There's been a lot of remodeling happening in our house this winter.
The bedroom, the ugly bathroom and one of our closets. I feel like there's always power tools and construction debris scattered around the house, our stuff moved out of place, dust on everything. It's a constant state of flux. Sometimes it can be really frustrating. I'm asking myself "why don't we just pay someone to do this so it can be clean again?" and other times I'm completely proud of what we're doing and how we're making this house our home in an affordable way.
The bedroom was a bit of a happy medium between the two.
Shortly after we first moved into the house we took down a drop ceiling that had been installed in the bedroom (you can see it in the photo above). Our hope was that the original plaster ceiling was underneath and in repairable condition. That was not the case. The plaster was there, but it looked like a rough sea, full of waves and holes. The more we work in this house the clearer it is that the previous owner knew nothing about plaster repair. His solution was to cover it up. So due to other priorities, we lived under this terrible ceiling for two years.
We finally decided that this winter would be the time to get the bedroom done. Big projects tend to take a long time around here (the bathroom has been in-progress for over a year) because Andrew and I don't frequently have time off together. Aside from the fact that we didn't want to be out of a bedroom for that long, having a huge hole in your ceiling during the coldest months of the year is not a great idea, so we decided to hire some professionals to replace the ceiling for us. They were done within a week.
Andrew and his mom had taken down the wallpaper that fall, so after our new ceiling was done we went to work scrubbing the old wallpaper paste off the walls and repairing the plaster where needed. I think the best part of this whole process was discovering the old mural that was on the wall behind our bed. I'm assuming that it has been there since around the time that the house was built in 1920. Unfortunately it had been painted over at some point and we couldn't think of a good way to preserve it. I guess that's what photos are for.
So after a couple of weeks worth of work on the walls and several coats of paint we were finally ready to move back in. It feels like a luxury to finally have a ceiling light in that room. Not to mention a flat ceiling.
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| I pulled that mirror out of the trash when I was in college. It's perfectly worn. |
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| The Christopher Bettig print above the bed was a gift from Andrew. |
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| A tiny aluminum bird that we brought back from our trip to Cozumel. I like when the wind from the open window blows it around. |
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| I love all the original details of our house, especially the glass door knobs. |
We've been living in the room for a couple of months now and I'm still loving every bit of it.
Still to do:
This summer we're hoping to have the original wood windows restored. They've warped a bit over the years and don't fit as well as they should. We also ended up with a cracked pane after some extreme temperatures this winter. The floor, along with the rest of flooring in the house, really needs to be refinished. The previous owners did a sloppy job of painting the baseboards before installing carpet. It's something that makes me grumble almost every day. Also, as you can see in the before pictures, we don't really have a bedroom door. Instead we have two slatted closet doors. In fact all of our bedrooms are like that. Pretty awful when it comes to privacy, luckily we live alone.
