Remodeling progress of the living and dining rooms

After we did the bathrooms, we did the living room and the dining room. Here are some before pictures.

Unfortunately, we still have the pink carpet. We were slated to get rid of it, but decided to do other things instead. We did actually use the fireplace once, but it really messed up a few allergies so we vowed to not use it again. I did add a few split logs and some candles to keep it from being a total black hole.

In the picture on the left, there is more wallpaper. It was this flowery striped nightmare. You will also see that there is an arrow on the wall and the caption above it reads "shiny silver holographic switch plate". Man,that must have been stylin' on the USS Enterprise where I'm sure they got it from. In the picture on the right you will see that the stairway is painted yellow. It's actually not a bad yellow- more of a sunflower color really, and yes I did that, and the hallway was painted that color but I got sick of it. I had enough of various  leftover paint that I mixed together in a 5 gal. bucket and created a lighter gray. I wish I had had enough of it to repaint the stairway, but I didn't. I am open to suggestions as to what color to repaint the yellow. Post a comment or email me your ideas.

 

You will see in the picture on the left, a circled area on the wall. That's a phone jack. That doesn't seem like a big deal until you realize that the phone jack wasn't really there, it was on the opposite side of the room and they had run phone line along the baseboard, over the doorway, and around to that spot. The entire house was like that, inside and out. There was cable and phone line around almost every doorway. I wish I had measured it so that I could post how much there really was. Here's a hint: It was so bad that when we had cable hooked up to the house, the cable guy literally ripped out everything and reinstalled new inside and out. We got a new line run to the house, and a new cable box outside that wasn't filled with splitters and junctions.

There were bifold doors going from the living room to the dining room. If that's not 1980, I don't know what is. Below are a few little "extras" they felt the need to leave us. On the left is an upholstered cornice box. It was over the windows in the living room, and blocked a huge amount of light. We found some sucker on craigslist to come and get it. On the right is a picture of the dining room before the wall was taken out. Nice heavy drapes, dark striped wallpaper, and all the space of a closet.

I suppose I couldn't complete the downstairs blog without showing a little demo.

This is the wall between the dining room and the kitchen. You can see the old back door and the lack of light. Just look at how little Jonas was. hehe

This is the disaster we lived with for at least a month. The ceiling was scraped, the walls had mud (remember that we had to paint over the wallpaper since the idiots contractors put it up directly on top of the unprimed drywall), there was dust everywhere, and we basically couldn't use the kitchen.

Just for comparison, here's an after shot.

 

Here's another thing that had to be changed out in the kitchen.

From super shallow, to fairly deep. We ditched the old faucet and sprayer as well, and added an all in one unit.

Last but not least, here's a before and after shot of the back of the house.