our bathroom

With old houses, you find very few bathrooms. Our house is from 1920, and we have four bedrooms with only one bathroom (not including the closet with a toilet below the stairs that is currently not in working order).

The bathroom was the very first thing that Steve started working on in July 2013. But since everything had to be custom made, it came to a standstill, and just finally got finished this weekend!


The old bathroom had yucky green linoleum floors, painted wood-paneling walls, and the ugliest fluorescent drop ceiling light fixtures. Steve just went ahead and ripped all of that out :)

 
He got the walls down to the lathe, then he put up new drywall. If we had unlimited resources, or this were our forever home, he would have taken out the fixtures as well to dry-wall behind them.

 
We painted the new walls a minty green. Photos don’t really do it justice. It’s hard to take photos of bathrooms! :)


When he ripped up the linoleum, there was obvious damage to the wood around the tub. He replaced the flooring with new wood, sanded the entire floor, and stained everything to match. It turned out beautifully!

   
So this is how it looked for a year. Steve hadn’t made up his mind what to do with the ceiling above the shower or the vanity—there were some electrical and vent issues to consider. Recently, he decided to just finish the job: he tore it all out :) The light in the shower was a huge no-no and was gladly removed for safety. The exhaust fan/light was taken out above the toilet. (He found a dead bat in that fixture!) This left a series of holes in the ceiling and walls leading up to the attic—hello more drywall!

 

 
Now we have a simple, uncomplicated bathroom. Steve plans to add some trim where the old paneling meets the repaired plaster.


We added the shelf above the toilet when we moved in. Steve also switched the light switches, outlets, and covers from dingy to white!


We didn’t touch the tub or the tile above it. It’s another “If this were our forever home” job. . .  We’d love to take out the plastic wall insert, and tile all the way up to the ceiling.


Steve had to custom make all of the door and window casing (to include the window sill) to match the woodwork in the rest of the house.

   

As he did with the door and window, Steve matched new base moulding and shoe and installed them.

Thanks for stopping by!

Take a look at the rest of our house projects.

our room

Welcome to Steve’s and my bedroom (and Ephraim’s for the time-being, too). I really like having E close to me, and I know he feels the same way :)

When Steve first saw the house when the former owners were living here, it was an office.

The former owners moved out, and we tried to decide which room should be the master bedroom. All four of the bedrooms looked exactly the same size, but this room had a closet that you could walk into. Plus, the closet had a window in it, so I decided it had to be ours. In the winter, we realized that it is the room with the fewest outlets, and it has no heating vents in it! Brr!

Steve refinished the floors. We painted the walls a light lilac color right before we moved in. Just recently, we got rid of the dark green blinds.

I love our headboard since my dad made it.


For some reason, a previous owner had taken down the shelving in the closet. Steve found one piece in the attic, propped against a wall and rightly deduced that it was half of the shelf. The other half had been used as flooring in a crawlspace in the attic! (I don’t know how he even found it!) He refinished them, and reinstalled them a couple months ago, and I am loving having the extra clothes space. Steve uses the closet in our extra bedroom for his clothes. We also have a dresser that is usually in our room, but it is in process of getting a new coat of paint.

 

Found two of these cute prints here. I made the other two.
 

I’m linking up with Andrea for the “Come On In” series. Click through my “Come On In” label to see all the rooms we’ve done so far. :)

AND today is my little man’s THIRD birthday!! I can’t believe it! Did you catch his donut party yesterday? HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NOLAN BRUCE! We love you!

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our project list

Steve and I seem to always have a long list of projects that need to be done around the house. He has learned so much about remodeling, woodwork, electricity, and even plumbing in recent years, so when I come up with some kind of idea or dream, he responds by “I can do that!” So we’re definitely the couple that starts a million projects, and we get overwhelmed after a while because we can’t always finish them quickly :)

A year ago for my birthday, Steve ordered me a copy of “Young House Love,” but it got lost in the mail :( We got over it after a while and I forgot about it. But yesterday I unwrapped this copy (thanks, Steve!) and I’m super excited because I’m sure it will inspire many upcoming projects!

Last week, I mentioned that we stopped by a 1900 mansion that is being torn down soon. We had the option to buy some inexpensive, beautiful oak flooring for our kitchen and nearby bathroom—so we wanted to find out if there was hardwood underneath the red linoleum before we went out and purchased wood. We were really excited to find some nice wood underneath the bathroom and hallway area! Yay! Unfortunately, we are pretty certain there is no hardwood underneath the kitchen :(

 
Steve pulled up the linoleum (there ended up being three layers of old flooring to pull up) and scraped/sanded down the old glue mess.

There’s a lot of floor left to sand and then refinish. Since the toilet has leaked and caused water damage to the floor, he’s going to pull it out and fix the issue. The sink will eventually be replaced for a smaller size or corner sink so that everything fits better into the tiny bathroom. Lastly, we’ll update the paint and mirror/vanity.

 

This is the red floor of the kitchen that we would eventually replace with new wood.


This is our front entryway. I took down an old, dusty lace curtain from the middle window with the promise that I would make a new, more modern curtain. I hope to replace the two side curtains as well. The floor pattern is a bit outdated (as well as peeling in places) and there is (most likely) wood underneath to sand and refinish, of course :)

  
Another project on our list is to repaint my dresser in our bedroom. It was once my grandma and grandpa’s when they were young, and has been painted many colors in the past. Right now it’s a dark purple that I chose when I was in high school. I’d like it to be something lighter, that would match our bedroom better. :)  PS My dad wrote the “I Love You” for my mom.
 
A couple of months ago, we started work on updating the attic. Steve and Josh painted it a nice gray color with white trim (it still needs some paint touchups). Steve is also planning on replacing all the door and window trim with “proper” trim—what is there now is hastily cut pieces of wooden paneling. Then we’ll decide how best to use the space!


It’s been a huge goal of mine to organize my craft desk. It is a mess and I can’t wait for some morning when I have a couple of hours to dedicate to the job. I inherited a lot of fabrics recently that will be really fun to sew with someday. :)


Our main bathroom has been under construction since we moved in thirteen months ago. We were able to do a lot of initial work refinishing the floors, tearing out horrible lighting, putting up drywall, painting, etc. Steve recently made and installed most of the trim and base moulding to match the rest of the house. As you can see, there is still some work to be done, and I need to sew a new curtain because it’s just a bath towel hanging in the window right now, haha.


My grandma and grandpa gave me this print a few weeks ago and I can’t wait to get it framed and hung up in our bedroom. Steve knows how to matte paintings and build frames, so we’ll wait until he has time to do it. He bought me a lot of little prints by the same artist for my birthday yesterday and we’ll have to find a place for those because they are wonderful!

Usually I just show you when a room is finished, so I hope you enjoyed this little peek into all that still undone! You’ll find Steve and me praying for more time between work and childcare so we can finish what we’ve started. :)

Linking up with Andrea for her “What’s On” series.

the playroom

Welcome to our playroom!

To start, I want to share that we are renters. Steve is in his sixth year of post-college studies (working hard now on his doctoral dissertation), so we aren’t in our forever-home yet. We moved in last summer, just over a year ago, and we are in the unique position that we’re allowed to make changes and updates to the house while we are here to increase the house’s value :) Oh, and it was built in 1920, so it has a TON of character.

Here are a couple of photos before the last owner moved out. As you can see, the room is set up as a formal dining room, situated between the front door of the house and the kitchen. However, we didn’t come with dining room furniture, so we decided it would work nicely as a playroom—and it has!


For a year, we didn’t paint or do any updates to the room. At the end of July, we decided to give it a couple coats of gray paint. We used Olympic’s “Gray Marble," from Lowe’s. The old paint was dull, marked up, and looked yellowy in the sunlight, so this serene gray was a vast improvement. I swapped the navy curtains for some light blue ones that were elsewhere in the house. Steve and I absolutely love how it turned out!

Take a look! :)

 

The boys’ personalized Thirty-One utility totes make for great toy storage!

   
These white drawers were in my closet, but I realized they would make awesome toy containers. Nolan has TONS of Duplos, and now they all fit in the bottom drawer :)




In recent months, I’ve really begun to see how visual clutter affects my mood. Nolan has acquired many toys in his short three years. At the beginning of the summer, I could see that he was bored even though he had toys scattered throughout the entire house. I moved many of them to the basement and started a rotation schedule. When I pull out a toy he hasn’t seen in a while, he’ll play with it for hours! This has helped me with the visual clutter issue. And it shows how for Nolan—less is more :)

Thank you so much for stopping by! These are my favorite posts each month—I love a good before and after :)

I’m linking up with Andrea for the “Come On In” series. We’ve already done living room, kitchen, outdoor space, and kids’ rooms.

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