The first thing we did was remove all the baseboards and crown molding in the living room. We did this ourselves. We followed Sawdust Girl's tutorial and it was super easy.
After that, we got the floors refinished. We were lucky that the house already had beautiful hardwood floors. We wanted to make sure that the floors had enough time to dry and cure before moving in our furniture. For this, we hired an awesome company, K&Z Flooring. We found them on yelp. Not only did they have great reviews, but they also gave us the best quote. Since our house is on the cozier side, we decided to keep everything light and bright to open up the space. The floors have two coats of Bona NordicSeal to keep them closer to the color of the natural wood when sanded. They had an oil based finish before and that made the floors a bit orangey and a little dated.
While the floors were dry, but still curing, we decided to skim coat the room that was originally a child’s bedroom. Brant loves smooth walls haha, so we decided to skim coat that bedroom and the living room walls. We used this video tutorial.
This, was not so easy and honestly, all the drywall dust was a NIGHTMARE. Our friend, Kevin Joy, helped us out and when we were done, we were all so covered in dust, we looked post apocalyptic. It was after doing this one room that Brant decided we would pay someone to do the other rooms. We hired Douglas and his team off of Angie's List and they were fantastic. We also had them remove the ceiling fan and open the room up more.
We lived in a construction zone for a bit. As you can see, we covered the furniture with plastic. Once the skim coating was done, we painted ALL THE ROOMS. This was exhausting and definitely left us both with sore/numb arms, especially Brant who did most of it! We used Behr Ultra Pure White Marquee paint, which says it only needs one coat, but we ended up having to do three because of all the crazy colors (blues, black and turquoise) that the previous owners had painted the walls. We went with bright, to help open up the room.
One of our big projects was redoing the fire place. My brother came into town to help with this one (Yay Siblings!). He described the existing fireplace as a “portal to hell.” Read about that transformation and what materials we used here.
Finally, we got an electrician in the add recessed LED lights (from Amazon!), two sconces and two outdoor outlets, so we could hang these string lights (Amazon). The electrician also added an outlet behind the TV to hide the wires.
We also changed out the fixture in our dining room, to this cool industrial style light I found on amazon. We already had the beautiful wood dining table and chairs.
YAY! We love how it all turned out!!!!
PHASE 1: COMPLETE.
Shop our Living room here.