Almost There...

We're almost finished with the master bedroom renovation so that my younger son can move back home. It's so exciting to see that 35-year-old, filthy, tired space reborn. Here are some of our progress shots.

We had already started when it dawned on me I should be taking pictures. G-- had already taken the dark walnut fake wood paneling off the wall here. You can see the wallpaper just behind the dsl lines dangling out of the attic. Shortly after this picture was taken I went into the attic for the last trip and moved the dsl lines into another room.

The attic access stairs. When we bought this house in 1974 it was going to be our "starter" home. Three bedrooms, two baths, "farm" kitchen (which is an L-shaped kitchen area stuck onto a tiny family room, which made a large kitchen). Living room but no dining room. Within 18 months the price of the house had tripled and we couldn't even qualify for our own home if we had tried to sell it and re-buy it ourselves. Of course, that meant we couldn't move up into anything larger, either.

When we learned I was pregnant with our second son we added a large family room off the kitchen and the house is now 1350 square feet. We raised two BIG boys (and their big dog, a 110-lb Akita, now gone) in this house. It worked well except there wasn't room for the flotsam you get when two packrats raise a family. About 30 years ago we installed this access into the space over the master bedroom and, for 30 years I've been stashing stuff up there. I've been working since November pulling stuff down, sorting, pitching and re-storing in a rented storage unit. Now it's virtually empty (DH chickened out of dragging the last of his stuff down so it's still up there) and part of the renovation has been sealing that access up.

If you're looking you can still see where the stairway was, but it's pretty well camouflaged. We had the acoustic (popcorn) ceiling scraped off and a new knock-down texture applied. I did the painting on the ceiling. After one coat of flat I decided it looked awful and did another coat of semi-gloss which my son and I are very happy with.

Both of the doors - the one into the bedroom and the one from the bedroom into the bathroom - had holes in them so we had them replaced with these "updated" doors. All the trim is wide and I chose lever handles, too.

G--- spent some time today painting the walls. He chose the ever-popular Navajo White (Eggshell finish) for the walls (semi-gloss for the closet doors.) The doors, trim, baseboards and ceiling are all Nude semi-gloss.

About ten years after everyone in the neighborhood had moved in, people started falling through their shower walls. Turns out the developer (this is a Pardee development) set the shower tiles onto regular wallboard. DH picked this yellow (his favorite color) for our replacement. As I prepared the bedroom for re-painting, I realized that the shower had been leaking into the room we were working on. When our contractor demolished this stall he discovered that Pardee had also not bothered to make the shower walls plumb, which is why it kept springing leaks. We didn't really have a choice but to have the shower re-tiled. While we were at it, this pan simply had to go. It was not only cracked, but in my exuberant cleaning efforts I had managed to scrub off the finish over the years and it was impossible to keep clean (the camera picked up crud even I couldn't see. We're lucky the health department didn't raid this place!)

I already posted about my frustrating experience of learning that nobody makes a decent pan for this sized space anymore so...

We are well on our way to a completely tiled shower.

My husband is whining because it's all going to be gorgeous (our son is ecstatic) and the rooms that DH and I will be using are still cruddy. It's been a fairly big hit in $$$ and we won't get to use it.

My response is that it's time to do the rest of the house too, dear.