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Enter: The Foyer
Before we move into the foyer work, let me just catch you up real quick on the progress upstairs. With the upstairs flooring done (remember that?), we were able to move into our own bedroom and sleep in our own bed! We finished up the guest room for anyone brave enough to visit during the “Pardon Our Dust” period. And we created a proper office space for Warren and I to run our businesses from (because we did have to make time to make money throughout this renovation chaos)! Time Flies At this point in the renovation, it is April, 2016. Hard to believe that it has been almost 3…
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Kitchen Cabinets: An Open and Shut Case
We Need Cabinets on the Cheap! Hey, it’s all about the kitchen cabinets today! So I’ve mentioned budget constraints before since we had so many renovation projects to complete. And those constraints definitely applied to the kitchen cabinets. While we had custom cabinets already in the kitchen, they looked crazy! Best we can tell, the choice to incorporate the reproduction stove and antique farmhouse sink was made AFTER the cabinets were ordered. Hence none of the upper or lower cabinets lined up with anything because both the stove and sink are asymmetrical. I thought I could live with it but I quickly discovered that I.could.not! To accommodate the only window…
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Getting To Know Our Young Victorian
Building a Dream Home In my last post, I mentioned that I would get into the backstory on Annabelle’s Place. While she is only 20 years old, she does have some interesting history that’s fun to share. This house was originally built as a dream retirement home for a Michigan couple planning to move closer to their daughter. The original plans for the house were modified along the way. Things like moving the master bathroom, making a guest bath into an upstairs laundry room, that sort of thing. Fortunately, we have all of the blueprints that were later adapted by a local architect, which is something that has helped us…
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Hard (Wood Flooring) Lessons Learned (Part 2)
Hardwood Flooring: Sanding and Oiling Welcome back! Ready to talk more hardwood flooring? Good, because there’s lots more flooring stuff going on in the Young Victorian we’ve dubbed Annabelle’s Place. In our last flooring post, we had just finished installing all of the upstairs wood flooring and were excited (may not be the right word) to get going on finishing the floor. First step? Prep the raw wood for sanding. We went around and filled some of the larger wood knots in the floor with a wood filler. Remember that the flooring we chose was a rustic, full-of-character wood that did have some imperfections. Consequently, there were spots here and…
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The Tale of One Ugly Kitchen!
Everything’s Got to Go! During the early weeks and months of our Young Victorian renovation, we had decided that everything needed to go in the kitchen! So we went ahead and began the kitchen demo project while we were waiting for our hardwood flooring to acclimate. Here’s what the kitchen space looked like when we purchased the house: We had also decided that we would need to get rid of the kitchen floor tile. While we had first wanted to try and keep it, we did come to the conclusion that there were just too many broken tiles and an impossible-to-work-with grout color to keep it. You can…
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Hard (Wood Flooring) Lessons Learned (Part 1)
Hardwood Flooring – DIY Style During the three months we were waiting to close on the purchase of our home (you can catch-up on that story here), and we had far too much time to make decisions on the renovation projects, we came to the decision on what to do with the floors in our not-so-old Victorian home. And for the most part, it was a choice to put-down hardwood flooring throughout the house. Mind you this was only going to happen if we did the installation ourselves because, well, it was simply a cost factor! With all of the other projects we needed to complete, budget was always a…
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More Paint; The Real Transformation Begins
Welcome Back! Hey there and sorry, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything to the Young Victorian project but we’ve been a bit busy! Just in the last month, we decided to close our rentals business which you can read about here. And that prompted the creation of a new website to house our renovation story and you can read about the creation of FaithSpun here. I wanted to take a few posts to really introduce FaithSpun before jumping back into the renovation project. It is important to note that this post brings us up to where we were around late February 2016. That was during a time when Warren and…
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Pick a Paint, Any Paint
It’s Only Paint! Yes! It’s paint-pickin’ time at Annabelle’s Place! So here’s the scoop on the paint scheme we chose for the house and why. But first, let’s have a chat about paint in general. Warren and I love paint and we love it because there are so many options and it’s temporary! Yes, temporary! Sorry, got off on a tangent there. But really, it’s just paint and it can always be changed. In our case, we first had to strip off miles and miles of wallpaper to get to the painting stage and having just completed wall prep in our master bedroom, we were ready to pick some colors!…
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Mastering the First Bedroom
Master Suite – Our First Major Transformation We made the decision early on to focus on our master suite as the first living space to complete. I knew that I was definitely going to need a “getaway”, if you will, from the renovation craziness. There was something very appealing about being able to go to my own room at the end of each day and climb into my own bed and have a finished (and clean) space to wake up to each day. We decided to get all of the wallpaper removed and the walls prepped for painting and then painted before beginning the floors. We would later change up…
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Wallpaper Woes
Wallpaper: Faint-Hearted Need Not Apply nor Remove Well if you haven’t noticed by many of the photos, references, and notes in my renovation journal from my last post, we had more wallpaper than a wallpaper factory in this house. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but my goodness, there was a lot of wallpaper! And when you’re in the throws of the excitement of buying a house, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that it won’t be that big of a deal to get rid of something that’s a huge pain in the patootie to get rid of! Disclaimer: for those of you that don’t hate wallpaper, maybe even like it, I’m…
