My life in the fishbowl is, thankfully, almost over. Let’s be clear, I am not ungrateful for the hardworking men who have brought me this amazing transformation…but with no window treatments anywhere here and 12 people crawling all over your house at every window and door…it’s a bit unnerving after awhile. I KNOW they don’t give a rats ass what I’m doing, but…you know…it can be creepy.
The panels are all up…now it’s just trim pieces, new gutters and a few soffits left to do so I’m hoping by the end of the week, we’re done.
The post title is such since it’s not a real *renovation*, but just a coat of lipstick to make it look better until we can really tackle this..which may be a few years. We’d love to recreate what we did in our last bath renovation, but it will have to wait. I guess lipstick is just a bare bones budget renovation?
Thanks to those who voted for the new potty…my cheap, impatient side won and we went with the Jacuzzi Espree…so far we love it.
Since we already had to replace the potty and we had a few sets of house guests coming this summer, we decided to try and spiffy up the second floor bathroom. We really didn’t spend that much since we DIYed it and didn’t do any major overhaul. In addition to replacing the potty, we replaced the door hardware, cabinet hardware, the sink fixtures and a new shower head. Swipe on a new coat of paint and add some floating shelves from Lowe’s and we’re done. All told about $500.
The sinks, vanity, countertop, etc.. aren’t our taste, but are inoffensive enough to buy us some time. Although limited by the lack of modern brushed nickel widespread options in my time frame (They’re OK..they’ll do for now) it’s still amazing what new hardware can do. I actually like the groovy white 70’s tile on the floor in here, and by luck, the tub/shower surround is in great shape even if it is a thin sheet of acrylic….all in good time.
Metal finally arrived late Thursday, so Friday the first panels went up….what a difference.  To be honest, just the house wrap and the edging already made the house look better so this is indeed progress. FINALLY, I’m really able to visualize the whole thing done now and I’m pleased as all get out about it.
Wrapped and Ready
Wrapped and Ready
Contraption for Bending the Metal
How Many Dudes Does it Take….
My Heroes…Dale and Barry at the First Run of Metal
Since I started the blog after we’d already moved in, I will try to fill in a few renovations we had to complete prior to living here…mainly, the floors and the “cottage cheese” ceilings. Messy stuff we couldn’t live in so we cranked out a few key changes to the house back in August.
The ebony stained hardwood floors have naturally made the biggest impact on the overall look of the house. If you’ve seen the before shots of the whole house…there was enough green carpet for an entire putt putt course in this place… and it was old and smelly. There was a LOT of floor to lay since we were replacing the kitchen linoleum, dining room carpet, living room carpet AND stairs all with hardwood. We hired this one out and if you live in the Nashville area….I HIGHLY recommend Verchota Floors. They are unbelievable to work with…moving to a new city meant having start over with my list of good subcontractors, and these guys really impressed me…keepers!
There was a herringbone parquet in the entry and in a strip along the living room butting up to the green carpet. I kept it only in the entry as a small homage to the original house…and it cleaned up so well -it would be rude not to!
We used white oak flooring which was stained ebony. They achieved this by wetting the floor with water to raise the grain, then applying the stain so more of it was absorbed into the wood. This is a CRUCIAL step in getting a dark stain to saturate properly…so they told me. It worked because I love how they turned out. We used a grey berber carpet in the bedrooms and playroom for sound and softness. It would have been nice to lay the hardwood everywhere, but budget and kids whining for carpet won out for now.
Things are really moving along….The metal sheets are due to arrive today and beacuse of the prepping done during these past 2 weeks, the transformation will be instantaneous. I hope by this time next week I’ll have photos of a metal house to show you!
I thought I’d start off the new site with the first day of the galvalume installation mentioned here and here. Alas, not to be. Materials were delivered today….right color…wrong profile. We ordered the 12 inch striated rib in burnished slate and we got 12 inch minor rib.
The reason we chose the striated was for it’s more forgiving profile. The flat profile of the minor rib shows imperfections that are less obvious with the striated rib. The photos below show the differences in the 2 styles.
Kills ya to look at all that beautiful metal sitting in the yard that you can’t USE.
