I had no idea this thread was here! We’re almost finished having our house painted.
Last year’s big project was converting the formal dining room into a library. Next year I think will be tearing out the too-big, not-great-construction deck and putting in a patio. Personally I would like to put in a catio as well, but we’ll see. Sometime after that we’ll remodel our master bathroom. Oh and I’d like to paint some of the interior of the house, but the first area is two floors high so we’ll have to hire someone with a really tall ladder.
We’ve just about have our bathroom renovation finished. My husband did the demolition of the lovely original 60s baby blue bathroom and then the builders took 3 weeks to put it all back together.
It’s pretty much done, we are just waiting for the shower screen to be fitted (they couldn’t measure until the tiling was all finished and then has to be made. We need to paint the window, door and frames and hang the mirror.
Ooo I like the tub! Did you find someone to take the old stuff off your hands? My dad had someone take an old toilet once. He had me put some shower doors up on craigslist for $5. I was like, “No one is going to take these, I haven’t even gotten the scale off of them.” But, to my fascination, they were immediately wanted. Weird!
This also reminds me of a bathroom I saw at an estate sale that was entirely rose pink including the toilet. It was fabulous, I must say.
We kept the bath for our garden, we have been collecting all the old sinks for our someday veggie garden. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take the sink out until the plumber came and it got buried in the skip because we forgot to tell him we wanted it.
When we first moved in 19 years ago, I wanted to work with the blue, but we needed to fix the floor as there were cracks in the slab and we wouldn’t have found anything modern to match the bath and sink.
But I am pleased with the end result. It matches the two new build wet areas (laundry and ensuite bathroom), so brings a more cohesive look to the house.
Now to do the finishing touches and then bring some colour in with towels and maybe a plant on a shelf at the end of the bath.
That looks so fresh! Does the shower go next to the sink? And the loo, is it in another room?
We have to do both our bathrooms over but not this year. The budget’s allocated to finishing siding the back addition & building steps, dry wall, outlets & lights.
If you don’t have enough light on the bathroom, I’ve had success with finding quality fake plants that mimic the real deal nicely. And they aren’t ivy.
That looks nice @mellybelly81 ! Very different look. I understand wanting to work with what was there, but at some point something that has been intensively used for half a century is just worn out and needs to be replaced. As a student I once lived in a place that had a vintage 1960s pink bathroom - it looked cool but it didn’t function as it should. Had I owned that place I would have eventually replaced it, too.
@Magpie very exicting! Bathrooms are my favourite, I love tiles. But it was also one of the more expensive things we did - depending on what you need to do, it can be very labour-intensive. We had leaks so they had to remove the whole concrete floor, replace all pipes and pour a new floor.
I was finally able to set up my sewing machine yesterday, on top of a Kallax cupboard. Not ideal but it works. I’d serged and pinned the curtains earlier so it was just lots of hemming today. Nearly done. We don’t have curtain rails up yet (will order these this week) but when we do, we’ll have curtains everywhere except for the living room. We kept hardly any furniture for the living room, only the dining table, so when we’ve saved up a bit again, we’ll go on the hunt for furniture and curtains.
My distraction was fixing and recoating the 70-year-old front cement steps. I’m crafty, I can do it. It’s done, not professional at all and may still get painted, the.railings need a goos scrap and paint. The steps look so much better and hopefully, I’ve halted the winter water damage for a while. Now I can finish re-landscaping the foundation plantings and smothering the invasive goutweed.
Apparently, I don’t take pictures of the front of the house very much. But there were chips, worn spots and the steps had settled and cracked, visible from the side where the coating had cracked off and freeze/water damage had occurred. This is a 70-year-old house. Luckily we are older than the ongoing crumbling foundation problem most of Connecticut has. Houses built from 1983 - 2015 used concrete with a naturally occurring iron sulfide causing crumbling in later years. Something no one had a clue about. But our house is good. since I had to work in shifts, you can see where I stopped and started. Oh well, they do look better.
Only before picture I can find… Oscar is standing neighborhood watch duty.
My little sister always got the top because I would fall out of bed. Then she fell out one night, or unrolled out wrapped in blankets. Still didn’t get the top.
Haha, no fighting here. One is afraid of heights. The other got the “most courageous” award in cheerleading this past winter…so you can guess which one is up top!
We didn’t gain too much space. The toddler beds were pretty short. We are still planning a big move later in the year to a larger room when the loft is finished.
Fingers crossed that after this week, we’ll be almost done with builders walking around in our house! Tomorrow we’ll get solar installed, and next week, the appliances for our kitchen will be built in. Then there are only a few minor adjustments left.
In the mean time, I put the shelves back into the closet in our bedroom and hopefully tomorrow I can do the same in the basement. I’m not completely happy with how that one turned out - originally, they weren’t supposed to do any work there at all, but at some point they had to remove the concrete floor because they had to get to a pipe that turned out to be in that floor. When they poured a new concrete floor, they raised the floor level. The builders deny they changed it by a lot (according to them it’s about an inch) but I always knew it was much more. Now I want to put the shelves back in, I notice it’s indeed a lot more (maybe 8 inch). But we don’t have proof and the builders don’t agree. It’s a lot of work to remove a concrete floor by myself and I’d be afraid to damage those pipes. But it’s annoying because it has really limited our storage space (it’s a tiny, tiny basement under the stairs, not a whole extra floor - type of basement).
awww That’s frustrating!! I know I wouldn’t have thought to make and document explicit measurements in such a case! Hope you manage to make your storage area work for you!
That’s crazy! Eight inches is huge. Is it something to do with building codes? I know older houses aren’t always in compliance with new codes (ran into a few things with our house - built in the 1960s) and sometimes have to be brought into compliance with any new construction. Sorry to hear you lost so much space. Our basement was accidentally made too short (by a whole cinder block - about 8 inches, lol), so I understand the frustration of it.
Small, construction-related rant: My neighbor is rebuilding his house, and I have been patient with all of the noise. The two straight days of beeping trucks was just about all I could take (I hid in the basement - the only place in my house I couldn’t hear it). But, this morning, he was out there running equipment well before 7am. Not cool. We have noise ordinances that prohibit this (and the hours of beeping). I was up late with a kiddo who wasn’t feeling good and I have a long day ahead…less than five hours of sleep is going to hurt.
Still didn’t get the top.
