The First Month: the Bedrooms

If you remember, the downstairs bedrooms were... bright. We had the pink room:

The walls were the color of pepto-bismol. The carpet? Maroon. And wood trim to top it all off.

This was the room we chose for our bedroom.

Out the door you can see a small hallway area. With linoleum floors and off-white walls, it looked like so:

And to the right is the purple room

Both of these rooms need a good amount of work - windows need to be replaced, drywall and insulation needs to be redone, and the closets - additions courtesy of the previous owners - leave much to be desired. Mostly, there's nothing but a thin layer of plywood between indoors and out, so in the winter the closets (and the clothes in them!) get VERY cold.

But for now, we needed to get moved in, so we focused on making things livable. And that meant paint.

After just a layer of primer, the rooms looked completely different. First, the pink room:

And the purple:

And then we painted! The (formerly) pink room became blue

And then the carpet came up - hooray!

A little before and after, for fun:

And with the trim done, a pretty blue room

The hallway became a light gray green, which is very hard to see as the room gets essentially zero natural light

And the purple room, destined to be my office, became my favorite room in the house

Before with the wood trim still intact, and now it looks a little something like this:

What a difference a few cans of paint can make!!

The First Month:Living Room

Oh, the living room. What a difference some demo made. You remember, the living room initially looked like this

The 60's had happened to this room in a big, big way. Shag carpet over what I knew to be lovely wood floors. Lava rock over a brick and stucco fireplace. Puffy vinyl window treatments.

After tossing the shades, the next project was pulling down the lava rock overlay. This was loud, tedious work and took the better part of a day to get done,

It had been installed with wire nailed to the wall, then concrete laid on the wire, then the rock laid into the concrete. We chiseled out each rock with a hammer and a set of very large chisels.

The stuff on the wall came off relatively easily - once we got going it was quick, and we could yank at the wire underneath. The rock on the fireplace had to be carefully removed so as to not damage the structure of the fireplace.

Que angels singing.

Once the fireplace was down, the shag had served its final purpose of protecting the floors. It was time for the shag to go. Here's a shot of the living and dining rooms right before we pulled up the carpet.

The carpet and pad rolled up easily - we had those out of the two rooms in just a few minutes. Then it was a pass around the edge of both rooms to pull up all the staples, and that took forever. But when we finished we were treated to this view.

The wall behind the fireplace was pretty torn up by the lava rock and will need to be replaced, and we were undecided about repairing vs replacing the stucco surround. Whatever the room ends up looking like, it's already come a long way!!

The First Month: Part 1

Over the next few posts, I'll take you through what happened in the month between close and move in. As you saw last week, there was plenty to keep me busy! 

First step: dumpster

30 feet long and in all her glory.

I started my home renovation journey, as many do, by taking a layer (or three... or seven...) off. Here's how that went.

In the kitchen, that meant just wallpaper.

Guys, that's a yellow wall.

The dining room seemed simple, with just one wall with fake wood paneling.

What we found underneath?

Look at that...

Wallpaper!

A close up:

In what we didn't know would be some major foreshadowing, we scraped off the wallpaper to find...

MORE wallpaper.

After hours upon hours of scraping off layers of wallpaper and paint, we finally had a bare wall.

The living room was also a major undertaking with the awful and out-of-place lava rock fireplace and shag carpet.

This, however, deserves it's own post. So I'll leave you with the one and only member of the household who voted to keep the shag (spoiler alert: she lost)

First Project!

I had the rare and strange opportunity to start working on the house before close. There were some pre-sale issues with the oil tank (the house is currently still heated with oil). The old tank, which was buried in the yard, was leaking and the sellers were required to replace it before sale. Since below-ground tanks are no longer legal we needed a new place to put the tank. Putting the tank, which is 5ft long and 3ft wide, out of the way behind the garage made the most sense. The only issue was the shed.

Really, the word shed doesn't describe what this structure was. It was built next to, and using the rear wall of, the garage and was a glorified lean-to. The only light came from one small window that had been painted over and didn't open. It was, in a word, creepy. I believe the previous owner used it as a work room as we found lots of old tools and nails and wire, but we called it Dexter's kill room.

There she is in all her creepy glory.

In order to get the tank there, the shed had to go. So after a few phone calls and signatures I got the go-ahead to demo the shed to allow for the new oil tank,

A quick run to the hardware store yielded a ladder and this wrecking bar which has been one of the better purchases I've made in my home-owning experience. I can't think of a project where this baby hasn't come in useful.

First we took off the door and window, then we used the bar to pry off wood one board at a time. After just a few minutes we could see right through.

And within an hour we had her down to the studs!

 Oh hey, who is that guy?

This is TK. He lives here too and is a mostly-willing participant in my home improvement shenanigans.

After we were down to the studs I jumped on the roof to carefully pull off the shingles and other roofing material so we could take apart the top board by board. We used a saw to cut through some of the larger pieces and, when most of it was gone, went at the studs with a hammer. The result? A most satisfying "timmmmmmmmbbbbber" and, after a little cleanup, this:

Ta-da!

No pictures of the true after, though, because the oil tank is prettttttttty ugly.

Cast of Characters: The House

There's no other way to say it: this house needs some love. 

When I set out to find my home I knew what I wanted... and I knew I had limitations. Buying a home in Portland is stressful and competitive - houses get sold before they even go on the market! Not to mention I was buying a house on one income, and with substantial student loan debt. My purchase was going to have to be a fixer upper, and I was excited about it - I could make it whatever I wanted! Or, whatever I could manage to make given my limited resources and even more limited know-how. 

What I settled on for criteria as I searched was an older home with good bones and charm. I wanted a big yard. I wanted something that needed a vision, but not too much cash. I wanted to put in the work, and I wanted the work to be work that I could (mostly) do.

What I found was grandma's house. Not MY grandma's house, but certainly someone's grandma. My house has such a neat story - it was built in the 1940's and I'm just it's second owner. A young couple bought the house as newlyweds and raised their family there. Over time the kids moved away, and the husband passed. The wife lived here alone for a time, but recently she and her family had decided it was time for her to move into assisted living. 

Over the years the house has seen hundreds of renditions of itself, but as you'll see now the last major update was in the 1960's or 70's. 

And now, I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves. This is what the RCH looked like the day I got the keys.

dining room from the entry way

dining room

dining and living room

living room

kitchen

amazing stove

hallway

pink bedroom

bathroom

purple bedroom

upstairs bedroom

upstairs bedroom

upstairs bath

upstairs bath

upstairs hallway

stairway

Shag carpet. Wood paneling. Lava rock. Wallpaper (so. much. wallpaper). I had my work cut out for me! And still have. And will have for a very, very long time.

I was super lucky to have a full month between the day I closed and the day I had to be out of my apartment. It was a long, exhausting month but it was so worth it to be able to not move into a complete construction zone. The first (and most FUN!) step was demo, so the day after closing I had a 30 foot dumpster delivered and went to town! I ended up keeping the dumpster for a full week and going almost a ton over the allowed weight - oops!

Up next - the first project!