I am so tired. Folks, one thing you should never do is basically renovate your entire house in a month. It’s stupid and it sucks. But it is immensely satisfying. After you’ve slept for 1800 hours and recovered. Or when you see the for sale sign up and know that you did the best job you could. Whatever. Frak, I’m tired. Also, this post is more of a rambling of what we did/focused on, with some pictures and I’ll post the pretty room-by-room stuff as the week goes. If I’m not comatose.
When we took back the house from the renters it was a hot mess. It was smelly, the walls were dirty, the floors were dirty. Everything was dirty and they painted things the way wrong color for the house. It’s a row house, and it doesn’t get a ton of light in the living room, so one thing we learned was that dark colors just did not work in there. So of course, they painted it a dark color. Sigh.
We repainted the entire house. Top to bottom. Literally. From the basement floor to the upstairs ceilings, every. single. surface. was repainted. I am permanently stained with paint. I went through three paint sprayers (I’ll eventually review my favorite). We spent the bulk of our budget just in paint. I am now probably pro-level at painting. As I am typing, I’m in a nice business professional dress with paint on my feet, in my hair and on my glasses. I’m sure my coworkers think I’m totally normally.
We spent probably half the time bargain shopping for furniture, because staging was a must. Target and World Market are my new besties. I don’t know how much we spent in furniture but it was a lot, but not a ton. I mean, we were furnishing a nearly 1800 sq ft house almost from scratch. But I think we’d probably still win an award for being super frugal. Like most people’s one room decorating budget would be more than what we spent in the house total. Most of the tags are tapped/tugged into the furniture and will be returned when we sell it. Or we’ll sell it with the house. Whatevs.
We have a lot of rugs too. I need more house to use all these rugs. We bought rugs to hide how stupid the floors are in the house. We refinished the downstairs, but never did the upstairs, and really for what someone is buying the house for, they can replace their own damned floors. (Pro tip: In Baltimore, real estate is stupidly cheap — especially in comparison to where we live now). But in the meantime, we didn’t want it to be like a total “OH NO, I HAVE TO REPLACE THE FLOORS” and more like “oh well the rugs will hide it, we don’t need to do this immediately.”
So, enough rambling, here are some pictures.
First impression from the door when you walk in
The dining room. So lovely and huge.
More living room
Master. ❤
Completely renovated bathroom.
More kitchen. Giant fridge. Original casing that the previous owner had covered up!
Kitchen. With toe moulding! We never really completed it while we lived there. We should have.
Oh the office. My favorite room in the house
Back Bedroom. I love how Scandinavian this room looks. And the planets are fun.
Middle Bedroom. Ugh.
We have to make a trip back up to the Baltimore house tonight to wrap things up. And do something more with that middle bedroom because in the worlds of Charles Barkley, It’s Turrible, but it goes up on MLS tonight! YAY!!!!
The end.
32oh7 