Adventures in Remuddling

I’ve been prepping the guest bedroom for painting for 3 weekends now. It’s not as high a priority as our two bathrooms, so I tend to do a little bit, and then leave it to help Tig. It also didn’t help that I started with the most hole ridden and cracked plastered room in our unit. The closet was never painted, there are three large cracks on the west wall and holes in the closet. The previous owner, over the past 43 years made over 30 holes in the room (hanging wall shelves, nails to hold blinds, hooks, etc…). If my spackling efforts fail to fix these flaws, plan B is to buy a really large world map that covers most of the wall.

On Saturday, I loaded the caulk gun and started to close various gaps between the trim.

Continue reading “Guest room - prep work” »

The Boston Water and Sewer Commission has a cool feature on their website; it graphs out our daily water usage. For fun, we took a look at April’s water usage under the previous owner.

Now compare to after we closed on our house:

Continue reading “Our water usage” »

For Unit 1 Bathroom, I decided to take the existing medicine cabinet in Unit 2 (that’s our friend Carl singing while taking the picture)

For the past few weekends, I’ve been sanding off the awful gold paint and green blotches off the medicine cabinet with a wire brush and sandpaper.

Continue reading “Medicine Cabinet Makeover” »

Even though the bathroom is not 100% done, I thought it would be fun to put up before and after pics.

Before - Fiberglass surround, old tub, vinyl floor, ugly fixtures, bare light bulbs

Continue reading “Bathroom No. 1 - Before and After Pics” »

When we first got the place, the rental unit’s back porch entry was scary. Ugly brown wallpaper on the upper section, green chipped paint on the bottom section. An ugly bulb dangled from cracked plaster that looked like it was going to fall down any minute. We had to do something about it. The only saving grace was the wood trim, which had not been painted over.

Continue reading “Scary back porch entry” »

Our house came with oak floors in every room except the kitchens and bathrooms. Luckily, the first floor unit was recently refinished before the purchase. Our unit, however…

Continue reading “Sanding the floors” »

When we removed the stove a couple of months ago, I noticed there was a bracket screwed to the floor. I assumed this somehow held the stove in place. When I asked our contractor consultant, if we needed it, he said “Duh… Yeah.” Actually, he did not say “duh” but his tone made it sound like it

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Continue reading “Anti-tip device” »

To see how far along we’ve come on the kitchen: here are some before and after pics.

Continue reading “Kitchen before and after” »

Now the fun part, a look at before and after photos. The good thing about this whole remodeling project, there’s nowhere to go but up!

Continue reading “Bathroom No. 2 - Before and After” »

We have neglected to put up some pictures of our guest bedroom…

Continue reading “Guest Bedroom (Ours)” »