More Tile

Dining area and great room is finally glued down! This weekend grouting!

 

Ready for carpet!

Lanai- A Retreat

My husband and I spend long hours in our porch. We play with th epuppies and just simply enjoy talking to each other...I know I do.

In our new house, we have a large lanai which I would love to turn into our retreat. I am still looking for ideas so if you find something just send it my way or add a comment here, we would love to hear from you.

So far we know we have a 300 square feet area. We will tile that too, cleaner for the puppies coming in and out of the backyard. I already chosen the color for the walls, still a warm color from Behr.

We do have windows all around with sliders. This is our lanai:

 

  

Here are some pictures I found:

  

I think this will be too formal for my taste...but I can adjust. 

So , here is my drawing:

Websites of Interest

Plenty of websites with tons of ideas. Her are some of the ones I have used:
http://www.kitchen-cabinet-hardware.com/
http://www.homedecorexchange.com/
http://www.behr.com/Behr/home#view=0;vgnextoid=;channel=HOME
http://www.ashleyfurniture.com/Home.aspx
http://www1.macys.com/catalog/index.ognc?CategoryID=35419&PageID=152127046904239&kw=Living%20Room%20Furniture
http://interiordec.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=interiordec&cdn=homegarden&tm=13&f=21&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.hgtv.com/hgtv/rm_walls_molding_trim/0%2C1796%2CHGTV_3804%2C00.html
http://www.renovation-headquarters.com/Landscapeindex.htm
http://www.decoracabinets.com/custom-cabinets/kitchen.aspx?page=18
http://www.omegacab.com/omega.asp
http://www.platowoodwork.com/plato_doorstyles/index.html
http://search.thisoldhouse.com/search.html?Ntt=add+moulding+to+flat+kitchen+panels&bu=&x=0&y=0
http://www.hgtv.com/
http://www.constructionwork.com/gallery/
http://shawfloors.com/TryOnaFloor.aspx?mode=gallery
http://www.petdoors.com/ideal_fast_sash_window_pet_door.htm
http://www.godeem.com/gallery.html
http://www.houzz.com/browse3D/traditional/family-room/start=30
http://www.hgtv.com/designers-portfolio/room/contemporary/living-areas/327/index.html
http://viz.mbci.biz/viz/_schrock/index.cfm?browseBy=wood&CFID=24077854&CFTOKEN=87015104
http://www.schrock.com/show_gal/kitchen/index.cfm
http://www.subzero.com/login/index.aspx

My Office

This will be my office:

Eventually it will be something like this....we first have to wire the house for internet connection and network it.

My Dream Kitchen

Kitchen is a synonym of "more work" and after a full, whole-hearted day of work I don't need more work. I never wanted a big kitchen nor I am going to use it, so I love the walk-in kitchen concept-in other words, get what you need and keep going. That's what a kitchen means to me.

Our kitchen needs lots of work, in fact it needs to be "redone" completely, but we need to save some $$$$. A complete kitchen remodel, the way I want it, will cost us about $5,000. So I settle for the about $300 we will spend giving it an uplift for now.

Here is my dream kitchen picture...in other words..one day it will happen.

Simple concept. It is still a walk-thru kitchen though I think it has more space than ours. We believe nothing is impossible, with a little planning I think we can move some walls a bit and create the same layout.

Now, reality check! This is my kitchen, without no work at all, in other words, "as is":

 

Sorry about mess...it is a work in progress...lots of junk on counters.....OOPS!

But I guess you can see the idea. To replicate the "Dream Kitchen" will not take to much. We will need to push the sink area further into the living area and then create the "breakfast bar area" as in above picture.

We plan to get rid of the low ceiling and add recessed lights. Also we will add some planters space.

Oops, that is my husband..checking on the tile in one of the model homes we visited. :)

So, to rejuvenate our kitchen we will strip the white paint, sand, and repaint cabinets with a color similar to this door:

We will add knobs like this:

We will add some trim to the plain doors for depth, and maybe add some color to make it aged. We will see if that works. Still it will be better than what it is right now.

We do have stainless steel look in all our appliances so the satin nickel finish will look just right.

We will also add a kind of black sink (Double-Basin Composite Granite Topmount Kitchen Sink)

 

and a nickel look faucett.. I think it will be ok.

We will also change the countertops to a dark blackish/speckled brown one.(about $300)
Something like this but not on granite and this color for cabinet is just about what we want:

 

This pic is not same layout but the colors are.

Great Room

Here are the pictures for the Great room and tile areas.

 

  

Pretty cool! Can't wait til it's finished!

Oh My...! Tiling

My husband is an artist. He can do anything you want with tile..at least I think he can. He has about 300 square feet to tile inside the house and another 300 on the lanai. We decided to tile the breakfast nook, kitchen, hall, laundry room, dining area, and some of the living /great room included the entry/foyer.

First we thought about direction, which way do we want the tile to go, one direction? diamond shape?

Since we have such a big space and so much tile, we though about 2 directions.

The kitchen, hall, and laundry room will be straight lines, since the rooms are smaller.

The rest of the area will be diagonal or diamond shaped. For this we needed to draw lines on the floor, of course to figure out the straight lines. So there we go with all of our Math skills...and they say Math is not good for daily life...of course it is.

We also decided to create an arc in the living room which will have carpet. We chose a berber because of the puppies.

Here are some of our initial lay-outs:

We added some accent trim to divide the 2 areas.

Breakfast nook

From another perspective, here you can see the different directions clearly.
I like it! (ignore kitchen cabinets, we will redo them anyway!)

Now see these pictures with nook almost finished! 

We still need to grout, tiles have just been glued down.

 

 

 

Check the next post for the Great Room area.

Lots of Carpet

Here is all the old carpet. Just though you wanted to know how much there was.

The Big Burgundy Wall

Well, there we were, with lots of colors and a huge brush of primer! Last wall to get rid of the big and bold Burgundy wall. This wall had some work previously done on it, my husband discovered that there was some sort of water something-maybe a fountain or a sink, who knows, but there were some pipes.
So when they fixed it, or so they say, they made a really disgusting and ugly patch which was really obvious on the burgundy wall...and there was an outlet on the floor!

We decided to tear it apart, which we did, well...my husband did.
Here is the progression:

Now it just needs paint! Goodbye Burgundy Wall!

Bumps on the road

It seems like we have not done much but on every step we took we found something else that needed to be done first. The clean-up was quite a task.

For those familiar with gardening, weeding and getting rid of unwanted plants is an exhausting job, especially when you have established root systems that have wrapped around sprinklers and everything else that they have found on their way to the water.

We had to do a lot of digging in order to get rid of all unwanted plants and weeds. We also needed to get rid of excess dirt, so a lot of scooping out and carrying it out to the back of the house, which we will get rid of later, in fact we spread some around the backyard, since we will resod anyway and it will be replaced in the soil with rain.

When patching walls, we also realized there were a lot of nails and screws still in the walls, so we needed to spend some time digging those things out, which was time consuming.

Getting rid of the wasps, phew! spray-spray-spray and we are still spraying and scrubbing the left out dead nests by hand, so the little beasts do not come back looking for their old home.

Cleaning the old linoleum tiles...oh my gosh...I am still hurting from that. When my husband pulled the tiles out, one by one, he found out that a horrible ssticky residue was left on the concrete. Started scrubbing and using a chisel, nothing. So we got a liquid designed to get the stickiness off, which works, though you have to be on your knees with a kind of chisel-ripper, as I called it, and get the stuff out. It looks like gooey stuff when it comes out and it really burns if it gets on your hands. We finally got it ou but we still have to do the laundry room which also have those ugly plastic -linoleum tiles. After all that is taken off, we still have to sand it to get whatever is left out and get it ready for the ceramic tile, otherwise out tile will not stick! No way.

Another big bump was buying the wrong paint. My husband was advised to buy WalMart Paint, Color Place I believe is called, so we did. Darn! We should have never done it. 4 hours after trying to pain one room, the one with the pink stripe, we realized the paint was no good. It did not stretch, and it did not cover at all. So we returned it and got Behr! What a difference, that is one day later. So we wasted one day.

Some things that will have to wait are the patio, lanai, and garage, that we will do when we move in. Since they are not really living areas, we are not really worried. We also have big plans for those areas.

The kitchen will have to do for now, we plan a complete remodeling so we will just repaint for now, change sink, change countertop, and make it the best we can. I will post my plans for now and later in a whole new post since Kitchen is one of the big projects for me.

We also have a wall that need to be ripped apart. They  (prev owner) tried to patch a hole in the wall with some material, and it looks just awful. So it will be replaced tomorrow, I hope.

I will be painting all trim and doors for the next few days. Hopefully my husband can start laying tile and by next week we could probably have the carpet installed. Unfortunately, we cannot install carpet untill tile is done because of the lay-out we have planned. I will post later.

Bedrooms

There are three bedrooms in the house, neither one of them has ever been repainted or retouched, as far as we can see, the walls were dirty, full of nail holes, which we had to patch throughout the house..they even had nail holes in the ceiling...go figure what they hung. One of them had a pink strip...why? DUNNO! But it is done, we painted it!

 

Master bedroom, in progress, notice the hole patches above sliding doors. Carpet has also been ripped, and patches done. Waiting for carpet to be installed. We will add all new baseboard on Clear Moon paint by Behr and crown molding same color.

 

So, I hope we can end up like this!

Artistic Home Builder

Our home was built by Artistic Homes in 1988. They are still building around this area, so we went to their model homes to get ideas and take pictures, which I really did.

Our model is the Versailles, the original one; they are now building Versailles II, which looks almost the same as you will see, with some architectural differences, like 8 feet tall ceilings, different corners, but overall the same floor plan. Here is the floor plan I found on their site, our home is the same without the pool and you will need to turn the floor plan over to see the exact house.

So our kitchen is on the right instead of left, and master bedroom on left instead of right, same with rest of plan. I like Open Floor Plans, I am not the formal kind of person, so the more open the better. This house has that.
These pictures are from the model homes in our exact floor plan, take a peek:

The second picture is the exact lay-out plan as ours, and hope it will look alike once our renovation is completed-another added TO DO is the arch in the entry, we only have a "pony-wall". This house has 8 foot ceilings which we do not have, but it is ok....that we cannot add....unfortunate.
Here is ours, without any renovation:

 

So, what do you think, will it look alike?? awful yellow paint...yack!!!

 

This is the Great Room, dungeon brown color!

Now it has a nice warm and bright color, Innocence by Behr.

Carpet has already been ripped, all outlets pulled, trim removed, tack strips removed, the whole house was primed with an oil based primer to cover the DUNGEON colors, doors removed, and we are prepping the floor for tiling....some people have some taste...or maybe they watch too much HGTV...:)

Taking Over

As we got the keys, we ran to the house to make our real TO DO list and to take pictures of everything.

Our TO DO list got bigger...yeah...it did....but we were willing to take care of our littl' piece of Earth no matter what.

This is what we found:

Overgrown weeds all over, overgrown bushes, and lots of wasp nests!

 

Lots of weed!!!!!

Now, after a couple of days of cleaning and sweating and getting bitten, it looks like this:

 

Still needed to get rid of the front patch of weed, which I did later, will post picture in another post.

 

First picture (side of the house)-  Second picture (side of the house)

My husband also spent one day pressure washing driveway and concrete walkway around the entire house. At least, when we come in the house to keep working, we will walk into a weed-free house, I like that!

Some added things to our list: pressure wash driveway and concrete areas, get rid of wasps, outside lights, re-stucco entryway, repaint-refinish front door (eventually we will replace door but not now), change all locks, and our list is getting bigger.

More to come.

Foreword

My Littl' Piece of Earth...is a journal about our renovation project. Thanks to my great Principal and friend, Mrs. Berger, who understood my excitement and gave me these words "Your little Piece of Earth"..there is plenty to be excited about"..she said. I now think about my new home as that precious little grain of sand that I will have to take care for in years to come.

After some painful years of waiting due to a "QUIT CLAIM", for those who knows what that means, we finally bought our home. We started looking at houses this past Summer. After looking all over, we decided to look for something that was going to be comfortable, practical, manageable, and most importantly reasonably affordable, without commitments.

We have been debt free for many years and did not want to get ourselves in a mortgage that was going to take us away from our comfort zone. So, thanks to the market, we looked at Foreclosures.

When looking at foreclosures, we prepared ourselves for the worse, but had an open mind. We focused in "potential". These are some questions we thought before we entered a house: What can we do with this house? Is it big enough for the 2 of us? Will our puppies have enough space and yard to run around? Can we fix it ourselves? How much out of pocket will we need?

We didn't think of granite counters, updated kitchens, nor top of the line flooring, though it would have been a must.

We looked at many properties, and some really needed lots of money to be back into the "livable" condition: no floors, some had holes in walls, mold all over, you name it , we saw it; until we came across Danforth Rd.

My husband fell in love with it, the first time we saw it. It had personality but needed TLC, some bunchs of it....but it was going to be manageable.

Here is what we saw:

 

It had potential!It was enough for us! So we went for it!!!!

Our TO DO's: 

1. Remove weeds, clean up

2. Paint, paint, paint-prime-prime-prime to get rid of Dungeon colors, as I called them.

3. Remove all doors and trims-replace all and repaint.

4. Remove carpet and kitchen-laundry flooring

5. Reface-redo kitchen cabinets somehow.

6. Replace sink-faucet.

7. Remove all shelving from garage

8.Tile lanai and paint

9. Bathrooms: we planned to repaint- will upgrade later.

10. Remove greenhouse on back- build brick patio with built-in grill: Pretty Cool!

So these were our thoughts. Plenty to do, but affordable, and did not need to hire anybody to do it but the carpet man! More savings for us.

We put an offer, we went though the "hula-hula" dance of waiting, and inspections, and everything else, and we bought the house. Great deal, affordable, manageable, and plenty of space for my husband, myself, and my 2 cocker spaniels. My son still lives with us but is preparing to go to UCF next year. So we made room for him..:)

This is now our Little piece of Earth.