Blue Bathroom Makeover

The house I grew up in had two and a half baths all of which where what we called The Pink Bathroom, The Yellow Bathroom and The Blue Bathroom.  We helped renovate my parent’s house while hubby was out of work, and we were able to do just about all of it. Today we are gong to show you how we transformed The Blue Bathroom into this with a very limited budget.

This is what the picture looked like before we did anything.

How to Paint a Perfect Edge Every Time!

I am painting again! Our bedroom needed to be updated, and paint is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to change a room or should I say makes the biggest impact. It is not always easy.
Do you paint?
Do you want to?
I have been painting for 30 years. We have owned and painted four houses we lived in (multiple times), three we flipped, two we renovated and helped others paint. I am always learning new tricks, and would like to share with you some tips I have learned along way.
One of the hardest parts of painting is getting a straight edge to give it that professional look.
When I started to paint I used painters tape all the time. It makes a nice straight edge, but it definitely has its disadvantages.

1. It takes a lot longer to prepare to paint.
2. It costs more than if you didn’t have to use it.
3. The paint sometimes gets under the tape. Then you have to repaint where the paint leaked.
4. If you don’t take the tape off while the paint is still wet, it is harder to remove.

I learned how to paint free hand and I do a very good job at it, but I found a way that gives me a perfect edge every time and is really fast and easy.
Look how nice the edges look!

Every edge is perfect! Read More to find out how to get this edge…

Staining a Deck with Solid Color Stain

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While my husband was out of work for a couple of years we flipped three homes and worked on some side jobs. One of the jobs we did was to renovate and update my parent’s house. Their deck was weathered and not looking too good.  Look at the before.

Hallway Transformation!

I am so excided! We finally installed the hardwood floor that was sitting in our hallway for a year. (See the boxes on the left.) We used the flooring (3/4 inch thick tongue and groove hardwood) that was left over from our main floor. You could see a post on that here. It looks so much better! What do you think?

Here is our hallway from both directions before the hard wood.

How to Paint Cabinets

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Hi, everyone! I am excited to show you how painting cabinets could really update and change a look of a bathroom or even Kitchen. We have painted several cabinets, in the several homes, we have owned. I have a few pictures that I have to show. I lost a lot of the pictures when I got a new computer. I thought I saved all of them but I didn’t save the ones from a certain program that had a large amount of (project) pictures on it. :(

Here is a kitchen that we painted the cabinets and changed out the some of the other fixtures.

Main Floor Renovation Part 4:Family Room and Kitchen Updates

Well it has been almost a year since we renovated our main floor. You could see that project here and here. I had been wanting to show the rooms totally done but they never got there. There is still trim work that needs to be finished and we were hoping to sell a house that we have staged with a good amount of furniture, and decorations, before I showed you the rooms, but just recently we had our third contract fall through do to financing. Please pray that we could find a buyer for our beautiful investment house.
This picture is from just after the floor was completed in March of 2011. The cabinet on the left has our old TV in it.

My Parent’s Pink Bathroom Renovation

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Have you ever seen a “Pink Bathroom”? That is what our family called our hall bathroom. You will see why we called it that below.

I also came from a family with 12 children. I never thought I would have the same. My husband and I did want a large family, and we were willing to accept whatever God would bless us with. We are very blessed to have twelve beautiful children and couldn’t imagine it any other way.

My parents had a house built, and moved in to it, in 1964. We had 3 bathrooms; one we called the yellow bathroom, one we called the pink bathroom and one we called the blue bathroom. (Could you imagine actually picking out these colors for the fixtures? My Mom did!) Well, they have been these colors for all those years. Until, last year while my husband was out of work, we did some updating,  remodeling, and renovations, at my parents house.  You could see the kitchen here, the family room here (the removing of paneling), how we removed wall paper here, and the bedroom here. Eventually, I will show you all the rooms we have done. My Mom is sooo happy with all the changes.

My dad was not very handy and to him, as long as something worked there was no reason to replace it. One of the reasons they agreed to have some things done to their house was the fact that it has been getting hard for my Mom to get around, and they were thinking if they had to move to a ranch there were definitely things that needed to be done to their house, to be able to sell it. 

This bathroom was one of the rooms we felt was very important to renovate for them.

This picture is one of the after pictures of their hall bath (It will always be the pink bathroom to me.)

Laundry Room Makeover

One of the things we enjoy doing in the homes we remodel is to make them more desirable. What woman wouldn't love to have all these cabinets in her laundry room? A nice large wash tub? Ceramic tile that could take the traffic from the garage?  This is the laundry room of one of the houses we remodeled and sold. 

Exterior Painting

As we have mentioned before we have a business of renovating and remodeling homes. We will be posting on several of the houses. This is a house we bought fixed up and resold. We also stage the homes before selling them with items form our house, garage sales, estate sales and things our daughter, from House of Grace, picks up for us, also from garage sales.

We saw some potential in this home. It looks kind of spooky!
Before

Our Step’s Redo

When we started our renovation, we were going to just replace the carpet on the steps with the carpet we were taking taking out of the family room or living room. They were still in good condition. We did that in our old house. We used the carpet from under the couches and other areas that did not get much wear, to replace the carpet on the stairs, which then still matched the carpet upstairs.
You could see Part 1 and Part 2 of our Main floor renovation. 
Here we started to remove the carpet.

We found that several of the steps had Liquid Nails and screws on them. We think it was an attempt to try and remove the squeaks. It didn’t work. You could also see there was a pile of dirt, it was so GROSS.

Once we removed the padding we found LOTS of staples.

We used a screwdriver to remove the staples that held the padding down.
  
We tried to remove the Liquid Nails with a scraper and hammer.
 
This was the worst step, which had the most screws in it.
  
This is what they looked like, not very pretty!
  
To try and remove the paint on the steps we used this Citristrip. It is a safer stripper than the other strippers on the market. We bought it at Home Depot.
 
We brushed it on relatively thick, and let it sit for an hour or two. We stripped half of the steps at a time so we could still use the steps.
 
This is a picture of the stripper at work.

We then used a putty knife to scrap off the bulk of the softened paint.

We then used a green scrubby pad with water and Basic H in a bucket, and then wiped down the step with a dry rag.

This is what it looked like, after it was wiped down. It came off way easier that I thought, but we were still left with all these screws. Ugh!
 
Here are the steps half stripped.
   
This is the view looking down.

Some of the steps had ink stamps marks on them that needed to be sand off.
 
We used a Multi-tool to sand the steps to remove the ink. We bought this tool a few months ago and already have used it for several projects. We really like it!!!

Here we are sanding some of the remaining liquid nails.

This is the step with the most screws.

We drilled the screws in a little farther and then filled the holes with a Elmer’s wood filler, and let it dry. 
 
This is where the crews were patched before we sanded the wood filler. The bottom of the picture shows the gap by the bottom step we put some shims in it to try and eliminate the squeaky steps, which only helped a little.

These are the screw holes that were filled and then sanded. Much better!
 
Here are the steps after the stain, before the polyurethane. Still not so good, but better than the carpet.
 
Here are the steps with the poly. and then we taped it off so we could paint the rest of the steps.
 
After we painted we removed the tape, shortly afterwards, so we could remove any paint that seeped under the tape.
   
While scraping the paint with a cloth and my fingernail, I scraped off some of the paint that was on the riser, which then needed to be touched up.

We put hardwood flooring on the landing.

After we put the hardwood floor on the landing there was this gap that we put quarter round on and caulked. Of course, I forgot to take a picture of it after it was done, and I don’t feel like doing it now.

Here is a picture of the corner round on the bottom gap. The top step is the step with the most screws and glue on it. It turned out not too bad.

This is a picture of the gap before, and all the patching.

Here are the bottom steps done.
  
These are the top half of the steps.

The steps are pine, the landing is oak, and the bottom step is plywood, but they all look good together. None of them are perfect, but we like them.

This is another picture of the steps before we stripped them.

My husband did an awesome job of cutting the hardwood flooring around the steps.

So what do you think?
Thank you for stopping by,
Parents of a Dozen

The Main Floor Renovation Part 3:The Hardwood Floors are Started

So we finally got our wood. We ordered it in November and just received it last Friday. The place we ordered it from was having trouble getting it from their supplier. It is not even the color we ordered. We hope we like it as much as the original color. We had to wait 72 hours for the wood to acclimate before we could start so we were able to work on it 3 days this week, and we have about half of it done.
Here is a picture of what we have done so far.

Our Main Floor Renovation:Part 2

If you remember we were going to be putting in hardwood floors, on our main level of our house, when it snowballed into several HUGE projects. You could see Part 1 here.

Well we painted the ceiling in the kitchen and family room where it was bad and of course, hubby wanted to do the rest of the main floor ceiling while everything was torn apart and we had extra ceiling paint. It does look a lot better!!