list: Own and restore a historic home.  It isn't what I had in mind, and I don't even get to live in it.  And even though it was built in 1941, it isn't on the historic registry, and it doesn't have a name.    But it has come a long way and I am rather proud of it.

So with that stellar introduction, meet our first little rental house:

It was dark when I took the after pictures so I will have to go back in the daylight for the exterior "after" picture. But here is a "during picture". The exterior had been painted, but the trim wasn't finished and the fence hadn't been fixed and the shutters  and house numbers aren't up, but it's still cuter:

UPDATE: Finished exterior

When we purchased the home two months ago, we were fairly enthusiastic, and my husband ripped right into the place before I had a chance to even take before pictures, so I nabbed the pictures from the listing.  Let me take you on a little tour, room by room.

Welcome to the living room I walked into that first day back in May (it was a VERY long process):

And welcome in today:

Let's look around the living room:

Let us enter the Kitchen, shall we?  Here is the before:

And the after. . .

Let's pivot around the room:

Moving on to the dining room--prepare yourself:

Ahhhh,  much better. . .

Laundry room/mudroom--a short step down from the dining room. . . before:

After.  What else can I say? Except, that at some point it will probably be sporting bead board and a shelf in the future.

The master bedroom (which used to be a one car garage--complete with maroon painted cement floor):

After.  This was the one room where all the things on the list didn't happen due to time restraints--our renter wanted to move in, little things like that. . . Plus it wouldn't really be OUR project if we actually finished everything!

Let's walk back through the laundry room. . .

and up through the dining room. . .

and back through the kitchen--do you see the peek of the bathroom?  Wait for it. . . .

The crown jewel of the remodel: the bathroom (the one and only).  But first, the before:

This picture doesn't begin to convey the gross, dirty, leaky, ewwy, smelling mess that was this bathroom.

Annnnnd. . .  AFTER:

I spent hours and days and days and hours and massive amounts of arm strength on tiling very nearly every inch of this bathroom. . .

Subway tile. . .

How I love thee. . .

despite the pain you caused me. . .

This faucet was actually very inexpensive, but I want to put it in my girls' bathroom when we renovate it (with hundreds of subway tiles).

I seriously love the way it turned out--can you tell. . . by the sheer number of pictures of it.

It was hard to get it all in a picture with such little space to work with. . .

Okay, I am leaving the bathroom.

With only a couple backward glances. . .

And on to the two bedrooms. Bedroom one before (there wasn't a before picture I could steal from the listing--perhaps because they didn't think we could handle that much design style--and the day I took this I had only a 50mm prime lens.  But I assure you, this flag covered one entire wall, and the rest was worse):

Loads of primer later. . .

The second bedroom was all girl before:

But now it's all soothing, crispy clean:

I love the old door hardware and those old doors (even though I had to sand and plane EVERY door to get them to close).

Then back to the living room and glancing back down the hall:

I might just have to put some of the trim paint in my house.  The walls, on the other hand are darn close to the color on my own house.  Together they are perfection.

What do you think--would you rent this little blue bungalow?

Sidetracked. . . As Usual

Necessity is the mother of invention. . . or rather, of construction in our case.  At least that's what I call it when a washing machine goes out and it spurs a laundry room makeover.  A deadline helps to.  Of course, that deadline has passed, as has the over zealous gusto with which we started the project.

"We have three days to make over the room before the new washer and dryer get here." got us really going on the project. . . then reality set in and we made sure the floor was done so the washer and dryer would have something to sit on.  Here is where the dilemma of the walls (and the sink/cabinets/shelf) brought this project to a screeching halt.  In typical fashion, we abandoned the project midstream.  Or at least set it aside, missing baseboards and all, while we figured out what to do with it and got on with life.

And by got on with life, I mean we jumped ship onto another project, of course.  I am having flashbacks of working on the garden, deciding the west side yard needed done, which is tied to the east lane gate area project (trust me on that one) so we worked on that area for, oh about an hour, before changing gears and focusing on the tree house for the entire weekend.

Clearly we have issues.

And one of them happened to be an overflowing non-functional under-the-stairs-closet-catchall-black-whole-where-winter-coats-go-in-but-don't-come-out. . . among other things (a couple sewing machines, a couple tubs of fabric, several jackets and backpacks--oh, and the vacuum. . . and carpet cleaner).  I bet you didn't realize a four by four space could hold so much.  My argument was that it really could be holding so much more--if we did something about making the space a little more vertical.  I was thrilled to find my daughter's coat we all took for lost last December.  Though it is less urgent now that it is June. . . or at least it would be if the weather would remember that it IS June.

And since we dove into this project with very little forethought, I have no actual before picture.  So just picture this room without the partially installed shelving and with the aforementioned crap stacked half way up and making a fairly successful attempt to spew out into the hallway. . . or don't, because that probably says something about me as a person.

We installed four 12" shelves, painted the room the same color as the hallway, and the shelves white.

We attempted to move the hooks off the door and onto the wall inside the closet, but of course we only succeeded in making several holes I will now have to repair.

In the meantime, we ran to The Container Store and stocked up on divided organizable storage totes that would fit our shelves and I began sorting.  I started with the sewing stuff, but will likely add some other craft supplies which are currently in my office.

I may need more space. . .

But in the end it looks so much neater. . . and I actually know what is in there.

Plus, as a bonus, I no longer have to shove the door hard and fast to keep the vacuum from bursting back out from lack of floor space.

Now the question is, will our next project be the rest of the laundry room?