Progress Update

March 6, 2016

“Perfection is boring” – a new mantra we’ve been trying out lately. It’s been serving us well as we work on our old house where nothing seems perfect. This post is a long over due Bringing it Home, progress update.

TV Room Transformation

I have a new appreciation for all of those home renovation bloggers out there, who manage to share their projects weekly, and always end with a beautifully staged room for the final photo. I’m not sure how they manage to do all the work, photograph it and blog about it, but here’s our progress update from the last few weeks.  We’ve been working on finishing the installation of the new laminate flooring on the second floor of the house (complete), as well as finishing the middle room, (what we’re calling the TV room).

The TV room is a pass thru room to get to the bathroom and the office and porch in the back of the house. It was 4 doorways (1 for a closet and one is a second entrance into the bathroom closet, which is kind of awkward and may go away in the future) and 1 window. It gets really nice afternoon sunlight. Like most of the other rooms in the house the walls were covered with several layers of old peeling wallpaper and paint, and there was water damage from a leaky roof down one of the walls and the floor was beyond repair. We (as in my awesome husband) actually had to rip up several floor boards and replace them in order to level the floor enough to install the laminate flooring over top. We also realized that while the floor was ripped up, would be a perfect time to add some blow-in insulation on the west and east facing walls.

This job is a a little messy (make sure you wear a good mask), but was a really affordable DIY project. We rented the machine and purchased the GreenFiber  (R60 Cellulose Blown-in Insulation with Sound Barrier), from our local Lowes store. We were able to add the insulation from the second floor, inside the walls, down to the first floor. It only took a few hours, including the trips to pick up and drop  off the  machine, and we can already feel the difference! Once the floor boards were back in place, it was time to tackle the walls.

Over the next few weekends we worked on removing the wallpaper.  We even got some help from Kevin’s brother Ed and his wonderful wife Donna, who volunteered to come and help scrape wallpaper – I know, crazy, right? but crazy in a really good, wonderful way. Thank you Donna and Ed! Kevin found this cool stuff called Loctite Power Grab ($3.58 a tube at Lowes) and drilled holes in the plaster, where it was loose, squeezed in the Loctite, then used some special washers and screws to pull the plaster back tight against the lath (wood strips) underneath. Brilliant!

Scraping, Scrubbing and Sanding

After hours of scraping, then scrubbing and sanding to clean the old 100 year wallpaper glue off the walls, we did many more hours of patching, spackling and sanding before we finally got to prime the walls. The walls are definitely NOT perfect, but about a million times better than when we started. We used Kilz primer to hide the water stains (this took several coats on the ceiling and some heavily stained areas on the walls.

Finished, almost…

The walls are painted with Gray Owl from Benjamin Moore, in eggshell finish. It’s a lovely soft gray, that looks really nice with the white trim. Speaking of trim, that’s next on the “to do” list. I’ll be sanding again and testing out white paint. We have Benjamin Moore, Simply White in both Semi-gloss and a Gloss that we had specially mixed – as apparently, it’s not usually available in gloss any more (and yet there was a wood sample with gloss sitting right there on the counter, hmmm). Oh, don’t get me started on the crappy negative attitude of the paint guy at the nearby hardware store in Lemoyne, PA. I’ll just say that it was SO painfully unpleasant to deal with him, I may be switching paint brands…hello Sherwin Williams.

The finished room – well almost finished – if you don’t look real close at the woodwork. It isn’t decorated and we have some cable tv and stero wires to hide, but it’s feels really great to finally have a clean comfortable place to relax and recharge between projects

Only 7 or 8 more rooms to go!