Total Transformation: The Master Bedroom

Well, I promised more total transformation posts, and here's another one already!

I've been making little tweaks to the master bedroom lately in an effort to make the room feel a little more finished. There's still some more to do before it feels "complete", but I thought this would be a good time to take a look at this room and how far it's come!

As with the rest of the house, this room was covered in layer upon layer of corroding wallpaper, as well as laminate paneling on one wall and those strange mystery panels on the ceiling. Consider this your warning that the pictures you're about to see are kind of terrifying!

Here is the room after we closed on the house in June:





Scaaaary!
(And I don't just mean Branden's wild man beard... though that was scary too.)

The first thing we did was pull down the ceiling panels and put up new, flat sheetrock.



Then the laminate paneling (faux-birch... fancy) was removed.



You can see there's still a little bit left on there in the photo above. And of course there was wallpaper underneath that paneling. Of course.

After the paneling was down, the new drywall started to go up.




This was the last room finished when we moved in. We actually slept in our guest bedroom for the first week or so after we moved in while our contractor finished this room up. After lots of mudding, sanding, priming, and painting, it was finished and I absolutely love how cozy and inviting this room is now!

Here is what we started with...



...and here's the room today:





My absolute favorite part of the room is my little vanity nook...



The prints on the wall are from London. When I lived there, there was a shop outside of my tube station (Baker Street... home of Sherlock Holmes!) that sold these prints of all different London landmarks. They were completely touristy, but on one of my last days there I decided to buy a few to bring home. Love them.

My vanity table has all of my jewels (having a jeweler for a boyfriend is a lovely thing...) and some keepsakes, like the blue box that my sister brought me home from Venice and a shell-shaped dish from my grandmother. I absolutely love sitting here each morning--it's nice to feel pampered in your own home!

Across from the vanity is this dresser that I've had since I was very little.



It used to be an ivory color with gold details (very 1980s), and was also covered in stickers. Gotta love little kids. When I was in college I spray painted it (very poorly) purple with silver drawers. Now it's gotten yet another makeover, with cream paint and new, simple hardware!



There's a bit of a bird theme going on here, but I like it! I picked up this little tray for Branden to keep his watches in one safe place, since they have a tendency to wind up all around the house.





Now that you've seen the details, let's take another step back and appreciate this room's total transformation!

Before:


After:


Before:


After:


(Please try to ignore the air conditioner... yes, we left it in all winter. Yes, we were too busy/lazy to take it out. If you read this blog regularly you see all the stuff we've got going on, so cut us a break on that one pleaseandthankyou!)

Way back when we closed on the house, I had posted this inspiration picture for what I had in mind for the room:


Obviously our bedroom ended up very different than this, but I did stick with the original color scheme that I had planned back then.

Here is another view, looking into the bedroom from the hallway.

Before:


After:




Pretty amazing, no?? It makes me so happy to see how far we've come since we closed in June! I just love looking at the difference between those hideous ceiling panels with weird designs, and the clean and modern ceiling we've got going on in there now. Happy sigh.

There are still some tweaks to be made, like replacing that area rug for example. I'm on the hunt for something that works and that is affordable (seriously, whyyy are rugs so expensive??), and I'll keep you all updated on that venture!

So what do you think? Pretty good transformation, right? I'll work on another total transformation post for another room soon!

Total Transformation: The Office

I did a quick painting project on a small bookshelf for my office last night (which I'll show you in a bit), and it got me thinking that I really should fully document that room's renovation in a post.

I started digging through the pictures that we took of the house before and right after we closed, and I honestly had kind of forgotten how much of a total shithole this house was. Seriously, most sane people would have walked in and bolted out the front door. But, luckily, we saw the massive potential in this place and decided to take a chance. But man oh man, it was a complete dump.

The family we bought the house from had owned it for over 50 years. After the mother passed away, the family rented it out. When we went to look at it, there was a family renting it with two small children. I can't even imagine letting a child sleep in this place the way it was. Yes, it was bad.

Be prepared, the next few pictures are not for the faint of heart.

This is the office before closing, when it was a little girl's "bedroom":



The water damage was from years before and the roof had since been replaced. But the room still had corroded wallpaper, paneling on one wall, dirty lace curtains, and generally looked like a crack house.

After closing, when the room had been cleared out and the tenants had moved, it was still a scary sight.



As with the rest of the house, we pulled down the ceilings, walls, and paneling and put up fresh new sheet rock.

Here's the room after it had been sheetrocked and primed:



The transformation was already astounding. Then came the paint, in a cream color that I selected. I forget the exact name now, it was "beach" something. It's a nice color... cheery but not overpowering.



And here's the office now, completely new and without any trace of the prior disgustingness...






It's not so bad spending my 40 hours a week working in here now... :)

Remember that the desk started off as just a simple unfinished wood piece that we finished and customized.



Branden finished it in a dark stain and I found a fun clock knob to add to the front.



Around the same time I also painted an ugly laminate bookcase and added a patterned fabric to the back.





It was a big pain in the butt, involving lots of polyurethane, but I'm really happy with the way it turned out.



I also used the same fabric to cover the bulletin board next to the window and tie everything together.

So that brings me to the project I worked on last night, that you can see a sneak peek of in one of the above photos.

I've had this little bookcase for ages, and back when I was probably 13 or 14 I decided to "enhance" it by adding some gold metallic paint to it...



Since then, I've moved it around with me from apartment to apartment but never did anything else to it. A couple of fresh coats of white paint later, and it looks very different!



It's a nice space to display some things in my office, and pretties up that corner a bit more, which I'm always a fan of.

In case the earlier pictures weren't enough torture for you, here's a view of this side of the office back before we closed and the renters were still using it as a trash heap living here:



...and now...




It's really hard for me to believe that this is the same room, or the same house for that matter, as when we bought the house in June. It's only been seven months!

I hope to do more of these "total transformations" posts for each room in the house, so stay tuned for those!

Total transformation: the living room

I think it's time to take a few steps back and look at how far we've come with one room in particular: the living room. It's hard to believe that we closed on the house and began working just three short months ago. Going back through pictures, this is not even the same house. The change is unbelievable!

Let's start at the beginning.

Here is the living room just after closing, exactly the way we bought it:







The walls were covered with peeling, stained wallpaper. The ceilings had these horrible, weird panels with odd designs etched into them. The light fixtures were old and covered in dust. It was dingy and dark, and I had more than one thought of "why in the world did we buy this dump?"

So, we started ripping down wallpaper.



This sounds simple. But it wasn't. Layer after layer after layer, and we weren't getting anywhere. Chemicals, steamers, and scorers... it was taking forever.







At this rate, we would be lucky if we finished one room in a year. And every single room in the house was just like this one. This is when we realized we needed some help.

We brought in a contractor, who informed us that what we thought was the drywall beneath the last layer of wallpaper (the brown in the photos) was actually a thin layer of gypsum board. Beneath that gypsum was even more wallpaper, on top of solid wood beadboard. Fourteen layers of wallpaper in total.

Let me take a moment here to mention that our house was built around 1920. Now, I'm no mathemetician, but from my calculations 14 layers of wallpaper means that there was a new layer of wallpaper added every six years. Every six years! These people were seriously wallpapering junkies.

So we switched gears, and we started ripping down the gypsum board.



Branden is using our favorite tool, the Fat Max crowbar, to dig in to the wall.



You can see the solid wood beadboard peeking out from underneath the last layers of paper. We found that the very last layer was actually newspaper, which was used as insulation back then. The pages were from a 1921 edition of the Boston Sunday Post. I saved the front of the sports section, which included a headline declaring the grand opening of the Yankees' new ballpark. I plan on framing it as a memento of this crazy undertaking.

Here's a debris pile with some of the newspaper pages on top:



Once we got all of the gypsum board off, we were able to pull down those horrible ceiling tiles and put up some modern, flat sheetrock. We also chucked the built-in china cabinet that once lived in this corner of the room. Since it wasn't original to the house and was made of cheap particle board, it was an easy decision. We gained a lot of space in that corner by getting rid of it.



Next came drywall on the rest of the walls.





Once the drywall was mudded and sanded a few times, the primer was able to go on. This alone brightened the room up so much. Things were starting to come together.



Then the most exciting part: paint color!





We chose Benjamin Moore's Shaker Beige. I love the color so much and highly recommend it. The tones are deep and lovely, and it changes throughout the day. The room was topped off with gorgeous crown molding.

It took so much work, I can hardly believe how far the room has come. Let's go back again to the beginning, just to fully appreciate the transformation.

Before


After











Lucy is obviously thrilled with the way things turned out! I couldn't be happier either. The room is warm, inviting, comfortable... everything you want in your home. Looking back at what we started with and where we are now, I truly believe that anything is possible. There's still more to do, of course, but for now I'm happy to just be enjoying this room and planning out where holiday decorations are going to go in a few months... :)