Remodel & Reveal
I love remodeling! When I first got married, and were looking for a house, we couldn’t afford much. We found a two bedroom old cottage with a large closet we made into a very small kids room. Hey, it had a window! It needed a ton of work. Starting with the one bathroom that someone had plastered all over with red, foot-tall, Victorian lady contact paper. Oh my! Anyway, through the years we lived there we did two major remodels. I designed what I wanted and we hired a builder to do it. We gutted and redid the kitchen, added a master bathroom, rearranged the other rooms to incorporate a porch, and added two bedrooms. Ten years later we did another major remodel to add a garage and fill the U shape of the house for more storage. It was so fun to see things come to life from what I imagined. Then we sold it and moved to Arizona.
After moving to Arizona my husband and I searched for a long time until we finally found our house. It had been emptied and white washed to make it appealing for selling. However, that meant that everything had been painted beige, including the chandelier in the dining area, with the exception of the wallpapered walls. It was move in ready but the kitchen and bathrooms were original to the 1973 build of the house. Over the course of the last 6 years we have completely renovated almost every single room in the house. Most of our renovation has been focused on the kitchen and both bathrooms, the outside patio, and in gardening. My husband, Arno, is the gardener of the house. He likes to putter around in the yard and is very much into planting and making things as green as possible which is quite something in Arizona. Here are some before and after photos.
One of the first things we did was to paint the inside walls of our patio. We downsized when we moved to a town house with an enclosed patio. It was very bare and colorless. So we changed that right away. Then Arno started planting…lots of small trees and plants in colorful pots. We added sun sails in the back patio area because…Arizona summers are HOT! Funny side story: I am not allow to have a dryer. Why? Because we live in AZ where hanging clothes outside dry in an hour. LOL
The previous owners of the house was a young couple with four kids. They had twins and two older children. Anyway, apparently, they liked wall paper. The twins room was wallpapered in black and white plaid paper. Ugh!
Yeah. I don’t know why but that had to go! The other bedroom was done in grass cloth. That wasn’t so bad except the kids had, evidently, liked pulling strands of the cloth off right at the level of their beds. I tried covering that up by putting a bookshelf in front of it but eventually that had to go, too. The main guest bathroom had little green and yellow flowers all over it. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GET WALLPAPER OFF? Sigh.
But the biggest first project I did was before we even moved it. As I said before, everything had been painted cream or beige for the selling of the property which was so boring. I understand why, of course. It is so the owners tastes don’t influence the buyers. They can envision there own style in the space. Well, I did. The kitchen was old (1973) but workable till we had more money for a remodel so I turned to paint to update it. I chose the neutral colors of gray and pale yellow to cheer it up.
I painted the cabinets in two shades of gray and painted the wall a light yellow. First, tried painting the whole cabinet light gray with the trim dark gray but I didn’t like that. So I did the box part of the cabinet light gray and the doors dark gray. It definitely helped give it more personality. Eventually we gutted the kitchen completely and redid it but for the first couple of years, we had a more interesting kitchen. Do you like it?
I will adding more of our remodeling adventures in coming posts!
Contact me at: taketimetolivelife@outlook.com