Without droning on and on, but in giving some perspective and journaling our experience, housing right now across the country is a mess. Prices are inflated and demand is high. Being in the military we get a BAH (basic allowance for housing) that generally keeps up with prices similar to where you're being stationed. We've been in the military for 14 years now and have always been able to find a comfortable living situation that is UNDER our BAH so that it leaves some wiggle room for utilities. That is the way BAH is designed to function. However, that BAH we were allotted for our move to Washington wasn't going to cut it this time. That made house hunting hard! We wanted to find something with enough bedrooms, enough square footage, and two separate living areas because of how much we utilize the piano (and how much the piano can dominate over everything else in the house). We put in offers on 7 houses before even being in WA. Once we were finally here we adjusted some of our criteria and price range a bit to open a few more possibilities and even that landed us with a house that had great bones but needed a lot of help. It's hard to invest all of your money and more into something that hardly seems worth all of your money!
So here we are a month after we closed on the house and here's what we've done:
Re-carpeted any parts of the house that were previously carpeted. But wait, before carpeting we had to haul the old carpet out, remove staples, and do some serious sweeping!
Under the carpet! Some areas didn't even have padding. We added a lot of Killz to areas that even had some mold!
And also before carpet we repainted the house! If you've ever done much painting around your house, you know that the prep before painting is no joke. We had 5 areas that were carpeted so those were our first priority for painting. In each area we did drywall repairs, some as extensive as removing sections of wall and some as small as thumbtack holes. One room had hung a bunch of stuff with 3M strips and when they pulled them off it left some adhesive. Instead of removing said adhesive they just painted over it. After drywall repairs it was sanding, re-texturing, removing old caulk, re-caulking, priming, masking and painting. It took us two full weeks of full days to get those 5 areas with their trim and walls painted before the carpeting arrived.
Here are some in-progress pictures. EVERYONE worked so so hard. The step not mentioned above is vacuuming in between every step. The kids became pro vacuumers, caulkers, drill operators, sweepers, sanders, and the go-to runners for every tool we couldn't seem to find in the moment!
I took this picture early in our renovations and thought this mess on the counter was terrible...you should see it now!
This was where Dan and I slept every night. And because the house was continually getting covered in fine dust from construction, we put away our bed every day and re-set it up every night. Exhausting.
Getting ready to do some texturing
The pink room. I wish they had only painted the walls pink. That would make some sort of sense for a cute girl's room. But no, they painted the window edges, they painted the inside of the closet, they painted the closet hardware, so. much. pink.
The day we primed that wall was sweet indeed
We invested in a paint sprayer since we were planning on re-painting the whole house. You have to prep the walls for painting either way, why not speed up one part of the process? Kudos to Dan for studying and learning how to operate this thing. It really is worth it if you take the time to learn it all!
These are the walls all primed and textured and ready for paint. It took so long to get to this point!
(why not fix some squeaky floor boards while there's no carpet?)
Paint Dan, Paint!!
We are so lucky that our new neighbor had a set of scaffolding we could borrow so Dan didn't break his neck trying to rig up something a whole lot less safe!
Because we're super smart, we did the trim AFTER the walls. So we had to reverse mask everything and then spray the trim. Took me two full days to mask for the trim.
How were we smiling? I was SOOOO tired at this point. It was like 11pm and we were spraying trim so they could lay carpet the next morning!
Finally. CARPET! We were so excited for this moment because it meant we could move our mattresses out of the living areas and into bedrooms. It meant there would be a few more soft places to sit. It meant we were one big step closer to being done with renovations on this house.
So after a lot of progress pictures, enjoy some before and afters!
Listing picture of the entry way. Worn stairs, antique yellow/white walls
SO much better!!
Oh, the pink room...
No more pink!!!!! Fresh and clean!
The room that alex chose. Looks can be deceiving, this room had SO much repair work that it made the pink room look easy.
Alex has really enjoyed having a space to go and chillax!
Master Bedroom before. Don't let the nice listing picture fool you, that carpet had mold under it and you can just see how yellow the walls were. Now it's ours to make into our own space.
Master bedroom after
Downstairs living room (the one we were sleeping in!) That white rug is covering a large hole in the carpet!
So brown and drab
This room feels like the biggest difference to me for some reason. It's great!
Cade's room before
Cade's room with fresh walls and carpet!
Immediately after the carpet guys left this is where I found Carson. He was so happy to have somewhere soft to lay again!
And in case you're wondering, the rooms are super bare because we still don't have our furniture from San Antonio! They had to put our stuff into storage since we hadn't found a house yet when they were first ready to deliver it. When we called saying we could accept a delivery they said, okay, how about October 29th??? So... 19 more days of bare bones living.
It is our goal to do all the same steps to the rest of the areas of the house that are non-carpeted BEFORE our household goods arrive. We're already in good shape to get it finished. Here's a few shots of progress since we've gotten carpet.
I installed some new outlets that have USB ports- cool, right?
The master bath needed way too much help. The toilet was leaking and the fix the previous owners had done only made it worse. Thankfully the actual fix was simple and they didn't ruin the whole toilet! The shower head needed replacing. The water diverter in the bathtub spigot was spewing water everywhere so we ended up replacing that after attempting to fix it. And the backsplash on the vanity wasn't attached to...well, anything, so we attached that with some silicone.
Check out the mess we found underneath the bottom drawer of the vanity. I'm convinced no cleaning was done on this house before the previous owners left. Did I mention the amount of cat litter we found in the vents?
Add all the drywall fixes, sanding, retexturing, re-caulking, priming, masking and painting the walls and trim, and then we finally had a functional master bathroom!
We also hadn't had a chance to paint any ceilings before the carpet came, so masking, covering the carpet, and spraying the ceilings was next on the list!
I even got to the point where I could add a little color to the walls! We wanted bright white walls throughout the house, but that doesn't mean we wanted to live in complete stark-ness for forever! We had a soft purple to the wall our bed is on in the master bedroom. I will be adding a stencil to it as well, but haven't quite nailed down the stencil color yet.
Cade picked a deep blue for an accent wall in his room, and we will be stenciling a world map on it!
Another thing that didn't work properly in the house was the garage door opener. I'm not sure if it just didn't have enough horsepower or what, but it would only open partially, slowly, and then stop. Dan did his research again, found a great deal on an opener from Costco that came with all the wiring, sensors, openers, wifi connection and a keypad so you can open it with a pin code from the outside. It took a day and a half of work, but we can now enter our house through our garage and maybe even some day park our cars there!
Remember how we named our house the Blue Box? Maybe that's because it's like the Tardis- bigger on the inside, with more and more and more repairs!
One Day, Blue Box, you will feel more like our house than their house. Until then, thanks for keeping us warm and safe even if you have some dysfunctions, malfunctions and ugly spots! (let's not even think about yard fixes yet!)
