As I related in a previous post, my intent has never been to remodel my own home. In fact, it’s something that I had vowed I would never do. But then I moved out into the big wide world and found that things cost money. A lot of money. And I’m not even talking about fun stuff, I mean the boring essentials, like toilet paper. I’ll never forget standing in front of the toilet paper aisle and just being floored. They want me to pay 24 dollars for toilet paper?!

Fast forward about 10 years when my husband I were looking for our first house. We were SO excited and SO naive. Our landlord at the time was a little wacky and didn’t believe that hot water was that much of a necessity. He would fill our propane tank up with a mini cheap one and when that ran out it usually took him a few days to get a refill. Do you kiddos know you can shower at the gym down the street? All you need is a membership…

That helped put some pressure on the situation. That and we felt like gazillioneers because I had gotten my first grown up job as a bonafide PA so we were both fully employed.

We had looked at a few houses but everything was out of our price range or just didn’t pass the muster. We had visited an open house at a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1959 blah house on a moderately busy street and both decided nah, we will hold out for something better. A few weeks had passed, the holidays were looming, and we were impatient. We decided to give the little house another chance. It had decent “bones” as it were, not a lot of charm but it wasn’t awful and hey, it was a house with consistently hot water (or so we hoped). We jumped, put an offer in that day and were so disappointed when our realtor told us we were one offer of three! 

Our hopes and dreams of getting the little house were crushed. We were first time buyers without an impressive portfolio; definitely on the bottom of the food chain. Imagine our shock then when our offer was accepted! We signed the papers and on December 20, 2013 it was ours.

We signed the papers Friday, got the keys Saturday and on Sunday we were ripping things off the house and had gotten our chainsaws out.

A week later we had selected our first official project; the guest room. We figured it would be a good place to start since it needed minimal work and it would get our feet wet. The existing room had old vinyl windows, skinny oak baseboards and blah paint.

So now the nitty gritty.

The previous owners had decided it would be fabulous to have tile on all the window sills in the house.

We yanked it and the window, replacing it with Milgard vinyl windows. We flanked these with an updated window casing. We used Oat Straw by Behr for our color in here and I liked it enough I used it in our living room as well.

We did a high gloss Creamy White Behr paint for our baseboards.

We decided at this point to go with high contrast details throughout the house. The white doors and trim really make the brushed bronze pop.

In the closet I was stumped as to why the previous owners would paint over the floor…

When I started planing it away we were so pleasantly surprised to find cedar!

Remodeling can be like this. A house often contains lots of little gifts (sometimes these are good or bad) and you never know what you will find. That is part of what often makes it maddening, addicting, and fun.

In our next post, I’ll share how the little dabble in the guest room led us to a whole other ball of wax when we got gung-ho with a sledge-hammer in the kitchen….

To be continued in Part 2