Before and...not-so-before part 5

Ah the kitchen.  Always a hot topic on those home renovation shows.  Even without a finished product you can really see the potential in this kitchen.  So let's get started.

These are the original 1920s cabinets, complete with glass doors and most of the original crystal pulls. And even though the sink is in rough shape at one corner, we are definitely going to keep it. We were told that underneath the laminate counter is a solid piece of cypress. 

The stove and dishwasher were later additions and of course, the plumbing and electrical for those appliances is frightening. Originally, the house had a wood stove, and you can see the stove pipe cover.  Behind that jog in the wall is a brick chimney that we plan to expose later down the road. It's amazing to me how much more obvious the grime is in the photos. The same weird cardboard wall covering was used in the kitchen as was used in the sleeping room.

Just off the kitchen is a mudroom, which had been retrofit with a washer and dryer hookup, as well as the hot water heater.

The breakfast nook in the kitchen has the most water damage.

Check these two out! And yes, I bedazzled my pink hardhat. 

This was probably one of the filthiest things I've done in my entire life. Decades of dust, dirt, and vermin droppings in the Texas heat.  Yuck.

But you can see that beautiful wood beginning to peek through.

We tried to leave the ceiling for last because we knew it was going to be the most disgusting.

And it definitely was. The ceiling boards were so loaded with dust and nastiness that they came down with very little assistance in eight-foot sections.

It took some serious sweeping and vacuuming to clean up the mess.

And of course, you need proper supervision...

And there she is. Even with the termite damage on the right side you can see the sheen on that wood.

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Before and not-so-before part 4

Today's before and not-so-before post is about my absolute favorite room in the house:  the sunroom, which we also call the sleeping room for reasons I will explain below.  The sunroom is the back of the house connecting to the kitchen and to the second bedroom.

Here's the before:

I'm not entirely sure what they were going for here.  It's almost as if they wanted it to look like the Tudor half-timbered houses?  I don't know...

We delicately removed the groovy 60s pendant light...surely someone will want it.

The paneling was on the walls as well as the ceiling; basically any place that wasn't a window.

It was some sort of weird particle board.  It wasn't exactly drywall, but not it was definitely some type of paper product.  It was nailed to the wall and then the rows of nails were covered with the strips of wood. After we pulled the strips, we could just tear the particle board off as if it was just a normal piece of cardboard.  But what was left behind were rows of nails that we eventually had to pull out too.

And the not-so-before:

With three of us working, it only took a day to pull it all down.

You can sort of see little bits beneath the window that we just couldn't get out.  We are probably going to leave those for the pros later.

After we got all the particle board off, we saw this writing on the boards:

Though it is tough to see, it says sleeping room. Isn't that cool?

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Before and...not-so-before part 3

The saga of contractors continues.  While we've been working through that situation, we've been doing a ton of work outside; unfortunately, I haven't organized all the photos yet.  So instead, here's an installment of Before and Not-so-before featuring the second bedroom.

Here's the before:

1960s wood paneling and acoustic ceiling tiles.

Another view.  Don't you love the negative space where there had previously been picture frames? This makes me want to clean every surface in my own house for fear of ever letting it get this bad. Note yet another water leak.

Mom and Dad pulled the ceiling tiles and wood paneling down.  Behind it is some old wallpaper.  All things considered, this isn't horrible wallpaper.

Here's a closer view of the wallpaper.  Since wallpaper is back, I'd be curious to see if someone still makes this.  Not that I'd actually use it later, just out of curiosity.

And the not-so-before of the second bedroom.

Door on the left goes down the hallway.  You can see the hole where the telephone nook used to be. The door on the right is a closet.

From the other direction the sunroom is straight ahead.  The door on the right is a small closet.

And another angle, with the closet door on the left and the hallway door on the right.  If you were keeping count, there are four doorways and a group of windows in this room.  Furniture placement is going to get interesting.  But that is a subject for another day.

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Before and...not-so-before part 2

In case you missed Before and Not-So-Before, the renovation of our house is crawling along at a snail's pace.  So as much as I would love to share a "before-and-after" story, the best I've got is "before-and-not-so-before."

Today's feature:  the central hallway. 

Before:  1960's wood paneling all the way up and down, with a strip of trim about a foot down from the ceiling.  The central hallway connects both bedrooms and the dining room to the bathroom.  By way of orientation, the telephone nook is adjacent to the dining room door.  The bathroom is across the hall from the telephone nook.  The bedrooms are at either end.

Mom and Dad took down the ceiling tiles, but they saved me all the staples in the hallway. Believe me...I was thrilled.

Now...I know many folks would want to open this up because it is pretty narrow.  That's not an option for us for a couple reasons.  First, since this is not going to be a full-time residence, our goal is to preserve original features even if they aren't necessarily what is "hip" by today's standards (for example, who has heard of the drinking game where you take a shot anytime someone says "open floor plan" during an episode of House Hunters?").  Second, this appears to be a load-bearing wall.  All of the rafters in the ceiling meet at a beam in the attic that runs the length of this hallway.  

Because the hallway is narrower, you get a better sense of just how tall the ceilings are.

 Pulling the trim and the paneling off of the wall was relatively quick and painless.  The trim pulled off in long strips with just a little assistance from my handy seven-function tool.  (As an aside, I've never been able to figure out why it's called a seven-function tool.  I have only counted up to 3 or 4 functions.  If anyone knows all seven, please share with the rest of the class.)

Pulling off the paneling was seriously gratifying because most of the time it came down in large sheets.  Around the moldings and trim it got a little frustrating, however.

It took just a few hours to remove all the wallboard and clean up.  

I did not have enough steam at the end of the day to remove the paper backing that was behind the paneling.  But Mom and Dad came back on another day and finished it up.

 Not-so-before:

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Happy Early Halloween!

Halloween has come early to WBC.

In celebration, I thought I'd share a creepy story.  Last weekend Larry and I were measuring the depth of the lower cabinets.  We opened the cabinet below and guess what we found....

A snakeskin!

One of us screamed like a little girl (but I'll leave you to ponder which one of us it was).  And then since we are both citified wussies, we shut the cabinet and left it there to deal with another day.

This weekend, with Mom and Dad there for backup, we decided to pull it out. O.M.G.  It kept going, and going, and going....

This thing was at least three feet long.

Here's his face.  Did you know that snakes shed the skin on their eyeballs?  I certainly didn't.

Here's the creepiest part of the story...Mom neglected to mention earlier that she found another snakeskin a few months ago while she was cleaning the cabinets.  This is the SECOND ONE and he was there RECENTLY....Think about that one the next time you open your kitchen cabinets!

That's all from Wisteria Bend for now.

Christy

Before and....not-so-before

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.

 Each tile was held up by at least 4 staples.  When the tiles came down what was left was THOUSANDS of staples with bits of leftover decayed tile.  You learn very quickly, DON'T DO THIS KIND OF WORK WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN.

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