Kitchen Laminate Floor

Adair has been preparing the kitchen floor for the new ALURE laminate floor. While Hailey finishes the grouting in the bathroom, he prepared and cleaned the floor area, after filling in any gaps in the subfloor.

The Kitchen is due to arrive on the 6th of February, along with the appliances, so we need to get the floor down, at least in the kitchen. This new laminate "tile look" floor, glues to each other, rather than the floor itself. It is a sealed joint and is waterproof, perfect for the kitchen and hallway where we are putting it down.

Bathroom Floor Tiles

Adair and Hailey have finished tiling around the tub, and are now working on the bathroom floor tiles. They have done a good job, and Hailey is getting ready for grout.

Everyone is working hard on this renovation, as we start putting everything back together, it is looking much better.

Adair has started on the laminate floor in the kitchen, while Hailey does the grouting in the bathroom.

Bathroom renovation

Hailey and Adair were continuing today with installing tiles around the new bathtub. They are doing a great job, and the tiles they picked are awesome! As per usual, older houses, have "not so perfect" lines, so they have had their hands full, trying to make everything perfect.

But they have, with lots of measuring and tile cutting, this bathroom will be one of the best rooms in the house. Pretty good for "first time renovators".

They had a budget, and picked out everything for this room, including the new vanity, and floor tiles.. can't wait to see it all together.

I have been painting. I have now put primer on three bedrooms and the hallway. Also, two coats of ceiling paint on all rooms. The fourth small bedroom, needs some wall prep before we can continue, but with the primer tinted close to the finished colour, it is already looking better. Jeremy was "materials manager" today, getting us all the things we needed. It is handy to be working on a house right in town, stores are not far.

Tomorrow, I will prime all the doors and window trim. Some are presently bright pink, or purple or green. Zinsser primer works best on all of this. Once that last bedroom is primed, then it will be time to put on a coat of finish colour.

Creative Renovating

The upstairs hallway had a wallpaper border all around the top, including the area over the stairwell.

There is no landing in this stairwell, making the ceiling two storeys high. The border was dry strippable, meaning the pattern part ripped off easily, but it leaves behind the brown backing paper. You then wet this and scrape it off. Sounds easy enough, but unless we can rent some serious scaffolding, this job has been left for now.

Until I got creative! I pulled a completely redneck move. I took a long handled mop and soaked the paper border over the stairwell, from the second floor hallway. I then took the wallpaper scrapper blade and "duct taped" it to a pole (used for painting ceilings etc) and proceeded to scrape off the paper. This actually worked! It fell all over the place, and took a lot of mopping to get it really wet, but it worked.

Did the same trick when it came to painting the primer on the wall. I "duct taped" the trim paint brush to the pole, and carefully edged the paint. Not too bad at all! No one could believe how I did this when they came in to do work on the house today. I promised Jeremy, that not once was I in danger. I did not go anywhere near a ladder, just got creative with the extension pole!

Repairing Drywall

One of the small bedrooms in this house, was dark blue wallpaper, and the opposite walls, at one time, had stick on cork tiles. They were stuck on quite well, and at some point the previous owner must have tried to remove them, taking the drywall surface paper with it. So, now we are faced with the fuzzy insides of the drywall board.

We were trying to avoid tearing down the drywall, as this would damage the ceiling, and it looks like they had already put another thin sheet of drywall on as a second layer. (who knows what happened to the first layer!).

I took off as much loose paper as I could, and the remainder of the cork, and am trying my hand at "mudding". I have already used two small pails of spackle, and will sand it tomorrow, and see what it looks like. Worse case scenario, this room will have a "plaster look"! (That is the before picture you see)