Friday, April 17, 2015

And I'm back

And maybe a little bit sad.  We're on a bit of a fixer-upper frenzy right now 'cause we've come to the conclusion that we're going to have to sell this place and move back to Canada.  

All along I've been looking at this place as our dream-home fixer-upper; the first place we've actually owned since we were first married.  But as it turns out, this is my 'make all my reno mistakes here' place.  I'll do much better next time.  

But we've been busy.

First of all, I finally got the master bathroom painted to match the bedroom.  

This is the before, but I"m not sure it shows up properly - pink sponge blobs on white with wall to wall carpet.


This is the blue.  And what looks like a big over slop onto the shower enclosure is actually
shadow.



And the carpet has been gone for awhile.  I found some 70s white lino underneath, but it had been all scarred up, so has to be covered.  I think I showed you the ceramic tile I scored at a thrift store that I was going to use for it.  Weeellllll... when I carried it into the bathroom to see how I wanted to lay it out, I realized that I had two different patterns, which I could work with and two different thicknesses, which would be a lot harder.  

Pause for rethink.

While pausing, I got tired of the green carpet on the lanai, so I ripped it up and painted the space with  Sure Step paint from Home Depot.  Actually, I''ve been at Home Depot so often lately, I could just call it Home.  You have no idea how much sand can blow into a carped in 40 years.  Not a clean project.

I couldn't get the colour I wanted, but this is okay:  



I'm thinking we should probably paint the walls the same mossy green as the garden wall, but that's probably last on our list.

Then we started on the kitchen.  So far, His Grace has added knobs and drawer pulls.  Not only does it make the cupboards look so much more finished, it keeps them cleaner; I'm not always grabbing the corner of the door with my messy cooking hands.




The pictures will also serve to remind you of our harvest gold stove, counter top and backsplash.  Which are soon to be gone.  Well, soon in our little Duchy; probably not as fast as it happens on planet real world.  

First off I got some paint for the countertops.  It doesn't look too difficult, but the blogger on pinterest did say to watch the video several times before you start.  I'm also thinking about the backsplash... maybe this or this - but painted white.

And I got a newtous light almond fridge, stove and dishwasher on craigslist.  We had to get a new fridge anyway, as the one we had was clearly on its last compressed gasp.  Problem is, both fridges are too wide to go through the door without removing part of the door or the doors off the fridges, our existing stove is built in and who knows how they wired it in 1972 and the dishwasher are just more than we want to deal with.  And as the lovely Lady Bidango Smith-Somethingorother tells me often, "Mumsie... there are people for that."  So I called Chris, the guy who took the ugly porridge off the ceilings in both bedrooms.

We're also getting the porridge removed from the ceiling in the living room and dining room.  There was another person for that.

So I've been begun work on reflooring the whole condo.  The whooooooollllllleeeee condo.  We realized that dirty - as in just about impossible to clean - worn out wall to wall wouldn't help our sale potential.  I was looking for relatively inexpensive but easy to install and found TrafficMaster Allure flooring in teak.  It really is pretty easy, but so far I've just done the square part of the master bedroom.  The next row gets into the angled walls, and that is going to be more challenging.  But - using my best Scarlett O'Hara voice - Tomorrow is another day.

But I do like it so far.


While I've been ripping out old carpet and putting down new flooring, His Grace has started on painting the hall bathroom.  Why, you ask?  Because this is the wall paper.



Even though I want to slap those people on House Hunters who have hissy-fits about things being 'dated.' even I have to admit that this is possibly the definition of that word.  But we've decided just to paint over the paper as the stuff under it would have to be surfaced before we could paint.  

And that wallpaper may not be the definition of dated.  When I removed the mirror in the master bath to paint, this is what I found.  And covered up as soon as I could.


It's actually flocked gold and orange wallpaper.  Scary.