Friday, October 21, 2016

Renovating Can Restore Your House...And Your Soul

Hey all,

Finally, the last of my renovation posts. I actually forgot last week...sorry. So today's post covers the last three rooms.  The downstairs bathroom, the guest room (aka Jasiah's room) and the master bedroom.

I really like how these turned out.  The guest room is nice...yet generic, but my son has made it his own.  The bathroom and the master turned out even better than I expected. Nothing is 100% complete, but it'll do for the next year until we get back.

So let's start with the guest room, shall we?  :-)

This was the worst room we had.  It was the one with the major leak and the floor was covered with water when the appraiser went in.

 As you can see, there was mold that had been caused by the previous owner using a dryer in this room and not venting out the wet air. Add that to the leaky plumbing, and it wound up being the area we were most concerned with. Toxic mold is nothing to mess around with. BUT... we took care of it and with our realtor's help, we attacked and conquered!!!  Woot!

And once we pulled up the nasty carpet, this is what we discovered. I love bright colors, but this...not so much. Bleah!


Like the other rooms, we painted it in the butter cream color and trimmed it with wood. We took out the closet doors because my son is a gamer and he wanted to make a gaming area to play in.  Made the room a bit snug, but he's happy, and that's what is important.



On to the downstair's bathroom which turned out to be one of my favorite rooms. It had been a mess. One of the leaks wound up being in the bathroom ceiling, and one day when I was in doing my hair the whole thing came down on me.  Not my happiest moment.  But see what I started with...




As you can see, I had a mess to start with. But I think I turned it into something kinda wonderful. And I did it all myself! Except the ceiling. The boys helped me with that! What do you think?




And finally, the master bedroom. This wasn't meant to be a bedroom at all, but a den or extra game room. But because it had a fireplace, I totally wanted it to be our bedroom. One of my most favorite things is laying in bed with my sweet baboo and watching the flickering flames.

But, as I said, it didn't start out as a bedroom. This is what I had to work with. Not bad by itself but it was wide open to the rest of the house And needing privacy, a lot of things had to change...


You can see the open space behind us. It leads to the staircase and hallway, and it was the first thing we had to deal with so I could have an acutal private room.


But since this was our private place, I wanted to make it as special as I could. It's not complete by any means, but it will give us that privacy and do until we do a major downstairs renovation in a few years. But for now, it's a nice place to enjoy a fire and each other.

Two days before I left for Australia, the mantel fell down, nearly hitting me. (I'm seeing a pattern here.), but the actual fireplace is hidden behind the fan.

 As you can see, we now have a bookcase and door instead of things being wide open. The bookcase was built by my darling son, Jasiah. And it doesn't come close to properly holding all the books I own. LOL




So there you have it. A whole house renovation pretty much in three months. Not too shabby, and now Jonathon and I have a comfortable place to come home to whenever we have a break between tours.

I'll be back on Tuesday with my latest upcoming story. A ghostly Halloween offering that is completely Bad to the Bone.

Hugs,
CJ England

2 comments:

Phylis said...

Lovely, lovely! Nice job! Enjoy when you get a chance. Thanks for sharing the pictures. Hopefully nothing else is going to fall on your head now!

Ray said...

I love that master bedroom. What caught my eye more than anything in the series of pictures is your hat collection. Touches like that is what makes a space truly personal. Not so much what it looks like, but where each one was acquired.

On trips to Crete over the years I collected what are called museum quality statues, plates, etc. Each came with a lead seal showing the artisan made an exact copy of a real museum piece. It isn't so much the items as it is the people I talked to in the shops. One couple who owned one of my favorite shops had a picture of their son who owns a nightclub in Canada with Celine Dion.

In another shop I talked to a young woman who was a student at an American university on the island every time I was in Crete. Somehow we got on the subject of pancakes. She had seen them in the movies, but never tasted any other than crepes and didn't think that was the real thing. So the next day I went to the commissary/exchange on the NATO base and bought pancake mix and syrup and gave it to her that night, our last in port. I didn't get back for several months. By then she had gone abroad. The owner of the store told me that the young woman had bragged about how much she loved pancakes for months after.

Your books and the hats bring the memories flooding back.