I love a good before-and-after story. Unfortunately...I don't have one to share yet. It has taken waaayy longer than I anticipated to find a contractor who could fit us into their schedule and get us a bid for the job. To this day, we still don't have a written bid. However, we did find out that the "ballpark" estimate is higher than the price we paid for the house. OUCH!
In the meantime, we have been doing some prep work to clean the place and remove icky nastiness so that whenever we do get a contractor, it will be that much cheaper and easier for them (hopefully) to do their work.
So the next few posts will show the "before" and "not-so-before" of the rooms inside the house.
WARNING: We all look grungy in these pictures. You would too if you spent 7 hours cleaning decades worth of funk out of a house with no air conditioning in Texas in the summer. Please don't judge. I promise we look way better than this most of the time.
With that out of the way, here's the before and not-so-before of the living room and main bedroom.
Before: 60s acoustic tile on the ceiling.
Before: facing towards the street.
To take the ceiling down, they had to pull some metal trim, and then essentially scrape the ceiling tiles off of the ceiling.
All those little white dots are staples with white fibrous tile clinging to the ceiling.
We had to pull each staple out individually. (I use "we" in the general sense here. I didn't ACTUALLY do any staple-pulling in the living room. But they saved plenty of staples for me in other rooms). No joke. At first we used needle-nose pliers, but that was not a perfect solution. Not only did it kill your forearms, at least a fourth of the time, we inadvertently pulled the handles off of the pliers. Eventually Mom ordered a staple remover (originally designed for upholstery) on Amazon that made the process much easier.
But after getting the staples out, look how much cleaner and prettier the ceiling looked!
Ta-da! Not-so-before of the living room. Yes, clearly still work to be done, but significant improvement and it's ready for the pros to start working (whenever that might be...).
And in the master bedroom...
Before: Someone had already started working on the main bedroom ceiling when we bought the house. But they had only pulled down a small corner so there was still quite a bit left to do.
I have no idea what these things were made of but it was fibrous and left a huge mess and a lot of dust as they came down.
Not-so-before 1.
Not-so-before 2.
Not-so-before 3. You may also notice the absence of nasty plastic mini-blinds that were once there. Window treatments are going to be an interesting challenge, I think. We've got 32 windows total. Privacy will be a huge concern for the rooms at the front that face the street, including the master bedroom. But at the back of the house, not so much. We certainly won't want to hide the molding on the windows, but because the windows are double hung, the frames may not be deep enough to mount hardware on the inside of each frame. That's the up-side to things taking so long...plenty of time to decide...
Not-so-before 4.
That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.
Christy
