Before & Afters! (Part 2)

Welcome back! Let's move on to the rest of the house :) I'll warn that a lot of these are just 'After' pics. For whatever reason, we failed to get some before shots of the hideous pink walls we painted over.

Moving on from the kitchen, we have what we use as our Den:

As you can see, we never got around to this redoing this room. This (and one other) room still have popcorn ceilings. I eventually wanted to paint the wood paneling white, but then again, it felt so home-y as-is :) I'm curious what the next homeowner's will do with it. The carpet in this room probably also needs to be replaced, but again, that is for the next homeowners to decide.

Stepping into the hallway, we have the main hall bathroom:

In this bathroom, we removed a very ornate/flowery wallpaper and painted the walls beige (the same beige used in the hallway and spare bedrooms). I also added the frosted window decals so that we didn't need window treatments and still had privacy. Lastly, we installed a new toilet back when we moved in and recently, needed to have a plumber fix the bath/shower fixture (new rough-in for handles and showerhead). I also painted the doors and trim white and gave them new hardware.

Eventually, I would have replaced the flooring and maybe re-purposed the vanity (or at least given it a new top). And replaced that light!!! haha But again, we ran out of time.

Moving on to the Master Bedroom:

It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do!! As well as smooth ceilings, freshly painted white trim, and freshly painted white doors with new hardware. When all is said and done, I repainted 20 interior doors (!!!) in this house from their outdated yellowish white paint to a crisp clean white that matched the new white paint we used on the trim. We also updated all the hardware (hinges & doorknobs) that I bought in bulk online. The white doors made the whole house feel more updated and clean. And I LOVE dark hardware on white doors :)

You can ignore the ugly handy-down dressers... ONE day I will buy us new furniture. *sigh* The fabric headboard I made myself. And lastly, we took down the window treatments and put up white wood blinds that I found at IKEA (they were surprisingly the only ones that would fit the size of our windows).

Attached to our bedroom is a Master Bathroom (though there's nothing Master about it!):

When we moved in, I immediately removed the wallpaper, painted the walls gray, put the frosted decal on the window (not shown) and installed a new medicine cabinet. 

Moving on to the 2 spare bedrooms across the hallway from our bedroom.

Here is the guest bedroom:

And another spare bedroom:

In each of these rooms, the walls were pepto-bismol pink and the walls were dirty and filled with nail holes. It took a lot of prep work to get them ready to paint. 

Again, we had to scrape popcorn ceilings in both of these rooms, painted the ceiling white, painted walls the same beige, painted the trim, installed window treatments, and also tackled painting the doors white. What a difference!

Finally, we have a room upstairs where the previous homeowners converted some attic space into a 4th bedroom and 3rd bath:

This room we tackled a week before listing the house! We've never used the bathroom (it's tiny!) and Ross just used this room for storage. It was the same pepto-bismol pink as the other spare rooms and just felt dirty up there. It has walk-in attic access which was really nice. 

Don't you just love the avocado green bathroom?! (it looks much better now that the attached bedroom is not pink, ha!)

So we spent a week (on crunch time!) prepping and painting the bedroom & bathroom beige, painting trim white, and painting the remaining interior doors white. This room also remains with popcorn ceilings. There was no way to tackle that in a week before wanting to list the house with all the other last-minute projects we had going on.

So that's it!! This house was mostly cosmetic updates. Sure, we would've tackled a bathroom or two down the road and maybe the kitchen, but in the short-term, it wasn't worth our effort or money. We made some major improvements as well which helped the value of the house (replaced the furnace, updated the breaker box, etc.).

With this house, we became pros at:

• scraping popcorn ceilings (FYI, it's a LOT of work, scrapping, skim-coating, sanding, painting, etc.)
• painting interior doors (with no brush marks showing :)
• updating electrical (only Ross)
• installing crown molding and baseboards
• installing plank walls (only me!)
• and other numerous projects. 

When all is said and done, we'd probably do it all over again. The payoff to us is a house that we can be proud of and bringing a house back up-to-date! We also love tackling a project! What will be next?!

*Kristin*