Renovating my childhood home - 1973 brick ranch

[Alisamer]

Up super bright and early this morning. I’m actually just sitting in a room listening for my sister and friend to yell up from under the house. Main project of the day is to fix the floor joists and get one toilet working. It may or may not be in the same bathroom as the shower. I plan also to work on painting. 
 

Friend’s daughter is here helping and she is awesome. Her volume is at 11 but she’s sitting on a skateboard rolling around the entire house hammering in nails in the subfloor that aren’t flush. I think her ADHD meds haven’t kicked in yet. 
 

We are very lucky dad’s fully equipped workshop is next door. We keep running back and forth getting tools. 

[JDuggs]

I’m enjoying reading about your home reno journey. You’re everything I’m not: organized, ambitious, optimistic. I just get overwhelmed and don’t know how to start anything. Your problem solving, can-do attitude is really inspirational.

[Alisamer]

2 hours ago, JDuggs said:

I’m enjoying reading about your home reno journey. You’re everything I’m not: organized, ambitious, optimistic. I just get overwhelmed and don’t know how to start anything. Your problem solving, can-do attitude is really inspirational.

Thanks so much! This is a huge project and we have hit a few snags where my priorities and my sister’s don’t match up, but generally it’s been going well! As usual with anything DIY it takes longer than you think and you’ll hit snags along the way, but we are making progress. I am very optimistic about this and I have some long term plans! We say that I am the Walt Disney-the one with the big ideas. My sister is the Roy Disney of the family-the money person reigning in the more out there ideas and making it happen within the budget. 
 

Floor joists have been taking a little longer than expected but the main repair is just about finished I think. The crew working on the house is me, my two sisters, our friend and her teen daughter, and our mom and dad. So all women except dad! Friend and daughter are under the house with my middle sister getting the joist installed. 
 

We have 2 new toilets sitting out in the driveway waiting to be installed. The walls in all the house except the bathrooms are basically ready to paint - we just need to take down light fixtures and put up plastic over the windows because we are going to spray the ceilings since they are popcorn in much of the house. I am really really wanting to start the painting. The house looks better and better as the holes in the walls from nails and such have all been patched. 

[Alisamer]

Update!

So. The new floor joist is dry fit, and just needs to be secured. Because this is an older house but we are trying to use some newer systems (IE, not just toenailing the joist to the ledge it sits on like the old joists) my dad is going to do some modifications and fabrications to secure the joist - standard joist hangers just don't work in the space we have there. There are also some places under the house where we can't figure out what happened, but there are boards going all different directions and they are not all supported and it's impossible to tell exactly what's going on. The inspection report more or less says (I'm paraphrasing) "I don't even know if this is actually a problem but it looks like a hot mess." So our solution to that possible-not-a-problem is that we are planning to just add piers under the intersections of the crazy quilt where we can. 

Bathrooms - neither is functional yet, but we have two new toilets to install. The bathroom attached to the main bedroom is teeny, so we are going to replace a bit of subfloor there, go ahead and paint it, put in the new floor, and install the new toilet so that bathroom will be all done and functional. Youngest sister has been watching a furniture refinishing youtuber so I've assigned her to deal with the vanity - it's golden oak which I hate so we are painting it gray. The walls will be a pale kind of seafoam aqua color in there. Flooring will likely be waterproof wood-look vinyl plank, because when they bought the pallet of flooring for the rest of the house five boxes of a slightly different color/style snuck in there. They are similar enough to the rest that we are just going to use them for the bathrooms and possibly in the closets if we need to. 

Main bedroom needs one more coat of paint on one wall. Most of the room is blue, which dried darker than I expected, and that one wall is a deep violet that is drying to navy blue. Honestly I'm not sure I like it but I'm going to make it work anyway! My plan is that the bed will be centered on the dark wall, and behind the bed will be basically a ceiling to floor (or at least top-of-window to floor) white stripe made of a shade (there's a window there) with a curtain of fairy lights in front of the shade and behind a layer of sheer curtains. On that wall I'm going to go with metallic gold accents, probably - I'm thinking constellations on the wall, a lamp that looks like the moon, and I have plenty of wall shelves that are gold metallic. I'm going with kind of a "day" theme on the blue walls, and a "night" theme on the dark blue-violet wall. 

We have a lot of plain white flat paint so we are basically using it as a primer on every wall as we are painting the ceilings with it. We have one small bedroom all done and will start on the rest of the rooms this evening. Then it will just be proceeding through getting all the painting done, finishing that one bathroom, and starting on flooring. 

I've recruited my parents to help me convince sister who is the money person in this investment that we should get the house all painted and floored BEFORE I move in. Because otherwise I fear I'm going to end up with all my boxes and furniture shoved into one room that never gets finished because all my help is gone. I would prefer to move things into the rooms they belong in from the beginning, instead of filling up a room with crap so I can't arrange anything properly and have no really functional rooms. 

So we are progressing! Plan so far is to work several evenings this week on paint, finish up all remaining painting next Saturday, and then we can start on floors. Somewhere in there the bathroom will be done, but we can have a couple people on that while the rest of us paint. And at some point in all this I still have massive amounts of packing to do in my current house. 

my dad and sister adjusting the new floor joist. 
 

the kitchen! Cabinets will be painted, we are still debating whether to keep or replace the flooring. 

[CTRLZero]

That’s a nice amount of cabinet space in your kitchen.  Is it open in the corner as a pass-through counter to the dining area?  That will be handy, if so.  I love that you are sharing your adventure with us.  

[Alisamer]

27 minutes ago, CTRLZero said:

That’s a nice amount of cabinet space in your kitchen.  Is it open in the corner as a pass-through counter to the dining area?  That will be handy, if so.  I love that you are sharing your adventure with us.  

Yes, it is open to the dining area! There's a large space to the right of the photo - my parents had a full size kitchen table in there so the room is quite big. The cabinet on the bar there on the right is coming down, it's not original to the house. There were originally upper cabinets there. My current house has ONE DRAWER in the entire house, this has like 10 in the kitchen and some in the bathrooms! So much cabinet space, there's even the "secret cabinet" on the back side of the peninsula there to use the corner space. There are even more cabinets to the left not in the photo. And the dining area was the den when I was a kid, it is very large for a dining room, really. We are going to re-do the countertop on the peninsula so it can be used as a bar, my cousin has some bar chairs she is giving me to use there. I'll put a light above it, and we'd talked about possibly adding open shelves up high there also.

And I'm glad I can share with everyone! I need to get the video walk throughs edited together but I've had literally no time so far. I will be super glad when the hard work is done and it comes time to move in and decorate, that's the fun part! This is going to be a years-long project, really, but this part right now is a sort of blitz attack. After that it'll be more gradual upgrades and stuff. 

[CTRLZero]

6 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

So much cabinet space, there's even the "secret cabinet" on the back side of the peninsula there to use the corner space.

We have one of those cabinet spaces on the back side of our kitchen peninsula.  Among other things, we store the barbecue utensils there.  Very handy as it’s next to the door to the back deck.  I’ll let you get back to work now.  😁 

[Alisamer]

21 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

We have one of those cabinet spaces on the back side of our kitchen peninsula.  Among other things, we store the barbecue utensils there.  Very handy as it’s next to the door to the back deck.  I’ll let you get back to work now.  😁 

I've frequently seen that used as a liquor cabinet around here! I'm not sure what I'll have in there, barbecue utensils are a good option though as it is also right next to the door to the back deck on this house. Frankly there are far more cabinets than I need for kitchen stuff. It's just me and the cat who will live there. I think I'll have a cabinet for the cat's food and stuff, for sure, but may have some non-kitchen stuff in the lower cabinets in the bar as well. I'm liking the idea of having more storage space than I need.

Yesterday after work my middle sister and dad and I worked on it a bit, we got the final coat of paint on my bedroom and a first coat of white paint on the foyer and hallway including the ceiling. The plan is to do that area entirely in white (with the possible exception of the small wall at the very end of the hallway) so it'll need at least one more coat, possibly two. Good thing about white - it's super easy. Get it on the trim? Who cares. We'll paint over it. Other colors you have to be a bit more careful about. This evening we will go back over and likely get a coat of white on the small bathroom. We're using the flat white as a sort of primer/base coat for every wall and using it on the ceiling because we had a whole 7 gallons or so left over from my sister's house. I will also be doing the dining room and living room in "Requisite Gray" which is a light gray color. I was kind of wanting to stay away from gray, but we have a 5 gallon bucket of it and then some, and it's free. Plus it's a nice plain neutral. So for free I'll go with it! 

We are still leaning toward white walls for the art studio and debating the flooring in there. We might try the habitat ReStore this weekend to see if they have any flooring there we could put in that room. The white walls are partly to make it lighter and brighter in there, partly because we have the paint already, and partly because I tend to surround myself with STUFF in there so there will be shelves all over the place full of dolls, action figures, toys, doll furniture, snow globes, tchotchkes, etc. If it's anything like my current craft room the studio is going to probably make people who prefer minimalism cringe a bit, but many working art studios I've visited look much like that. Surrounded by beautiful, interesting, and inspiring things. My whole house tends that direction, but the studio goes farther. 

I think we are taking Wednesday off from working on the house. I need a break, although I also need to work on packing up the current house! Saturday and Sunday will be another blitz of work on the new house, and then after that my sister won't be available to help out after work at all for a couple weeks. I'll probably use that time to do what I can with my dad's help but also to work on packing. 

[Alisamer]

Last night we did a first coat of paint on the small bathroom and the living room, a second coat of white on the foyer and hall, and filled in a few holes we'd missed on the walls in the future dining room. We are taking tonight off from working on the house, and I am glad. I COULD go work on the house (everyone else is busy) but my knees are killing me from all the up and down and ladder climbing and such. I might go over since I have a couple packages for the house arriving there, but I'm not likely to really do much if anything today. 

Thursday looks like probably a break day as well. I am the only one available (well, and dad, he's retired so he'll be around) to work that day and even I would be late (getting the earring in my daith piercing downsized, finally! I'm excited!). It totally depends on what I feel like. If my knees stop aching I might go Thursday on my own and put a coat of color paint on the small wall at the end of the hallway (I think I'm painting it dark gray) and the first coat of color on the small bathroom (it's a pale green-leaning aqua).

I am thinking I might do both bathrooms the same color, since I have a gallon of the paint. If I do I'm leaning toward a sort of shimmery pastel colorful look in the small bathroom attached to the bedroom, and beachy stuff in the hall bathroom. 

Friday after work and all weekend will be another blitz. I'm hoping we can start on flooring this weekend!

[Alisamer]

We are very nearly finished with paint. We did all the trim paint yesterday except in the hall bath. There are a few places that need second coats of trim and the hall bath still needs a second coat of wall paint, but I'm hoping to get some of that done this evening. 

Plan for next weekend is to get the flooring in and at least one toilet installed. Everything we do makes it look a little better - it's unrecognizable as the house we started out with just about. 

I have no helpers during the week this time except my parents, so we are going to do what we can on our own. 

We are debating on the kitchen cabinets. They would look better painted, but just having the rest of the paint done around them is making them look significantly better than before. So we are discussing whether painting the cabinets is a project for NOW or one for in the Spring. We are torn between "get it done while we are working" and "just get the house livable so I can move in". 

[Alisamer]

The initial house tour is up!

 

this is the afternoon we closed on the house so before any renovation had happened. 

[CTRLZero]

The house looks in decent shape, and I’m sure you’ll get it fixed up and freshened in good time.  It was nice of Buddy #2 to escort you around, lol!  How does it feel to be a home owner?  So excited for you, and look forward to your updates. 

[Alisamer]

2 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

The house looks in decent shape, and I’m sure you’ll get it fixed up and freshened in good time.  It was nice of Buddy #2 to escort you around, lol!  How does it feel to be a home owner?  So excited for you, and look forward to your updates. 

Interestingly I already own a house (half this size) and am technically going to be renting this one from my sister. Kind of a rent-to-own situation. My name won’t be on the paperwork at first. But I get to live there so it’s cool IMO. We finished up trim paint except the main bathroom tonight and tested the stove and oven (they work!). We are looking at probably a new HVAC system but that isn’t totally unexpected - the system there is literally 50 years old. The son of the guy who installed it came to look it over and give us a quote on a replacement. 

[JDuggs]

The neighbor cat who came to check out the house cracked me up. You probably covered this before, but why didn’t the sellers let potential buyers see the inside of the house? Also did you eat in the kitchen? Isn’t it funny how you didn’t use the biggest room in the house when you were growing up?

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, JDuggs said:

The neighbor cat who came to check out the house cracked me up. You probably covered this before, but why didn’t the sellers let potential buyers see the inside of the house? Also did you eat in the kitchen? Isn’t it funny how you didn’t use the biggest room in the house when you were growing up?

That cat is hilarious, he just patrols around wanting treats and going in any building that’s open.

We did get to see the inside briefly during the estate sale but didn’t get to see the bathrooms for example. And we had no idea what they were leaving in the house! I think that was largely because we kind of came in as a previous potential buyer was dilly dallying and we did a swoop in to buy situation. We didn’t use a realtor nor did the seller, and the seller was out of town for most of the time (and we were for part of it also). I’m sure if we had pushed we could have gotten a tour first but we had the brief estate sale look and the inspection report so we didn’t. We decided that because of the location (surrounded by family land) and what we knew about the house it was a wise investment and it would be dumb not to buy. In the long run (like after our parents pass) we will end up with several acres including 2 houses, a separate shop building and a good bit of road frontage so it’s a good nest egg for us. 

When we were kids we had a kitchen table where we ate, and a third of the big living room had a dining table. It got used at Christmas mostly! It wasn’t so much a “not allowed to go in” room as it was just a boring room with an itchy couch and chairs that we were supposed to keep clean for company, so we didn’t use it much. Spill something on the linoleum or vinyl sofa in the den? No biggie. Spill on the gold shag carpet or yellow upholstery in the living room? Big trouble! Mom’s piano was in there though so we did use that. And my sister slept there on the couch for a while after they got bunk beds and she discovered little sister was a wiggler. It would really be strange for me not to use that big room though, and I do plan to occasionally use a dining table when having friends or family over. 
 

My parents currently live in our grandparents old house next door, and that house has a formal living room so separate from the rest of the house you wouldn’t know it was there if you didn’t look for it! It is decorated for Christmas year-round, since that’s the only time it gets used unless mom decides to practice her piano. 

[hoipolloi]

23 hours ago, Alisamer said:

The initial house tour is up!

This is so great! Subscribed so I can see the progress. 

I am so impressed -- we need to do a bunch to our house but I quail at the thought of it all.

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, hoipolloi said:

This is so great! Subscribed so I can see the progress. 

I am so impressed -- we need to do a bunch to our house but I quail at the thought of it all.

Thanks! It is a lot. I’m exhausted and everything hurts, TBH. I’m taking tonight off of working on the house but will try to pack a bit at my current house. 
 

if we get the flooring all done this weekend I might see if my dad will let me borrow his small truck for the next week so I can haul a load of stuff over each evening. The current house is small enough I’m struggling to pack because there’s nowhere to sit things! 

[Alisamer]

I took last night off from the house but ended up more "napping with the cat" than "packing to move". 

I'm hoping tonight can be a night off too - I think we've got about all we can get done prior to floors handled, and my sister likely has to work late anyway. Now that I've caught up on a bit of rest maybe I can actually do some packing or even send a load of stuff over to the new house. I had planned to put things in the garage or utility room until moving them into the house, but both are filling up quickly. The garage has a flat of the flooring and the stuff the previous owners left, and all the interior doors in the house are in the utility room blocking the storage shelves in there. I could use the outdoor storage buildings, but I was really hoping not to have to do that. 

There are a few doors not going back into the house (my parents needed them so they could watch TV in the den while we were sleeping in the nursery as babies, but I don't!) and my main work table in my existing craft room is just a table across two bookshelves, so I might end up with an art studio full of door-tables. 

I also need to find where I stuck the cat doors for safekeeping so those can be installed while the doors are off. I'll need at minimum a door into the big closet where the litterbox will go, and one into the bathroom that closet is in. I'll probably put one on my bedroom door also. 

[Alisamer]

We have a working toilet!

I am thrilled to finally have one. We will have to uninstall it to put the flooring in, but it's in, it works, and it doesn't leak. There's a second bathroom still to work on, but that one can wait if it has to. There's still no door on the bathroom but we at least don't have to run next door to use the facilities. 

And, more exciting news - we have flooring! Not in the whole house. But we did complete the hallway, the main bedroom, the smallest bedroom, and the foyer. We've worked out a system and sent mom and brother-in-law out to buy more boxes of the floor, so we have decided just to go ahead and take out the existing laminate in the art studio and the kitchen. So last night we pulled out the studio floor (we left the closet because it looks nice, it's the only floor in the house that did!) and tossed it out the window onto my dad's truck bed. 

Tonight's plan after work is to install flooring in the art studio, and if there's time to pull out the flooring in the kitchen.

The largest rooms of the house are still to be done but those are mostly big rectangles so should move fairly quickly. We've figured out a sort of system to get it done as quickly as we can manage - the living room should be especially easy, as it's a huge rectangle and has big windows onto the porch. We'll set dad up with his chop saw out there and hand him boards out the window to cut! For the dining room/kitchen we'll set him up similarly on the back deck. We had him on the deck today and either he or I would run out there and cut any boards that needed it, there was a lot of going back and forth.

Our goal is to finish the flooring as much as possible by end of next weekend, and hopefully get most or all the quarter-round molding installed as well. That should go quick-ish, I'm thinking one person with the air nailer attaching it and another following behind with a tiny paint brush to dot over the nail heads, and one or two people (probably mom and dad) doing the angle cuts and handing down the pieces of molding. 

The HVAC guys will be in within the next week or two at latest - we are switching to a gas system. Once the quarter-round molding is down we can start moving some things in, as long as we aren't blocking access to the vents. We will also do all the small stuff - installing cat doors, putting the fan blades back on, probably replacing a light fixture or two. Progress is being steadily made!

First pic is my bedroom - I have mirrored acrylic stars I'll stick to that dark wall. The plan for the window on that wall (since I like my bedroom to be cave-like) is to put a window shade mounted up near the ceiling over it. On top of the shade will be a curtain of white fairy lights, with sheer curtains over those. The bed will be centered under that window.

Second pic is the front door. We will need to paint that door but it's not an immediate need. Not pictured: just outside the front door to the right there are the two old toilets sitting on the porch. We need to haul those off still.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Alisamer
Words.

[JDuggs]

The floors look fantastic! I’m looking forward to seeing your vision for the bedroom when it’s completed.

[CTRLZero]

Wow, that looks great.  Can you tell me more about the flooring?  I.e., is it nailed in place or do you use adhesive?  I’m really impressed with your skills and the finished product, so it’s giving me ideas for my own home.  

[Alisamer]

32 minutes ago, CTRLZero said:

Wow, that looks great.  Can you tell me more about the flooring?  I.e., is it nailed in place or do you use adhesive?  I’m really impressed with your skills and the finished product, so it’s giving me ideas for my own home.  

Thanks! The flooring is called Luxury Vinyl Plank, I think (LVP) - it's a floating floor like laminate that essentially snaps together on each side. It's vinyl with a solid core, and is waterproof and scratch resistant! No nails, no adhesive. We did buy a laminate installation kit that comes with a block and "puller" tool (we call them "encouragers", to help lock things in place when they don't snap in easily) and a rubber mallet. The type of LVP we got comes with a built in cushioned underlayment as well, so it just goes right down over the subflooring. You leave a small gap at the edges (1/4") and then put down quarter-round molding (or baseboard) to cover the gap, which allows for expansion with temperature changes. It's actually not difficult at all to install, and any straight cuts you can do with a utility knife - score the top surface and then snap the board. More complex cuts (around doorways for example) we have been cutting with a bandsaw since we have one, but I have seen pro installers use tile nippers to cut the board into shapes. It helps to have like 3 people so there's someone installing, someone cutting the end boards, and someone else standing where the installer tells them and running messages back and forth, but I did a portion of the foyer alone and it was fine. We got very similar flooring for the bathrooms - same system but in tile shapes in a faux carrera marble finish. 

We got it at Ollies with a 15% coupon, I think my sister said the whole house should be around $3300 for floor and that's 1600+ square feet. I paid about $100 for the marble-look tile for the small bathroom and should have way more than we need, and it cost much more than the wood look flooring.

[Alisamer]

Worked a couple hours on the house tonight- we got the floor in the art studio down and got things set up for the living room. The studio just needs the quarter round molding reinstalled, the fan blades put back on, and the closet doors reinstalled and it will be complete. Except window covers but that’ll come. We are slowly making progress.

[Alisamer]

Worked another couple hours this evening! Our parents put down the quarter-round molding in the art studio during the day, and put the fan blades back on in there. So that room needs blinds in the windows, a bit of paint touch ups (including on the molding that was put back in), and the doors reinstalled. My sister is talking about painting all the doors in the house, though, so we may need to do that before it's finished. 

We got all the floor in the living room installed last night. It went really fast since that room is a big huge rectangle. My sister is on the floor installing the pieces and I do my best to stay ahead of her setting out the next pieces she needs so she can just grab and install. Our parents go and cut the end pieces as we mark where they need to be cut. 

We are not as ready for tonight as we were for last night, but we've got all the junk that was sitting around in the dining room out of the way and that's where we will work this evening. We also need to pull out the laminate in the kitchen since we are replacing that. We should with luck have the floors everywhere except the bathrooms done before Saturday, or by end of day Saturday at latest. Then we can work on painting the bathroom cabinets (youngest sister took this on last Saturday, and hasn't shown up since so it's not remotely finished), painting the interior doors, figuring out the light fixtures, and possibly even consider painting the kitchen cabinets. 

The HVAC guys could come as early as next week (they had to order some stuff, so it depends on when that arrives) and once that's done we will go through the whole house and make final fixes and put down the quarter-round molding most places (we've been debating whether to wait or not, because the heat registers will be replaced in the whole house and that might affect baseboards and molding). I think I'm going to schedule internet to be installed in the next week or 2 as well. 

We are getting so much done. I could, maybe, be living in the house like the second week of November even!

Just in time to decorate for Christmas as soon as I'm done moving, and that was my goal.

[CTRLZero]

Your renovation process is such an inspiration.  I’ve needed a solution to hide the top of a curtain gap, and now I’m feeling motivated to try a home decor project.  I turned to You Tube and think I’ve found a good solution using foam board for a cornice.  The woman who put the cornice together didn’t iron her fabric.  I was so disturbed!  First thing on my checklist is iron the fabric before gluing it to the foam board, lol.

Sorry to interrupt your renovation thread, but it was such a funny thing, I had to share.   🙃