I told you I would do what I could and give you another before and after! For this addition, I bring you our family room.

The Before Picture There are a few things that had already been torn out before I had a chance to take a before picture. Around the fireplace, there was [...]]]>

I told you I would do what I could and give you another before and after! For this addition, I bring you our family room.

The Before Picture
There are a few things that had already been torn out before I had a chance to take a before picture. Around the fireplace, there was a very cheap looking mantle… you know, the kind where you had extra baseboard and a few extra finishing nails. To make things worse, the mantle also stuck further out into the little entry area so you were more likely to run into it if you were not paying attention. Another item that had already been removed was the cheap wood stand looking thing going from the little bar area to the floor. They use to have a large fish tank onto of the bar area and the stand thing hid the plumbing and pumps for it. It was ugly… it had to go! By this time, we had also removed the baseboards in order to repair the moldy drywall that was over by the sliding glass door. You can see where we rolled the carpet back a little bit to let the wall finish drying out before we dug into it.

The After Picture
This room took a while to finish. There are still a few things what we have to do to it… for example, finish installing the new light switches. But here is a breakdown of what we did to this room:

• Washed the walls and the roof with TSP TWICE! It was that bad.
• Ripped out a 2×2 foot chunk of the drywall near the lower corner of the sliding glass door because the slider was leaking that that area had water damage/mold. We also ran an Ozone machine in the house for a while to make sure everything was killed off.
• At least 3 coats of primer were applied to the red wall, 2 coats to the tan wall, and 2 coats to the ceiling.
• Painted the ceiling with super awesome ceiling paint… it went on PINK and then dried white so you knew if you missed a spot!
• The walls got 2 color coats of paint in “raw silk” It’s a white paint with a hit of yellow/grey that REALLY picks up the color for the floor.
• The carpet was pulled out and we put down laminate flooring. We tired something else that didn’t work… more on that below.
• New baseboards.
• All new outlets and switches.
• New ceiling fan… that seems to switch on from time to time on it’s own. Think the neighbors have the same frequency.
• The bar top now has a stainless steel finish.

The Learning Experience
When we bought the house, we didn’t have money in the budget to do the floors… but the carpet HAD to come out. We had both seen places where they had stained the concrete slab and it turned out beautiful! We thought this would be a great inexpensive idea to hold us over until we could afford wood floors. After all, I had stained wood in the past… couldn’t be all that much different right? WRONG!

We knew we had to prep the floor before we stained it. We tried everything we could to get the carpet glue off the slab… even rented one of those massive floor buffing machines with a super scrubber pad on it… nothing worked. The carpet glue would not come up.

Since we couldn’t get the glue off, we decided to do a very thin coating of concrete over the slab. Oh, I forgot to mention, we had already bought 4 gallons of concrete acid stain by this time. The thin coat of concrete went on very well, except that we put it on WAY too wet. This led pit marks in the concrete… at least now we know what we did wrong.

At this point, we were exhausted, frustrated, and almost out of money. Luckily LOWES had a sale on cheap laminate flooring. While still a challenge to install, it turned out pretty good.

While the guest bathroom isn’t totally finished, here are the before and after pictures.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to finish up the our DIY guest bathroom. The problem with this bathroom is that it has the only working shower in the house. Because of this, all [...]]]>

While the guest bathroom isn’t totally finished, here are the before and after pictures.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to finish up the our DIY guest bathroom. The problem with this bathroom is that it has the only working shower in the house. Because of this, all the work we did in the bathroom had to be done in sections that would allow us to be able to take our showers in the morning for work. For example, we used a quick drying tile mortar which allowed us to walk on it after 6 hours. We tried to do the same with the tile grout, however, the only stuff we could find was a resin synthetic grout that allowed you to walk on it after 16 hours. On the bright side, using a synthetic grout, we didn’t have to seal it! That saved a great deal of time.

Here is a breakdown of what we have done to this bathroom:

• Removed old sink (leaked), vanity, toilet (leaked), light fixture (rusted ugly), and vinyl flooring (nasty).
• Removed a 2 foot x 2 foot section of drywall that was covered in mold and replaced it.
• 2 coats of KILZ Primer, 2 color coats of paint.
• Installed tile floor with synthetic grout.
• Installed new pedestal sink and faucet.
• Installed new DUAL FLUSH toilet.
• Installed new light fixture.
• Installed new mirror that tilts.
• Installed new curved shower rod, and “rain” shower head.
• Installed new baseboards.
• Replaced old broken exhaust fan with high efficiency version.
• Installed new digital timer for exhaust fan.
• Replace all electrical outlets and switches along with their face plates.

There are still things that we need to do to finish it up:

• Resurface the Shower/Tub — eventually replace it with tile shower or claw-foot soaking tub when money allows
• Replace the bathroom door, and have it swing into the bathroom instead of out into the hall
• Hang pictures and shelves for towels… so on and so forth…

It has taken a great deal of time and frustration, but we finally have 1 fully functioning bathroom in the house!!!

The trouble with buy a home is that sometimes you find things that are just… well… troublesome. Here is a perfect example… in the “green room” while prepping for painting, we removed the crown molding to find that the original owner had painted over the wallpaper border. We figured that since it was already [...]]]>  

The trouble with buy a home is that sometimes you find things that are just… well… troublesome. Here is a perfect example… in the “green room” while prepping for painting, we removed the crown molding to find that the original owner had painted over the wallpaper border. We figured that since it was already bubbling in areas, it was a good idea to remove the wallpaper and repaint it.

After looking online, I found many tips on how to remove wallpaper that had been painted over. However, after trying some of these suggestions, we found that many of them didn’t actually work very well. So, I figured I would write up a tutorial on how I went about removing it.

NOTE: I want to make one thing clear… this will make a pretty good size mess. You may want to cover any flooring that may be damaged by scraps of wallpaper with paste on it. Also, this does have a possible risk of damage to the wall plaster… while there wasn’t any damage to our walls, every wall is different.

How We Removed Painted Over Wallpaper

THE SUPPLIES:

Most of the supplies and tools I mention here can be found at many local home improvement stores. The tools that we used were purchased at LOWES because it was near us.

1. This is the wallpaper scoring tool. It puts tiny cuts all over the wallpaper so the spray stripper can work it’s magic on the glue.
2. The wallpaper removal spray comes in both a liquid and a gel. I used the liquid stuff… you will use A LOT of this stuff. 
3.  The wallpaper scraper. Any scraper should work, but ours had a wheel on the back to roll against the wall…

THE STEPS: Time to get to work!

1. Get the wallpaper scoring tool and start scoring in a circular motion. You will want to push down pretty hard… Not so hard that they little wheels stop spinning, but hard enough that you get through the layer of paint. You may see little marks in your drywall, but that’s ok… the primer will cover most, if not all the marks.
2. Next we are going to spray on the wallpaper remover. Give everything a pretty good soak. Remember, you have to try to get under the paint and wallpaper to the paste. Read the instructions on your spray to see how long you need to let it do it’s job. The first attempt, we didn’t wait long enough and it was a pain. The second attempt we waited the 15min and it worked much better!
3. After waiting, it’s time to grab the scraper and get to work. This is where my technique differs from others. Try to scrap/peel the TOP layer of the paint/wallpaper off. Don’t worry if you don’t get it all off… All we really want to do is peel off the paint and maybe the color layer of the wallpaper. If it does all come off easy, then that’s great too!
4. Now, pick up the scoring too again and go back over everything you didn’t get off the first time. This time however, you may notice that when scoring, bits of the stuff you couldn’t get off before start to flake off. You may need to CAREFULLY clean the scoring wheels from time to time. Once again, don’t worry too much about putting marks in the drywall because the primer should cover it up.
5.  Just like in Step 2, we are going to spray the wallpaper remover again. Like before, give it a nice soak… and then wait. While you wait, it might be a good idea to get a trash back and clean up some of the larger chunks of wallpaper.
6. Once again, grab the scraper and go at it. You should notice that most, if not all of the wallpaper coming off this time with very little effort. However, there may be little areas here and there that still stick… but should be fairly easy to remove. If after this step, you still have large sections of wallpaper sticking to the wall, repeat the above steps.
7. This might be considered an optional step… but it doesn’t hurt. With a sanding block, quickly sand that areas that were covered in wallpaper.
8. Clean Up – Take a sponge and clean, warm water and wash the walls. This will help remove the wallpaper paste that was left on the walls.
9. Prime! Before you put your final coat of paint on, it’s best to prime all the walls. This will make a BIG difference, and is actually cheaper then having to use 2 coats of your colored paint.

It will take some time and some work, but the results are pretty good. We have primed the green room and should be putting on the color coat of paint this weekend. I’ll post pictures when the paint goes on. If anyone has other tips and suggestions on wallpaper removal, please put them in the comments below.