Remodeling This Life

This is a guest post from Alison at This Wasn’t In The Plan. She is all sorts of creative, thrifty, simple, frugal and fabulous. My kind of girl. Please check out her site as it is full of lots of really great content that focuses on living a great life on less, and making the most of a life that doesn’t follow all the rules in the book. Please check her site out and if you like what you see, why not subscribe to her RSS feed?

Soon after Emily and her husband bought their fixer upper, my husband and I did pretty much the exact opposite - we bought a brand new home. Faced with a house full of empty rooms and white walls, we got to do our own sort of remodeling. Most rooms are still white and boring, but the bathroom is not. While perusing a Lowe’s ad, we saw some very cool wall paneling that we thought would look totally fabulous in the bathroom. Unfortunately, this stuff apparently only existed on the pages of that ad. We improvised and purchased a bamboo screen from the lawn and garden department. It’s totally not typical for a bathroom (or any indoor room for that matter), but I love it. And after the initial mess of putting it on the wall, it hasn’t been bad at all.

With the pedestal sink, there really isn’t much room for storage in this bathroom. There was not a whole that needed to be stored in this particular bathroom, but I at least wanted a place to put extra hand towels and toilet paper. My husband and I had a hard time finding something that was both affordable and attractive. We apparently were thinking too hard. A simple piece of wood and some shelf brackets were all we needed. To hide away stuff, I bought a cheap bin for a few dollars and covered it with the same bamboo we had put on the walls. Voila! Because it’s fun to be matchy, I also covered the plastic trash can with bamboo.

Next time you see you a look you want to recreate - think outside of the box, you’ll probably come up with some fun ideas.

Last year, when hubby was remodeling the kitchen, there was a tile that got laid funny. Part of it was too high and it needed replacing just about as soon as it was put down. Because it needed replacing, hubby didn’t even grout around it when he did the grout job. So, for a year, I have had this tripping hazard in my kitchen that collects dirt, dust, debris. It became one of those things that my remodeling blinders kept me from noticing and thus kept me from nagging about it.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, I put it back on the very short to-do list for a Saturday afternoon.

To be honest, I think hubby was glad about doing it. It meant, after all, that he could demolish a tile and what man doesn’t love destroying stuff?

It was a relaxing family day, so I didn’t want to put “paint the house” on the list and instead gave him a project he could do with us around and the kids could help.

Please ignore in the photo below that my children have half ripped down one of my mistreatments that I slaved over. Blissful imperfection!

And now, a year later, I have a pretty perfect kitchen tile floor. Well, other than it could use a mopping.

I just updated my House Remodel Photos page if you are interested in seeing the progress all in one place.

And I updated My About Page with a new photo of me.

Just, you know, if you’re interested!

We’ve been busy with a lot of outdoor projects around our house the past couple of weeks. With the awesome weather that has settled in here in Florida, the family has been spending a lot of time outside playing, gardening, and relaxing in the yard. One thing we were sorely lacking was a cozy space to relax when out there. We have a decent sized yard with zero character but have slowly been trying to remedy that over the past 2 years. A lot of things were higher on the priority list until now. Hubby and I sat down to try to decide what we wanted to do for seating and comfort while outside. We are in the middle of working on a pagoda further out in the yard but we wanted something closer to the house and that would make use of the space off of our french door. And so our patio was born. Before, there was just a lot of dirt, weeds, and cracking, crumbling, collapsing concrete block that appears to have perhaps at one time served the purpose of being a patio. 45 years ago. Not attractive or functional.

So hubby started by pouring concrete

We weren’t sure what we wanted to do over it yet and were looking for deals on pavers and price shopping around for the different options we could go with. We honestly thought we would just leave the concrete as is for a while until we found just the thing we wanted. But our doggies had other plans. Not thinking clearly, hubby let them outside the other back door the evening after pouring the concrete. We woke up to a patio full of puppy paw prints! Ahhhh…cute, but so not cute. I headed out the next day to check out tile and pavers at Home Depot and decided on porcelain tile. Hubby and Monkey got right to work on laying it down.

She did a fabulous job, really. I am quite impressed with her and this was just another project to add to the long list of things she has helped with. It makes me so happy and proud to see my kids learning new skills and learning to work hard and take pride in that work from such a young age.

Here is the not quite finished product but finished enough to enjoy

I snagged that patio table and chairs at a yard sale over the weekend for $20. We were looking at ones on Craigslist for $200-$500 so I was very happy! It was one of those serendipitious moments when I woke up early before the kiddos, quickly scanned the garage sale listings in our area on Craigslist, saw a 5 family sale across town and crossed my fingers there would be a patio set and headed over there. I was one of the first to arrive and I stole their seating that they were planning to use for the day

This photo more accurately shows the true color of the tile. I am going to make cushions for the chairs soon.

Here it is after I put out some flowers and a big potted plant in the corner. I still have lots of sprucing to do.

I shared our $3000 Kitchen Remodel and now want to share part 2 of my breakdown of our home remodel costs. I am presenting today our living room. Oh, the living room. Once a room of drab faux (actually, so bad I should just say fake) dark wood paneling, 2 tiny windows, and oh the shag carpet - orange and lime green! I wish those photos hadn’t died with my old laptop, but they did. Under the shag carpet was a lovely avocado green linoleum tile. There was very little redeeming about that room.

My daughter still will say things like “remember when my house was old and the walls were brown and my bed was over there?” That’s right. The living room used to be one big bedroom. Sooo fab. I know you are jealous

Since I don’t have the before the shag carpet was ripped out and we moved in photos, I have to share this one

I have NO CLUE who that crazy lady in the photo is that snuck into my house and let her photo be taken by my then 2 year old daughter. The least she could’ve done was smile instead of making a stupid face and showing off her 6 months pregnant belly. Sheesh.

Here is hubby working on the room that we thought could not be redeemed. Look at that fabulous avocado flooring!!!

A peek at it during the during phase.

And here are the after photos then I will breakdown the costs

This is not how it looks today, decor and furniture-wise, but it gives you an idea of the french door across the one wall to outside and the shelf above it.

Okay, so that is pretty much the room as it is now. We made some changes like making the front door come in the living room as opposed to where it used to be in an awkward useless entry space that we now have as our dining area.

We replaced all the walls, windows, framing, electrical, doors, added a 4 panel french door, put down tile on the floors, painted and decorated, adding new fixtures and window treatments. It’s 100% DIY, so no labor costs.

Flooring - retail tile at Home Depot - $200

French Door - $250 on ebay, bought locally and picked up by us - $275 including gas to pick up

Walls & Ceiling - drywall and insulation retail at Home Depot - $175

Paint - retail at Sherwin-Williams - $30

Electrical - $100

Windows - 2 windows on clearance at Home Depot with the rest of the ones we bought for the house - $75

Trim and Baseboards and shelf above french door - retail at Home Depot - $200

Entry door and door to master bedroom - retail for entry door - $150, $10 on ebay for other white door to master - $160

Fixtures - retail at Home Depot - $100

Furnishings - don’t necessarily count as remodel costs but they were almost all either free, thrifted or hand-me-downs so we paid a total of about $100 for all of it, couch, chairs, wall unit, entryway and tables, rug, etc…

Total Cost - I’ll round to $1500 for extras that I am forgetting.

Not too shabby. And awfully cozy and totally OURS.

What do you think?