Not For A Weak Stomach

Any disclaimer that I could put before this post would not be adequate.

There are some things that you can't unsee. 

It will stick with you.

Kind of like the smell of this bathroom stuck in your nose even after you had left.

Picture if you will...

Gold shag carpet. Normally plush carpet is a good thing, when you soak it in urine. Not so much.

The carpet was old. The original owner of the house had 3 boys. The renters had 3 boys. 

Boys don't always make it into the toilet.

Catch my drift.

Couple the overwhelming pee smell with, dirt, and something else...

and you have what our bathroom smelt like.

I hated for our kids to even go in the bathroom. They were also forbidden to take off their shoes in the house.

Most people take a shower to get clean. I can see no scenario where taking a shower and then stepping onto that carpet would not make me want to jump back into the shower again.

Our good friends, who live directly across the street from us now, have a black light.

It seemed right at the time, to take a look at the carpet with the black light.

Standard operating procedure.

Try not to gag.

I couldn't wait to get the carpet out of the house.

We originally planned to pull up the carpet and paint the sub floor until we could redo the bathroom and tile the floor.

Pulling up the carpet was a breeze.

 Then came the sheer and utter disappointment.

Then regret.

Then fear.

I am sure those are the emotional steps one goes through when you buy an old house.

I can't be the only one.

I was concerned about mold. I was worried about our floor. I was obsessing about whether or not we were going to have to gut the entire bathroom.

Then realization hit. Holy Crap. We may have just bitten off more then we could chew.

Luckily, we have awesome friends. One who is a professional plumber. We had him come over and look at the floor. He wasn't concerned.

There was some water stains on the planks, underneath the sub floor, but they were not rotten and were still sturdy.

We washed the planks several times. Some with bleach and some with soap.

Then we set up a fan and let the floor "air out" for about a week.

When we realized that painting was out of the question.

We weren't entirely sure of where it came from but we wanted to be certain that it wouldn't happen again. 

Tile. It was going to happen.

That way the flooring would be protected to withstand any water.

Since we have blind faith in our abilities to do things, and youtube videos on our side, we decided that we would tile the bathroom ourselves.

Blake laid down new sub flooring.

Then the new Hardie Backer.

When I went to Home Depot to find some tile for the floor I found some very nice options.

My delema is that our house is not fancy.

I knew this.

I am not fancy.

It seemed silly to tile a bathroom with fancy tile only to have the rest of the bathroom look out of place.

It's like putting lip stick on a pig.

Then I spotted it. I probably ran in slow motion towards it just for effect.

Hello cutey. Where have you been all my life?

Only one problem...OK two.

It was the most expensive of all of my "cheaper" options

...and Blake.

He wasn't convinced. Plus he had heard that it was hard to lay.

But I gave him a good pep talk and that was it. He went to go buy the tile and the supplies and while at Home Depot he was talking to an employee and a conversation like this happened.

Blake: Ummm. I am going to tile. Where is stuff?

Employee: I am not supposed to offer, because they could fire me and stuff...but I can come and tile your bathroom for you for $100.

Blake: Can you be to our house by 3?    

We chose a light grey grout so that the pattern of the tile would show up, but also because I am no fool.

I know our floors are going to get dirty.

I did not want to spend half of my life scrubbing the grout to make it white again.

We decided to leave the vanity for now and in my painting frenzy I decided to paint it blue.

It was awful. It made the counter top look gross and the bathroom seem dirty.

I repainted the vanity in a light grey color which matches the grey in the granite top.

Blake rehung the cabinet doors, and I removed the medicine cabinet/mirror hanging on the wall...only to find a gigantic hole in the sheet rock.

By some kind of divine intervention we had a mirror that barely covered the hole.

At some point we plan on patching the hole in the sheet rock, and replacing the light fixture and adding baseboards.

Ideally I would love to tile up the shower, and replace the vanity...but...baby steps. 

We are working with what we got right now.

Girls Room

When the previous owner told us that he would leave a bed in the house for us, we thought...OK. 

Then immediately regretted it. That bed ended up being quite the beast to move. 

But one free listing on KSL for "a free bed" and we were bed free...too bad that it sat in our living room for so long prior to that. 

Laney and Penny's room was pretty much in the same shape as the boy's room. Only difference was the light fixture and in the girl's room the walls has white paint patches on it.

The light fixture was gigantic and heavy, and if we are being honest here...looks like something that belongs over an old pool table.

Blake removed the light fixture, then painted the ceiling.

We decided to leave the carpet down while painting the ceiling because we knew that we were going to tear it out anyways.

Then I painted the walls in a light green color, removed the carpet and patched the holes from the nails.

These floors, if possible, looked better then the boy's room floors.

Which made us very hopeful for the rest of the house.

We purchased some light fixtures from Home Depot and put matching ones in the both of the rooms.

We had two rooms under our belt and while it was so rewarding, I began to realize that it was going to be a truly exhausting couple of weeks. 

The summer days, ended up being long. I normally started my work at 9:30 and we normally stopped around 9 at night.

I started to feel it wearing me down, and I wasn't the only one.

But I am nothing...if not determined.

Boys Room

Blake and I realized that the first thing that we would have to do when moving into the new house was going to be to get the kid's rooms ready.

They were not the worst rooms but we understood two things:

1. Our kids would transition better if their rooms were done.

2. We needed somewhere that they could play and be out of the way.

Gavin and Canon's room had this lovely orange and yellow shag carpet and dirty walls. Dirty as in...boogers on the walls dirty.

The walls were all beige along with the ceiling.

We found a paint sprayer at Home Depot marked down so we took the plunge and bought it. We figured that by the time we painted all of our ceilings and doors it would be worth it.

We were right.

The ceilings got painted in white ceiling paint. I debated for awhile as to whether or not I wanted to paint them a color, but in the end decided that white was safe and I didn't want to hate them and have to repaint after we had moved in.

The carpet came up fairly easily.

There were a lot of staples and nails to pull out..but the wood floors underneath were in excellent shape.

We painted the walls in Dolphin Fin by Behr paint, which is a light grey color.

Their room, while we were working on the rest of the house, ended up being referred to as the "Lego room."

Which made perfect sense.

This room saved our sanity.

Most of the time.

Unless someone was hogging all of the Lego light sabers.

What We Are Dealing With

On the day that we closed somehow in all of the excitement we remembered to take "before" pictures of the upstairs. We forgot about the downstairs, but we are planning on doing the upstairs first and then working our way down. 

The Stairs:

 The Dining Room:

 The Living Room:

 The Kitchen:

 The Hall:

 The Boys Room:

 The Master Bedroom:

 The Girls Room:

 The Bathroom: