Trying to post before and after photos side by side.... Bear with me!!!!

Upstairs bath after

During

Upstairs bath before

OMG!!!!

Its been months since I've posted, but an amazing amount of progress has been made!!!!! We're in the home stretch, as they say. 

The upstairs is finished except for some trim and the living room, dining room, parlor, entry and vestibule are done down stairs!!! We're still working on the kitchen, downstairs bath, laundry room and office. 

Paint, tile, and a pretty medicine cabinet

It's been busy! The upstairs drywall and plaster repair is done and it looks fabulous! We also made the decision to do a knockdown on all of the ceiling to help disguise any imperfections. They also look good, but OMG did that stuff make a mess (that we're still dealing with).  

So last week I bought 37 gallons of primer and paint. And thanks to our grandkids Deandre, DaVonne and Taniya and my sister Kathy for helping prime the entire upstairs. Now the real color painting begins!

We painted the bathroom first so that we could start on the tile, floor and just under halfway up the wall. Then we'll be able to set the toilet so downstairs demo can begin. But I needed a little incentive, so I convinced my VERY hard working hubby to put up the antique medicine cabinet. It's just the look I was hoping for even if the silver is a little messed up around the edges. I love it!!! 

Crazy couple of months!!!

Sorry it's taken awhile to post but it has truly been crazy around here the last few months! Even for Wayne, the dog! And I'm not even talking about the record number of sub-zero days! But much progress has been made. Most notably the blown in insulation, the upstairs drywall, and not least, the matching of stain from 100-year-old oak to 1-year-old oak. 

While we knocked out entire walls upstairs, we only cut out sections of plaster downstairs since there weren't firewalls.  That helps a lot on the reconstruction!!

The drywall is up upstairs and because of it, insulation and new windows, it's really cozy now.  Even though the furnace in the attic isn't completed yet. (Next week we hope!)

The bathroom plan came out amazing and it's going to be really charming! The plan is a black and white basket weave tile on the floor with white subway tile half way up the walls and soft butter color paint. I can't wait to start tiling! And I've been working on restoring a beautiful medicine cabinet I found in an antique store for only $26!! Some rust, but beautiful with a frameless etched mirror. And Alan built in a little cubbie for TP storage that I'm going to repurpose an old beadboard door for a built in. Good idea, right?

Another thing that got accomplished was moving the two doors closing off the dining room to the new big closets upstairs. Worked like a dream! Plus we're going to have a coffee station in the the new HUGE master closet. 

And here's a shot of some of the outside issues we've had to deal with! 

Windows arrived!!!

Yay!!! First one in and it looks really great. Thanks, Alan!!! Also, my scaffolding is in at Home Depot so I can finish removing wallpaper without killing myself going up and down ladders. It will also be useful for painting and hanging my beautiful fixtures! 

Post Thanksgiving work

Kind of slow, to be honest.  Maybe I'm still in a Turkey coma! Lol!!! Wayne didn't seem to mind a low key couple of days. 

Meanwhile, I was steaming multiple layers of wallpaper thanks to my BFF Clyde. Previously, I had been using a squirt bottle and a scraper. Thank God for good friends with stuff! I got some weird rusults though. One wall was a golden color under all the layers and the steamer kind of messed up the woodwork slightly. Oh well, just another thing to fix.

The vents are completed though on the first floor and should help keep the temp in the house more modified for the season. 

I've been thinking about custom roller blinds for the 4 casement windows in the dining room. I thought taping the samples would help but, not so much!

They're just too small to get a good idea of the final result!

For a final word, thanks to our grandson, Davonne, for being such a big help getting organized today...in between texting and a nap! Gotta love teenagers! 

Tomorrow, the upstairs windows are supposed to be delivered, so that's the next thing to check off our list. 

Hanging in there. 

If it's not one thing, it's another; as Emily Litella used to say!

We've been working like dogs... Okay, Alan's been working like a dog! I've been working like a hamster... or maybe a cat. Just kidding!!! We've both been working hard and it's driving me crazy that the appearance of progress has been kind of slow. Anyone who has done renovations knows that the mechanicals behind the walls takes the longest amount of time and is the least noticeable.

On a positive note, we do have the first furnace going (although the vents aren't hooked up quite yet) so there is heat in the house. Kind of. Lol!!! The hot air is blowing out into the basement and coming up through the holes in the floor the hubby cut for the new ducts. Those will go in next week. And I LOVE the vent covers I found at Home Depot...on sale!!! Score for me!!! And they look beautiful.



One thing that has taken forever is preping the main bathroom for the new shower, moving the sink and toilet and adding a wall. Nothing was vented correctly! But it's coming along and the copper goes in tomorrow for the all the water supply. I love that the main bathroom is going to be so much larger than it was! We bought a beautiful antique pedestal sink from our friends LuAnnn and T-Bone (yes, you read that correctly!) and I've been researching how to refinish the original clawfoot tub from the bathroom. I'm going to use Rustoleum Tub and Tile Epoxy Refinisher and can't wait to get started on that project. The interior of the tub and the feet will be white and the exterior blacl. Here's a picture of what I have in mind... We'll see how it turns out!

In the meantime, this is what the bathroom looked like tonight with all the new pipes and the shower stall. Trust me, it's going to be fabulous!!!

In the meantime, since I know NOTHING about plumbing, I've been working on getting pesky plaster removed from the lathe in all the upstairs rooms so that new wiring and blown in insulation can be added. And removing all of the wallpaper, which is quite annoying at times. It's like they used some kind of super industrial glue!!! But, slowly but surely I'm overcoming it. I'm going to try to use our clothing steamer this weekend to work on the living room and parlor downstairs to remove the layers of paper. Promise I'll take pictures. It should be fun!!!!