DIY'ing my home.**master b/r remodel begins!

Oh Eileen you have no idea!!!!! I am learning that the man is the KING of understatement!! He's also a "shoot from the hip" kind of person. That combination? Well, I'll leave that to your imagination! Thankfully he also has really excellent taste...or at least it matches mine ...so I don't have to contend with a "surprise" that is ALSO butt-ugly!!!

 

OK, so now that the Thanksgiving and Christmas Craziness is over and things have dropped back down to a dull roar, we're starting back in on the work on the house. Ron wants to finish up the den and the laundry room, both of which are almost-but-not-quite finished, so that we can begin work in earnest on the Master Bedroom and Bathroom, getting it renovated so that I can actually move in!

The den needs to be painted and he needs to make the cabinet doors to the wall unit he built. We finally had a full day to get the ceiling done which, if you've ever painted, is the most cumbersome part of a painting job. The walls you can do a wall at a time, moving just a bit of furniture out from the wall and covering it and still being able to use the rest of the room. But a ceiling? EVERYTHING has to get moved out of the way so that you can paint, so of course the room is completely unusable till you can move everything back. In our case, we carried the smaller pieces out and moved to big pieces to one end of the room, painted half of the ceiling, and then moved everything to the other end and painted the rest. Painstaking and tedious, but we got it done!! Even got some of the trim done as well. This coming weekend we hope to finish the wall painting in the den, then Ron is going to start on prepping the laundry room for painting while I finish up the trim in the den.

 

Ronni your both doing a nice job and the ceiling lights look nice and the décor a nice warm colouring ...was you lying on the floor for this capture

 

I like painting too eileen, but just not ceilings. I'm actually more into the detail stuff. The trim and cutting in and that sort of painting is my fave. Which works out great because Ron, while good at that, finds it more enjoyable to do the rollering, which means the larger areas. So we make a good team.

C'mon over!!! I have an extra brush or two and we can share a bottle of wine to make it more interesting!!

 

<puts wine back in fridge, cranks up the music> Let's just boogie while we paint!!

 

OK, so we detoured from finishing up the den because we had the opportunity to get a friend's help on some stuff that was needed in the laundry room, which has been in progress since Ron moved into the house a few years ago, and threw up some walls in there to make it more functional. More recently he salvaged a bunch of cabinets from a remodel job he did, and put them up in the laundry room creating much more storage space. Also salvaged a slab of granite that was perfect to put up over the washer and dryer!
Here's what it looked like three weeks ago. We'd already started to paint, so you don't get the full impact of what we started with but still, you'll get an idea.

And now here it is essentially finished!! There's still some tweaking to do (he has to put up the blinds, replace one of the tiles on the floor which is cracked, do some touchup painting, and add some shelving to one of the closets, stuff like that) but it's now functional and useable. I get to start decorating now woohoo!!!!

 

Ronni smashing job you've both done and the décor colours look nice...is the painting black?

 

Gail it's called Charcoal something.....a deep gray.

We're going embark on the Master Bedroom renovation in two weeks! Well, Ron's already done some work. He had the floor reinforced, he's moved some furniture out of there and is living out of plastic bins right now, so that the only heavy stuff we have to move around the room as he renovates is the bed. This w/e is insanely busy, and we're going out of town on another weekend adventure next weekend, so we'll get rolling on the renovation after that. He's going to build the closet and the bathroom first (that's one whole side of the room) and then demolish the existing bathroom (it's on the other side of the room currently) and finish that out, including laying hardwood to match the rest of the floor.

Meanwhile, he's also designing our new kitchen!!! I'm REALLY excited about that...it's going to be a dream kitchen with everything I've ever wanted in there! He roughed out some plans for the cooking island. He want to move the stove that is currently against one wall to the center of the room, surrounded by cutting board surface and custom slide out drawers and other shelving for pots and pans, utensils etc. Here are the plans he started with..they've since been tweaked some, but you'll get the general idea.







The cutout is where the stove will be. The countertop surrounding it is all cutting board surface, though the larger surface is on the right which is the size of a very large cutting board and where pretty much all the work will be done. The pull out drawers on the right hand side will be for the iron skillets and most used pots. The skinny drawers on the left are originally where we were going to put the spices. But I'd prefer to have them at eye level, and it just so happens that right behind where that island is going to be he's building floor to ceiling cupboards, one shelf of which he can design to display all the spices and other cooking oils and flavorings. Yes please! So those narrow drawers will likely become storage for cooking basics like salt and pepper and olive oil, and then utensils, pot holders etc. Perhaps two drawers instead of three? We're still tweaking the design.

Right now behind the island is the sink, kitchen cabinets etc. To the left of it is the eat-in part of the kitchen. In front of it, where the narrow shelves are, is just a long section of wall behind which is the living room. Eventually we're going to knock out that wall, creating a large family communal type area. Once the wall goes and it opens up the space, we'll remodel the island, to create a sort of backsplash to the stove and then a ledge jutting out that will become a breakfast bar, two or three barstools in front. That's a ways down the line yet, but it's the eventual, final plan when there's room.

 

OK, we're starting on the master bedroom/bathroom remodel!

Here's the room after we moved some of the furniture out, but left the bed and nightstands before we moved it to the other side of the room. That door on the right in the first photo is the existing closet. You can see it again in the second photo, then the entrance to the room, and then the bathroom door. All that's being demolished. But first..........


We had to move the last of the furniture out of the room except the bed, and then we slid the bed and nightstands to the other side of the room. With lots of floor space to work with, we then spent a couple of hours measuring and figuring out the proposed plan, and drawing it out on the floor, erasing several times as Ron worked through various problems with this or that design. We're working hard to maximize every inch of space so we get to have everything we want in the closet and bathroom. He chose to put pocket/sliding doors in rather than regular ones so that we don't have to accommodate room for the doors to open. Of course that means he had to solve the problem of having enough room inside the walls for the doors to not slide into each other lol!

I posted this pic because it seemed like every time I walked into the room, he was standing like this, in different parts of the room, staring at the floor! I started referring to it as his thinking position!



That hole in the wall you can see just above the level is where there used to be a wall air conditioner. He long ago finished it out, and it was a cute shelf where he'd put a pothos with the vines trailing down. Now though he'll just wallboard it in He's going to build the new closet and completely finish it first, because we need to move all of his clothes out of the existing closet so that he can demolish it and put the master bath there. We ordered or bought all the material last weekend, and this weekend he starts the build!

 

Well, in this case, Ron IS the professional LOL. It’s part of what he does for a living, which surely is a plus for me!