This first post will be long as I detail what we've done in the past month, and what we plan to do in the future.
Sooooo I've already introduced myself and my house, but here it is again, in the snow this time!
We've done the floors, which had been under carpet for 30 years. When we pulled them up they tested positive for lead, (came here for advice on that one, thank you guys!!) and we ended up having a lead consultant come out with an XRF gun so we could really get an idea of what we were dealing with. They said that there is lead paint in the house (expected) but most of the positives I was getting from the floors were dust from a renovation done in the 90s that hadn't been cleaned up all the way. The white paint around the borders of the walls in the living room is lead paint, but most of the results were from dust. We decided that since we'd have to clean it all up anyway, we might as well refinish the floors rather than installing something new on top. So here are the pictures of the floors!!
Before:
Foyer/dining:
Living (previously an entrance and bedroom):
Looking back, I can't believe how awful they looked lol. We hepa vacuumed, wet mopped, did 3 passes with hepa sander (using mostly a random orbital sander), cleaned out each and every groove, filled some of the worst spots with wood filler, vacuumed again, then used TSP on the walls, trim, and doors. Here the rooms are right before staining:
During:
living:
living:
foyer/dining:
downstairs bed:
We decided to go with a dark stain for multiple reasons. We like dark, to begin with haha. Then, the floors are far from perfect and have some stains that did still remain after sanding, and some replacement boards that are a different type of wood; we wanted to try to hide some of these features. Finally, the oldest color we found on the floors was a dark reddish shellac. So we did one coat of minwax espresso on the floors, and 3 coats of poly. Here they are, all finished!
Finished:
downstairs bed:
living room:
stairs (not original-put in in 1992):
foyer:
They are not perfect, by any means, but we wanted them to look like the 150 year old floors they are. Also, it's our first time doing floors, so we're pretty happy with how they came out! In the summer we may go back and fix some of the poly bumps, but for now we need to move on so we can move in at the end of January (we already extended the stay in our rental a month longer than we planned!)
We're moving on to the kitchen now. It needs a complete gut, but for the time being we have to make do with just paint and some quick fixes, the gut will come in a year or two. The kitchen is basically all from 1992. The PO said when he bought it it was almost more like a 3-season room with just a giant stove in the middle of the room (we can see the base in the basement and the hole cut out in the floor for it!). The cabinets are clearly older and from a different house (PO was a contractor and probably wound up with them), the appliances are a little updated, all from around 2013/2014 or so. There are mice that seem to come up from the basement. The tenant who lived in it before we bought it had birds, and they seem to have enjoyed the birdseed. We caught 3, but there are surely more. There was mouse poop in the bottom of most of the cabinets, and underneath the stove and dishwasher. We pulled those out to clean, which was gross. There must be some underneath the cabinets as well, but we're just going to have to live with that I guess. The mice haven't been up in the kitchen in a week or so, we have some repellant down, and when we finally move in we do have a cat so hopefully that will keep them at bay. For now we've painted the insides of the cabinets, the cabinets themselves, and the walls. We'll get new (cheap) hardware to update things a bit while we wait for the big renovation.
kitchen before:
Really old contact paper on all the drawers/shelves. So awful to get out!!
We painted the kitchen cabinets in "pencil point" by behr, and the walls in "calm" by benjamin moore. It was definitely a hassle trying to match everything to the floors. These pictures are with only one coat on the walls, we did the second coat last night.
Tonight I'll be painting the foyer in Benjamin Moore "shadow". We'd like to do a picture rail and two-tone it in the future, but right now we're just doing everything solid since we just need to move in. We're going to be living downstairs when we first move in while we work on the upstairs.
We have a long list of projects we want to do. We'll be doing the roof in the spring, also adding and replacing gutters. We want to contact a landscape architect or something like that; the structural engineer recommended removing all the plants to keep water away from the foundation, but I also read that plants are important for soil integrity, so we need another opinion on that one. We're going to add some support columns to the basement and reinforce part of the floor that has had it rough for the past 150 years. Repaint windowsills, there is lead paint underneath and the latex is near the end of its life. Further down the road, we want to get rid of the wall that's enclosing the staircase and add railings, balusters, and a newel post. Redo the kitchen, redo downstairs bath, upstairs bath. Strip and finish floors upstairs (another whole ordeal-I can see the same white lead paint peeking through the upstairs as the downstairs-ugh). Do something with the front of the house, extend the porch or add a window or something. And I'm sure there's a whole lot more I'm forgetting!
Anyway, I'll be updating here as I go along and probably asking some questions too. If you've made it this far, thanks so much for reading!!
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