Like any good homeowner, the house is never “done” (ask me about my list of to dos lol!) but I feel like we’re in a really good place with everything. We have accomplished an insane amount of things in the past year. We found mold in our Master Bathroom the second week of February and that started off on this crazy spiral:
- Demolished the master bathroom (DIY)
- Made the master bathroom window smaller (professional)
- Built a new master bathroom (part DIY & professional)
- Demolished all the floor in the house, ~1600 sqft (DIY)
- Installed wood tile in the whole house, ~1600 sqft (professional)
- Replumbed the whole house (professional)
- Painted nearly the whole house (professional)
- Installed new baseboards in the whole house (DIY)
- Purchased furniture to fill our empty house (DIY)
If you’ve been following this blog or my Instagram you have probably seen the play-by-play but in this post I am going to bring it all together into a sort of narrative about how the last 12 months of home ownership has gone for us!
Demolition
Long story short, I was coughing…a lot…and we had a sneaky feeling it was something in this house. So one day I get out of the shower and Will says that the wall by the shower door is really wet. He cuts in to it and viola! We find mold and a lot of it. Our guess is that the grout wore out and someone let it go a while before regrouting. We wanted to redo the master bathroom because we hated it but we weren’t intending to do it less than a year after moving in. Now the big time decision: do we redo the whole bathroom ($$$) or do we piecemeal it??? Can you guess what option we took?
And then things just snowballed after that! On our 2019 goals list was to redo the floors in the whole house so we figured, why not? I mean we’re tearing up some flooring any ways and we HATE the tile/carpet/laminate/wood in the house. This past summer is when most of that demo work got under way. We decided to save lots of moolah by doing to demo work ourselves, tearing things up is certainly not as hard as putting it back together. We continued to sleep in the house, just moving room to room as things got dusty (in retrospect this did NOT help my cough one bit).
Read more: 2019 Summer Round Up: Week 6
Putting it Back Together
With the bathroom demolished we added on getting our house replumbed. Our house had the original, now recalled, plumbing, and figured might as well do it when we exposed all the pipes in the master bathroom. Will had a personal connection to do our plumbing through the dad of one of his students. 🙂 After the plumbing and demo work was done we ordered our tile, a wood-look finish, and got tile layers (through a personal contact from my sister-in-law).
P.S. I literally don’t know how people get home renovation jobs done without personal connections!
Now we had a house with new pipes and new floors but things still looked super shitty. Will knows someone who paints houses and we decided to ask how much that would be for the house, eh might as well! It was a great price, so we added in painting nearly the whole interior of the house onto this every growing list. At this point I started to feel better about the whole thing and we began to put our life back in order.
To add a curve ball to it all, I found out my sister and her boyfriend were coming home from Germany for Christmas and I REALLY wanted to host my family in our house soooo we decided to go for it. 🙂 At that point we still had no plan for the master bathroom and we had barely any furniture. We found a daughter-father duo to pretty much take over the bathroom remodel so that Will and I could focus on redecorating and putting up baseboards.
The bathroom was slow moving, mostly because our shipments kept getting cancelled or super delayed but we had a “functional” but not finished bathroom for Christmas, meaning some tiling needed to be finished and we were waiting on the glass wall for the shower.
Read more: A house blessing & tour
“New” Furniture
Now that we had spent most of our savings we didn’t have much left over for new furniture but we desperately needed furniture for Christmas. Anddddd in comes Facebook Marketplace. 🙂 I started spending hours each week looking for gently used items for our house and boy did I strike gold!
- Dining room table – $500
- 10 foot L-shaped couch – $400 (see above for the advertisement of that same couch new)
- 8×10 feet area rug – $45
- Chair & ottoman – $70
- 4 barstools – $70
We did end up buying a new desk & coffee table because we were not finding ones we liked via Facebook Marketplace. Although our journey is still not “done” (will it ever be?). I feel that we are in a great place to move more thoughtfully and slowly, making this house into our home.
JMF
