Our Home Renovation 2020

Here's a reminder of the floorplan of our house, and a summary of what we did during the renovation.

  1. Tear out and redo main bathroom
  2. Convert office into third bedroom
  3. New light grey laminate flooring throughout
  4. Repaint throughout, light blue/grey instead of beige
Kitchen: no change (thank goodness)

Timeline

July: interview two real estate agents. Both agree, they cannot sell a two bedroom house in this neighborhood, needs to be three bedrooms.

August: home inspections, minor repairs, competing quotes

September 8 (week 1): demolition on main bathroom

Week 1-2: main bath rebuild, we and cats live in guest bedroom

Week 3-4: flooring, other bathroom remodels. We are living and working among the noise, with our work desks in the sunken room

Week 5: we and the cats move to a hotel for a week while they prep and paint the whole interior

October 10: move back in!

Equipment stored by the pool, including the critical toaster oven for heating lunch.

Construction debris piled in the side yard.

Main bath remodel

Most visitors hadn't seen our bathroom before, so this may be a little harder to visualize. Hopefully this floorplan helps.

Basically, there used to be a small toilet/shower room with its own door; they "blew out" the wall to make one larger room.

Before. This is looking in the open entrance and right, towards the small shower and toilet room (we greyed out the mirrors using Photoshop).

Same view, after demolition; no more wall.

After. Visually the room looks huge now. The shower door is clear and there is no wall to block the sightline.

We really like the light fixtures we picked out to go over the mirrors. Each one has two glass blocks with air bubbles, lit by LED lights.

Office to "bedroom"

Dave's office is pretty small; now it still works as an office but technically counts as a bedroom because of the new closet. It is one of the few closets around with a window and power outlet. We applied a large, plain white sticker to blank out the window.

Before

After

Flooring and paint

Basically the whole house now has the same laminate flooring, except for the bedrooms which have new carpet. The grey area in the floorplan shows where we have laminate now. The walls and display cabinet are a light blue/grey called "Lighthouse Fog".

View towards the front door

Before (sorry, cat tree in foreground)

After

A few more pictures

Library room: Before (well, early during the packing process)

During. You can see the wallpaper that was there originally. We hated it, but it was mostly covered by the bookshelves.

Final result. It's hard to believe but we got rid of eight boxes of books. A lot of the shelves were double stacked before.

At the end of week one, they finished the new floor in the sunken (ex-pool table) room. We moved our work computers and some of the furniture there so they could work on the rest of the house. It was pretty loud, but we survived. You can see the top of Jen's head as she is working in the back left. In the evenings we could watch TV on the small monitor you see in front of the couch.

We didn't change the layout of the hot tub room. But now the tile is a bright white and the walls are a light green to coordinate with the green stained concrete we had already.

That's it, we hope this gives you some idea of the project!