Home Tour: Master Bath Before and After

Ok so our house is under contract now with a super awesome family, and we are thrilled to be selling to them.  They remind us so much of ourselves.  Thus why they are awesome.

Ok so I am going to be doing some quick before and after posts because I feel like it would be creepy to be posting before and afters of someone else's house after is sells.  So I am going to be packing like crazy, and I hope that you all don't miss me too much.

So I will tell you that the master bath was a scary room (much like the entire house honestly).  It had a weird and crazy configuration.  There was a little niche that the toilet sat in, with what felt like a ridiculously low hanging shelf above it.  All covered in what can only be described as grime.  The sink sat under a window.  But wait!  How did they see how well they had their teeth brushed, or make-up applied?  Biggest design flaw ever!   Okay, maybe not ever, but certainly short-sighted.

Don't be jealous ladies.  I know you will all be sad to know that we didn't keep that toilet.  Also the walls in here weren't wallpapered.  It was some kind of patterned panel board.  I demo-ed this room mostly by myself, and I won't even begin to tell you all the junk that was happening in here.  I will tell you though that there was some seriously unsafe wiring, and I could have easily electrocuted myself  when I was prying crusty paneling off the wall with a pry bar.  Luckily Señor Hotness and some awesome electrician friends from church completely rewired the house with brand-new wiring. PROBLEM. SOLVED.

Mmm.  I'd like to believe that this was solely from overflowed toilet mishaps.  Something tells me though that this, much like an awesome woman, had mysterious qualities and was more than meets the eye.  We did some crazy things in this room...other than completely gutting it.  <hint hint>  The toilet isn't still sitting here when we are done.

Apparently we didn't get a good picture of the sink area, but as you can see it was an unfortunate shade that screamed that it hailed from the same era as the Brady Bunch.  I, unlike Mama Brady, do not find green sink counters groovy so this to didn't survive the executioners ax either.  Now to address the elephant in the room.  I'm sure you are all asking what we asked.  What is going on in this weird closet area?  The sheet rock in here was installed backwards.  There was a capped drain in the floor, and if you look very carefully, there is wire strung across the top for what I can only assume was clothes storage.

There is a better view of that strangely placed drain.  Just a little fun fact.  When we fully demo-ed this room we discovered that this drain went no where besides the ground beneath it.  So I'm thinking this was planning ahead?

I don't know where to start in this picture.  The heat lamp still sporting a bandaid from who knows who that had been covering who knows what?  The serial killer light attached to the wall, or the fact that the twist air freshener that you can see on the wall there was one of 8 found in the room.  They were almost impossible to remove.  They came out with the paneling.  

Just to show you the classiness up close.  Here is the shelf that is just made to crack your head on.  Also I LOVED the crooked switch plate, and you can see through the doorway to the window in the master bedroom that was busted.  So fun.

So instead of having a drained closet we opted to put in a shower because having to share bathing facilities with the horde wasn't something I wanted to do.  We scored this shower 50% at a local builders surplus store.

This room is super tiny.  It isn't really big enough to comfortably have two people in there at the same time so the wall that was here before made this room feel even smaller and cramped.  So we got rid it during the remodel.

Notice how this niche is suddenly toilet-less.  I'm sure thats a word.  It made so much more sense to place the sink here in the niche, and the toilet where the sink had been.  It allowed for the space needed when stepping out of the shower.  The cabinet, granite sink/counter, and faucet were all also purchased for 50% off at the local builders surplus store.

On a whole I generally don't care for medicine cabinets, but this room was all about being pretty and funcational.  Since this was such a small room already, we needed a place to keep our toiletries off the sink.  I will say this isn't your grandma's medicine cabinet though.  

Generally I wouldn't recommend taking toilet pictures, but this one was a super nice one.  Señor Hotness insisted on this model because he found a video that showed that it could flush an entire bucket of golf balls.  I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to why that might be important.

Other than showing you our super dirty cabinet this picture is pretty significant.  This is where the window was in the room originally.  Being such a small space also meant, in my opinion, that we could sacrifice natural light for more wall space to allow for more storage.  I knew that we would need a behind the toilet cabinet, and I'm not really a fan of covering up a window so we removed it.

This is how we light up the niche.  Its a really pretty cream stone mosaic light fixture.  

I noticed after I snapped the picture that one of these lights is burned out, but these are the other fixtures that handle the lighting for a little windowless room.  The bigger round fixture also doubles as a surprisingly quiet exhaust fan, and the light above the shower is a LED light.  These lights and the niche light are all switched separately as is the fan.

Again, this room being so tight on space meant, we weren't going to be able to have a towel rod.  So instead we installed this row of hooks.  Its pretty and practical. 

So in the end I gave up quality, drainable closet space for a shower,  a toilet niche for a sink, a towel rod for a row of hooks, and a window in lieu of extra storage.  If all of that meant that I was going to have private showering and my own place to potty I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

Linked up to: jannolson.blogspot.com

Home Tour: Family Room Before and After

Ok so my last post featured our kitchen before and afters.  It was in a word...gross, but even it didn't hold a candle to the Family Room.  We are a somewhat large family, and wanted a large family room where we could all chill out together without actually crowding one another.  So when we bought this house we enclosed a single car carport, and merged it with a weird awkward skinny room to create our lovely family room.

See those tiny specks on the floor?  That my friends was a wasp graveyard.  This one isn't that bad.  We had to have the house sprayed twice a month for two months to make a dint in the wasp population.  So when we closed on the house, this floor was almost solidly black the dead wasps were so bad.  They accumulated daily, and so we would have to do a quick sweep.  Just another one of those things that we don't miss.

That's right...that's the other side of the room.  This was a weird narrow room.  I guess it could have been another bedroom if it had had a closet.  We had other plans though.

What is going on here you ask.  We asked ourselves the same thing.  This my friends I'm pretty sure was supposed to be a bar of some kind.  I'm going to go ahead and tell you that we don't drink, and had zero use for a bar.  Especially such a gross, weird one.

The color of this door would have been so cool if the bottom of the door hadn't been completely ruined by water damage.

Ahh, I forgot.  The mysterious metal sconce.  It was treaded for a light bulb, but not actually wired to take one.  Also there is that lovely hole in the wall where my children could have gotten their hands on the romex wiring, YEAH!

  I present to you...The Door To NO WHERE!  They had decided to board up this doorway.  We decided this really was a fantastic place for a back door, and restored it to rights.

Mmm.  A random light socket for all of your bare bulbs.  I personally call these "serial killer" lights.  Seriously in every movie/documentary and what not they always show a scary place lit with...these.  We have these in our house now too...in the ATTIC, because the attic is creepy and these fit right in.

This was the house while we were getting the carport enclosed.  Most of the work on this house we did by being weekend warriors utilizing our sweat equity, but this we hired out.  They had this completely enclosed within two days.  It would have taken us forever to get this done.

When we took down what had been the exterior wall, and load baring wall we needed to put in a serious beam to handle the load so that we could have a nice open room.

You can see the enclosed section on the right in this picture.

Here it is in all its glory, and here you can see some of my past projects (you can find them here, here, and here).  Please disregard my sectional that is SO dirty.  I recently discovered that I HATE microfiber.

I love that we were able to set this room up for the television to be wall mounted so we were able to plan for all the wiring to run in the wall.

So Señor Hotness has a serious hate of ceiling fans with lights on them.  I blame it on the fact that the man sells lighting.  He is a bit of a lighting snob.  Which brings us to the lighting in this room.  All of the down lights are LED.  Which is awesome since they have a 30-ish year life before you might have to replace them.

I present to you to door to...the backyard!  We reopened the boarded up opening for the back door.  It really was the best place for it.  Please forgive the lack of finish painting, and finish flooring.  I have both items, but I lack the skill to do the flooring and the time to finish the painting.  

Ok so you are probably wondering why I'm sharing a picture of the worlds most disorganized storage room.  Well, its because this is what the former creepy bar became.  We call this the "Big Pantry" because we are into super original and inventive names for random rooms, AND we buy lots of food items in bulk, and store the excess in here.  This is also what we use just for general storage.  Also I allow my girls to put things up in the room unsupervised sometimes which explains its organizational method...or lack there of.

Señor Hotness hung a galvanized pipe over the entry way so I could hang a curtain there.  

Sometimes company catches you unawares.  So its been nice to quickly pull the curtain closed if need be.

Do you notice anything amiss?

Yup you guessed it.  These curtains are hiding something besides a possibly trashed out room.

The addition of the curtains have been so super fun for all the littles around here, and because of the super heavy duty pipe screwed directly into the studs in the walls these curtains have held tight.  Even if they might have a somewhat heavy-ish child try to perform acrobatics with these.

Just another room I'm going to miss when we move out of state soon, but thankfully we'll have so many pictures to help carry the fond memories with us.

Linked up at: www.cozylittlehome.com, www.simplelifeofafirewife.com, www.wecallitjunkin.com, www.savvysoutherncharm.net, jannolson.blogspot.com, www.thededicatedhouse.com, www.shakentogetherlife.com, www.funkyjunkinteriors.net

Home Tour: Kitchen Before and After

It is with a heavy heart that we are selling our home.  So in that spirit I thought I would share with you all before and afters of our home.  Now I will admit that not all of my painting is completely finished, but the afters are drastic all the same.

I love how the previous owners made this room completely non functional by squatting a wood burning stove smack in the middle of this room.  There was no room for furniture around it, and it left soot on all the walls and ceiling.  So this was one of the first things to go.

Behind this wall was the existing kitchen.  When we knocked this wall down we more than doubled the space we could use for the kitchen.

Yikes!  The before kitchen wasn't much larger than a postage stamp, and if you will notice...no dishwasher.  This was pretty much my nightmare kitchen.

This was by far the smallest wall oven I had ever seen.  I didn't know they made them this small.  I'm pretty sure you would be hard pressed to fit a casserole dish in there, and as any mom of many can attest, casseroles are a must.  Another fun tidbit, the cook top was smaller than the hole cut into the countertop, and the side of the cabinet and wall surrounding looked like it had been torched.  Can we say grease fire anyone?

Mmm.  Chippy countertops.  These counters had a lovely coating of gross.

Needless to say this room ended up being a total gut job.  In fact the entire house was a total gut job.  It gave us a new blank slate.  Which was awesome because where the previous sink had been had had a longterm leak, and the entire floor had to be replaced.

If that was my nightmare kitchen then our finished product was my dream.  I'm so very sad to leave it behind, but when the Lord leads us somewhere else who am I to question.

So you can imagine how wonderful I feel looking at this knowing where we started.

I love my faucet.  It was a discontinued item...translation it was a cheapo clearance item!  It reminds me of a pump handle in old timey kitchen that still had to hand pump their water from the well.  I love my wall oven which will not only fit a casserole dish, but huge cookie sheets.

We mounted a big tv on the wall to use for entertainment, and homeschooling purposes as it doubles as a monitor for our computer.  The kitchen is usually where all of my parent friends would gather when we had get togethers.  The last few times we just sat, and watched funny youtube videos.  Apparently there is no age limit on enjoying funny animal videos.

And did I mention that this kitchen had two ovens?  It has been this bakers paradise.

Another shot of my amazing island. (read a post about it here)  How I will miss it.

Señor Hotness's older brother built us these fantastic faux door panels for us to paint as chalk boards. Also a bonus I'll miss.

The custom shelves for us to display my antique jar collection is a fantastic feature.

The icing on the cake however was and still is the crazy awesome penny counter-top. (check out a post about it here)  I will miss what Señor Hotness and I have done with this house, and how we transformed what the realtor tried to steer us clear of into such a beautiful home for our family.

Linked up at: www.thededicatedhouse.com, www.savvysouthernstyle.net, jannolson.blogspot.com, www.shakentogetherlife.com, www.funkyjunkinteriors.net, betweennapsontheporch.net, www.cozylittlehouse.com, www.simplelifeofafirewife.com, www.wecallitjunkin.com, www.thededicatedhouse.com