hardwood floors (redone!)

One of the first things we did was to remove all the carpet from the house.. it had seen better days, was smelly and dirty.. and had to go.  The good thing about all the carpet was that it seemed to have protected the floors really well.   The second floor is red pine and only one of the rooms had an area that was damaged.  The first floor is oak with an inlay around the perimeter in the living room and dining room.  Very nice floors but slightly worn.  So we decided to have them refinished as it would be easier to do before we move all our stuff in. 

The most difficult part of the process was that the carpet on the stairs had some type of clay based padding which apparently was used a lot in the 70's.... over time with the foot traffic on the steps it caused it to break down and was stuck to the floors.  We (and by we I mean Glenn) had to carefully scrape it off.  He had to wet it down to try to soften it.. there wasn't anything we could find that would help other than water.. But he eventually got it all off :)  They came out great!

We decided to go with a dark walnut stain on the first floor and kept the natural color on the second floor. 

Second floor bedroom sanded and with one coat of poly.

85% complete!

ok.. we are almost there with the bathroom.. major items still to be done are the glass around the tub, new windows and prepping / painting the window and door trim.. minor items include hanging towel bars / hooks..

The vanities, medicine cabinets, wall sconces, and faucets are all from Restoration Hardware.. scored some major deals at the outlet and the clearance store in Lancaster, PA.  The subway tile is American Olean from Lowes.  The carrara marble counters are from Abruzzi Stone in Cherry Hill, NJ; really nice, friendly people and the price was good too.  The toilet is the Aquia dual flush model by Toto.  One of the biggest savings was the 1" honed hexagon floor.. I purchased it at 1/2 the cost of any other source I found thru a store on eBay.   I love how it all turned out - I think it's a good use of the space and better reflects the character of the house. 

bathroom design and finishes

This is the new layout of the bathroom...  we relocated the toilet (basically it is directly opposite where it used to be)  there are low walls at either end of the tub which have a sill on them and then glass will be surrounding the tub. 

The finishes in the bathroom are pretty simple; white subway tile wainscot on the walls and 1" honed carrera marble in a hexagon pattern on the floors.  Below are some progress photos...we are not 100% complete yet but it's fully functional.. just some minor items (and the glass) to be finished.  So I will post nearly complete photos soon!

bathroom demo

Here are some photos from the demo... this bathroom was put together pretty solid.  All the tile was set in 2" wet beds with wire below.  It was a dust nightmare.  We also discovered that at some time insulation had been blown into the walls from the outside so hopefully this will help out with heating and cooling. 

pink is not my color...

Before we even settled on the house, we knew that we wanted (needed) to rip out the bathroom first.. it was not pretty in pink.  One of the things that really bothered me about the layout was the full height plumbing wall that was blocking most of one of the windows in the room.  The size of the bathroom is really nice, it is much larger than what you typically find in an 80+ year old house.  So I came up with a layout that I thought would work better and would also allow us to have two vanities.  Since this is the main bathroom having two vanities is a plus.

This photo is from our walk through and you can make out in the upper left corner the radio that is plugged into an outlet on the other side of the wall and resting precariously on the top of the sliding door... an accident waiting to happen. 

This is the full height wall which was set about 12" off the outside wall blocking half the window into the room.

before photos

Here are just a few photos from one of our walk throughs of the house. It's difficult to tell from the photos, but this house was dirty....really DIRTY. I don't think it had seen a vacuum, mop or any kind of cleaning solution in a long time. Thankfully we have already taken care of the nasty pink bathroom.. but still have to suffer with the kitchen for awhile.  We started with removing all the wallpaper (which was in most rooms - some up to 4 layers) and had the floors refinished.  Also renovated the bathroom.  Progress photos to come soon!

we bought a house...

So we finally bought a house after having looked a few years ago, then stopped looking and found one that pretty much had everything we were looking for in a house.. except a fireplace. It has great bones but had been neglected over the past 20 years or as the realtor put it had suffered from "deferred maintenance". For the most part, that's ok with us as we prefer to make it our own anyway and the less crap that was done to it over the years the better.

On Sept 1st the renovations began, mostly minor but it already looks much better and more like us. I thought this might be a good way for those who are interested to see the progress or if nothing else for myself to review where we started and how far along the progress is coming.