The bedroom that the girls share. This will be the realtor walkthrough before pictures, the pictures of now, plus the bathroom addition. We added a full bathroom to this bedroom.
AFTER
Category Archives: Before and After
Before and After: Bedroom
The middle bedroom. Before.
AFTER
Before and After: Master Bathroom
This is a really fun one. This bathroom was so awful. We will start with the realtor walk through pictures and then show pictures of present. We just completely gutted and updated the bathroom this year. In the middle are pictures where we put down some vinyl and updated it a little and that is the way it stayed until this year, 2015, with all new plumbing, flooring, closet, etc.
Yes, there were swinging bar doors to the toilet….
Here are a few pics of what I tried to do to make it look better.
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Then, my brother ripped out the toilet, flooring, lighting, bathtub, etc. and put it all back together again. We lowered the ceiling a couple feet so you didn’t feel like you walked into a cracker box every time you passed over the threshhold. We also added a fan, new beautiful ceramic flooring in a chevron pattern. We also gutted the closet and put a new door in and re-engineered the shelves.
Before and After: Master Bedroom
Continuing on today…it is rainy and I thought I might as well finish out the before and after posts. Here is the master bedroom. It starts with the realtor walk through, then proceeds on to what it looked liked for a couple years before we painted. Finally about 2 years ago we got rid of the horrific blue carpet and I tried quite valiantly to remove the black paper that was stuck to the hardwoods. I finally gave up and had Lowes install new carpet.
REALTOR WALK THROUGH- I guess these are the only 2 pictures I took.
PAINTING
I couldn’t decide on the color, so I tried several before settling for Benjamin Moore’s Hemlock.
I then put up some CURTAINS, finally!
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Click here for the install of the NEW CARPET AND HERE IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE PRESENTLY.
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Before and After: Great Hall
Here are some realtor walk through pictures of the hall, what it looked like through the years, then the final pictures after we refinished the floor and put up the interest wall.
PICTURES OVER THE YEARS
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REFINISHED THE FLOORS, NEW ART, HOW IT LOOKS PRESENTLY:
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Before and After: Study
Here are a few before and after of the study. Here is the story of how we stained the floors. The first pictures are of the realtor walk through almost 10 years ago. Then there are pictures after I painted beige and left it like that for a while. It was kind of the dumping grounds of the house. Every odd piece of furniture and stack of tile got stored there, then we refinished the floors and added a bathroom in late 2012, early 2013. The last pictures are of the room currently.
REALTOR WALK THROUGH 2006
THE DUMPING GROUNDS FOR A WHILE
FRAMING UP A BATHROOM, CREATING AN INTEREST WALL, AND CHANGING THE ROOM ENTIRELY
AFTER
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Before and After: Living Room
To continue the before and after series, here are the realtor walk through pictures from almost 10 years ago, what it looked like for several years, then when the floors were refinished about 2 years ago. Enjoy!
REALTOR WALK THROUGH
TAKING DOWN WALLPAPER, PAINTING.
AFTER/PRESENTLY:
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Before and After: Dining Room
Here is the next room. The dining room. It has a pass through from the kitchen to the dining room. It has the original butler pantry cabinet that we restored back into its original spot. There was evidence of it being closed off where you had to pass through a door from the kitchen into the butler’s pantry. There was a sink and the cabinet, and then you also had to pass through another door to enter the dining room. Now, it is open.
Realtor walk through pics:
I didn’t realize the importance of taking good pictures back then. The dining room was mint green with a border. The fireplace was odd. I never thought it fit in a formal room. We eventually switched it with another one. We put this one in Alex’s room and moved the more ornate one into the dining room.
Here are some pictures of how it was for a while in the interim until we refinished the floors and completed all the exterior work. In between working on these rooms, we also redid the two other houses on either side of us. Each of them came up for sale and we bought them for a good price. We took a break on our house and spent 9 months each on those two houses, then coming back to ours. For pictures of those remodel you can click on the tag 94 Bungalow and 1808 Bungalow.
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The floor was really bad and we had it covered with a rug for most of our years here. Then, I refinished all the floors and it came out beautiful!
Here are the after pictures. This room was easy. We painted. We caulked the wainscoting and repainted it. We refinished the floors and painted a new color. Then switched out the fireplace for another one in the house:
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Thanks for looking! The next room will be the living room.
Before and After: Kitchen
This has been long overdue. I am now going to post the before pictures of the house when we first walked through it in 2006 prior to purchasing and the pictures as it looks presently. I thought I would start with the kitchen as it has undergone the biggest transformation.
When we first bought the house, the kitchen had carpet in it. We took up the carpeting and the tile underneath it was really not in great shape, but it was better than carpet. So, it stayed black and white tile for a long time. Eventually, we moved the butler pantry back where it belonged and framed a wall up and added a laundry room. For more details and pictures regarding the entire process, click on the tag: kitchen.
Here are the before pictures. We took down the fabric that stapled to the walls. I was able to wash the red acryllic paint off of the cabinets. And the kitchen largely stayed like this from 2006-2010 until we were able to complete renovate.
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I sanded the laminate counter top, super primed it then painted it a stone fleck black. Here are some transitional pictures during that timeframe before the full remodel:
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And…here are the final “after” pictures and how the kitchen presently looks. We built custom open shelving cabinets, painted the bottom cabinets, took down the wall of cabinets on the back wall. Pulled down the sheetrock and exposed the original beadboard, framed up a laundry room and moved the butler’s pantry that had been hacked out and set behind the door–back to its original home in between the kitchen and dining room. Here is the link to the full write up: Click Here.
The demo:
Ripping out the cabinets, Steven and Vivian taking the doors off
The washer and dryer are where the cabinet is supposed to be
Butler’s pantry/cabinet
Mostly gone
Where a wall used to be in the kitchen
Kitchen gutted
The same wall…cleaned and primed (Super duper KILZ!)
The framing going up!
Painted and the floor down
Where the butler pantry is supposed to be
Right before we moved it and put the floor down
moved the washer and dryer
installing the cabinet
Framing up the laundry room
Sheetrocking laundry
The in between:
This is where the butler pantry was. We moved it back, now we want to make a built in pantry in this area.
And here are the final pictures:
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Here is a video I posted on Youtube right before our house was appraised in 2014. I took advantage of everything being picked up and nice and neat: https://youtu.be/avBTQc8bBIE
Hope you had fun! The next post will be up in a couple days of the next room. I will continue until all rooms are shown.
Done!? Are we really?!
I hate to even make an announcement that we are finally finished, after 8 plus years of work (and lots of breaks in between :-D), because as our luck would have it, something big would break…perhaps a geyser in the yard? Or, a random safe falling from the sky making an obscene hole in the roof (hey, I’ve watched the road runner, it happens!). I also realize (cue shaking the head and wiping tears) that you are never *really* done when it comes to old house upkeep. So, maybe I can say that we are done…for now. Will that suffice?
I’ve had a lot of requests for updated pictures and more in depth before/after. In preparation for our appraisal tomorrow, I have cleaned the house and fixed quite a few cosmetic bo-bo’s (I am sure you will find quite a few more I didn’t fix), so I thought it a perfect time to take some 360 videos. Are you game? I will do some before/after photo blogs when I get around to it later this summer.
I only videoed the master bedroom, hall, living areas and kitchen. I’m not brave enough to show the kids’ rooms and who wants to see bathrooms? Coming up tomorrow will be porch and exterior tours. I thought it was fun (and a whole lot easier than taking pictures!) and I can also use it for insurance purposes should that Acme safe ever fall out the sky.
If you are new and would like to see some before pictures, you can search for “realtor walk through”, click on the name of the particular room you want to view in the cloud tag, or click on “before and after”. That should get you some really old photos to look at and compare how far we have come. Here is a post I did right after we updated our major systems (roof, plumbing, paint, mostly exterior projects).
I ordered the videos so that if you watch them in the order I posted them, you will feel that you are walking with me, or at least can make sense of the floor plan. Here you are! Tell me what you think!
PS: Note to all the perfectionists: ignore those cosmetic blemishes.
Note to old house purists: yes, I know I don’t have velvet curtains and Victorian tchotchkes. “Museum style” has never really been my thing.
Note to people who want paint colors: I will publish all paint colors in a future blog post when I do the final before/after pairings.
Did I cover it all? Leave a comment if not 🙂
Master Bedroom:
Small weird hall and the back of the Great Hall:
Front of the Great Hall, study, living room and dining room:
Kitchen:
Perpetual Renovator 