Sorry for the silence last week, what with Father’s day we didn’t really get anything done at Aldo’s House.
We realized that treating the two rooms as a unit was somewhat overwhelming, and decided to paint the dining room completely before adding any color to the living room.
We finally brought Aldo to visit the house. He was very unsure about this travel arrangement but managed to fall asleep eventually.
He would very much like to know why we’re spending so much time making a mess of this cabin instead of hiking or something.
You may be able to tell that Jen took these photos from a chair while Jesse did all the borscht painting but hey, she needed to keep Aldo safe from paint-related dangers. The first coat of Borscht did not apply or dry evenly, not in the slightest. It needed a thorough second coat after it had completely dried.
By contrast, the green covered beautifully on the first pass. We had to go back and hit a few dimples after the bubbles popped, but it seems that the majority of our frustrations are happening with paints containing red pigment. I guess the lesson is: when you’re painting in red, you might need twice as much as you thought.
Tada! White Duck ceiling, Borscht North and South, Fiddlehead Fern East and West, and Resort Tan trim. We’ll get around to replacing that ceiling fan, but we want all three in the house to match and it’s a low priority.
We’ll do some proper before-and-after photos and a cost summary once we’ve installed the flooring and curtains!
We didn’t get a whole lot done this last weekend, but let’s talk about our plans for the front rooms.
The front of the house is made up of two rooms: the carpeted living room and vinyl tiled dining room, with a wide doorway between them. We were excited to take out the old carpet and see how it improved the air quality in the house.
The original hardwood floor was discovered in the bedrooms during the inspection, and we had a hunch it would be present throughout the house. We thought that repairing and refinishing them would just be too much to undertake along with everything else. It will be more efficient to put a new, non-destructive floor treatment over the top of them.
We were not expecting the floor lasagna in the dining room where the hardwood was covered in two layers of glue-down sheet linoleum, which was covered with plywood subfloor for the vinyl tiles. We’re not super looking forward to dealing with that, but we get to put it off for a while and focus on the walls.
Jesse was at this point wondering how many times he would have to relocate the stack of flooring. Probably at least once more! This was before an afternoon spent patching and priming the living room.
We diagnose this wall with chickenpox.
The house had been occupied by the previous tenant for about 10 years, and the walls had accumulated quite a lot of nails, screws, and small holes in that time. Our dedication to doing things right the first time does daily battle with our impatience to see progress!
“shake vigorously for ONE MINUTE”
These rooms definitely needed some fresh texture application after all of our patchings. In terms of dry times, everything seems to take so much longer than advertised. The caulk around the subfloor in the laundry room promised to be ready to paint in 30 minutes but ended up postponing our flooring install by a week. We were eager to paint the ceiling in the dining room but the texture stayed tacky for the rest of the day, which again meant it was delayed until the next weekend. Also, rattle-can texture application is just the worst.
You may have noticed that Jesse is wearing glasses in these pictures! Despite an abundance of caution and religious use of PPE, something managed to get under his contacts and cause a mild infection. He reported multiple consecutive nights of his eye itching furiously after contact removal, and Jen ordered him to keep them out until he could see a doctor. She threatened him with the possibility of eye amoebas to make sure he would take it seriously (it wasn’t eye amoebas).
Jesse blames the sawdust from the table saw, but he spent a lot of time handling the carpet and the dirt that we found beneath it seems like it would have been microbe heaven.
With the original water heater out and the walls painted, we were ready to install the new floor!
The room on May 9th, before cleaning.
The previous owners were kind enough to leave us a stack of replacement linoleum tiles, in case we wanted to keep this floor and patch the places where it had been broken. We were determined to make every room our own, and Jesse had found a great deal on engineered hardwood floors.
Preparation
The old tiles came up fairly easily, much easier than sheet vinyl floors would. We had picked up a couple of 2-inch putty knives, in the end we favored the method of tapping the stiff knife with a rubber mallet when we were having trouble getting under a tile.
Unfortunately, the flooring we picked out was not available in any nearby stores, and we were left waiting for it to be delivered. That delay offered us some time to work on other things around the house and shop and get very detail-oriented with the painting. There were some gaps between the wall and subfloor, so we bought a flexible waterproof caulk and filled that in.
We painted all of the existing trim Icelandic while we waited for the floors. Here Jesse is working on the trim in what we’ve been calling the Wall Hug.
Instead of getting the more traditional hardwood baseboard, we went with a primed particleboard trim. We enjoy the look of natural wood but we are trying to keep things within a budget, and a painted trim helps give our multicolored rooms a more cohesive look. We cut and painted these while we were waiting on our floors.
Since this floor was on such an incredible deal we made the leap and ordered enough for the laundry room, living room, and dining room. This meant a semi-truck drove backwards down the entire length of our narrow residential road to bring us a pallet of boxes. This also meant that we were terrified that we had ordered so much of something without ever even handling a sample and were antsy to see how it looked.
Before we could install anything, we had to let them sit in their boxes inside the house for at least 3 days. More waiting!
These are engineered wood floors. Before you call us nuts for installing wood in a laundry room, we picked these because they were marketed as waterproof. We also plan to get some leak alarms to avoid putting that to the test.
Installation
Step one on the installation was to remove the tongue from the boards in the first line. Jesse wanted to give it a go without power tools but then felt pretty silly actually trying to accomplish this with hacksaws as suggested in the instructions. At least he had beer. In the end, we decided we weren’t equipped for this, which meant more waiting.
Table saw to the rescue! We had borrowed this table saw from Jen’s dad before for a smaller project. This time they said “just keep it there until you’re done with it,” which we think might mean they never want to see it again. The face shield may seem excessive but Jesse discovered on the first cut that his safety glasses were not successfully keeping the sawdust out of his eyes.
After installing the first two rows, any worry about the final look of this floor was gone.
With Jen measuring and installing, and Jesse sawing in between bursts of old floor purging in the rest of the house, the hardwood was down in no time at all. On the left, Jen is seeing if this end board would fill the requirement of being 6 inches away from the seams on the previous row. We had mistakenly cut the first board about an inch shorter than we meant to, which ended up giving us two starting board lengths to choose from on every row. We’re not fretting about the extra scrap but looking forward to making some matching coasters when we’re done with the other rooms.
They were advertised as random lengths but truthfully there were 3 consistent lengths. There were far more long boards than small or mediums, we favored these by always cutting them for the end pieces instead of starting from whichever board was closer to the intended dimension. Random seam placement is hard to accomplish with consistently sized panels. We threw in a small or medium when using a large would cause a seam to align with one in a recent row.
Happily, Jesse returns for some hammering and installs the baseboard with finishing nails.
Before and After
We are completely thrilled with the results. Once the trim was in we spent the rest of the day just sitting in the laundry room, admiring it, and talking about what it would feel like for the whole house to look this nice.
The door has been left bright white for now, we think it might look nice for it to match the appliances instead of being a wall or trim color.
Total Cost
There are plenty of small details to go in this room, but most of them will probably wait until the other rooms are finished.
The floor and underlayment for this room cost $133.89, and the baseboards were $29.76 (including an extra 7-foot segment that we’ll either use in another room or make into a frame). Our total cost for tools, paint, and materials was just under $275. A cursory search tells us that the average cost to remodel a laundry room is $6000. Of course, we haven’t added any new fixtures here like cabinets or shelving. We’re going to wait until the appliances arrive before deciding what to add in the way of wall fixtures or furniture.
Speaking of appliances, we caught the Memorial Day Sale Madness and ordered a new washer and dryer set. Our shiny new water heater, though, was a gift from our friend Sarah. Thank you so much!
What’s Next?
Our contractors still haven’t been able to start work, so nothing can be done about the bedroom or office. Our easiest available next step is the living room and dining room. It will basically be the same work as the laundry room but on a larger scale. We’re both eager and nervous to tackle the kitchen, and may start dismantling that while we’re in the “wait for it to dry” steps on the front rooms.
We had initially planned to start at the front door and repaint the living and dining rooms first, but starting with the laundry room was appealing for a number of reasons.
The previous tenant had taken her washer and dryer with her, so the room was mostly empty.
Being able to wash our clothes seemed like a more important prerequisite to moving in than having a place to put a couch.
It’s a small room that visitors aren’t likely to linger in, and we’re probably going to do a few things wrong on our first try.
Cleaning
Our plan was to get everything out of the room, clean, prime, paint, and then replace the floor before installing new appliances.
We dutifully followed the directions of disconnecting the water heater from power and running a tap until it was no longer warm. We had plenty of other things to do while we waited like removing the shelf brackets, peeling away the vinyl trim, and scraping the duct tape residue off of the window, but it takes a lot longer to run out of hot water when you want to! Jesse started to wonder if the water heater really needed to be replaced, given how admirably it was performing. Eventually, we found a sticker on the tank with a copyright of 1993 and he relented.
Those intimidating black smudges on the walls came off pretty easily with pine-sol and an all-purpose sponge.
When the water finally ran cold it was time to shut the input valve and drain the tank.
The tray was in the way of fitting a hose to the drain, so Jesse hammered it. He was looking for a reason to hammer something. We then discovered that the hose didn’t fit very well onto the drain connection! It was just a hair too small to get past the first threads and all the water would escape around the connection instead of following the hose. Being very prepared people who totally know what we’re doing, we had not brought duct tape.
Jen went on the hunt in the truck and found an old grocery bag and the medical kit that had been a free gift with our first car. Once it was snugly wrapped, we found that if we opened the tap slowly we were eventually able to get it to full flow without any leaks.
Shortly after removing the water heater, we discovered that when you run the water in the bathroom sink, it would also come out of this pipe here. We hadn’t brought anything to cap these pipes with and it was going to be a while before we could replace the water heater. We agreed to put a ‘do not use’ notice on the sink and wrap the pipe in a towel for good measure, creating this stylish hat.
Priming
We primed the whole room with Kilz 3. We calculated how many square feet of surface we would eventually need to prime, and went ahead and bought a 5 gallon bucket of it. Here Jesse is happily putting the finishing touches on the door, and you can see the stark difference between the bright white and the kitchen. That’s not a lighting illusion, the whole house was that yellow!
Painting
We decided to use Sherwin Williams Superpaint, mostly because a new one had recently opened in our area and had a really great grand opening sale.
We’ve picked a total of 9 paint colors for the interior, 11 if you count the ceiling tints. Each room will have 2 wall colors and a trim color that compliments both of them. We’re very excited about owning walls and color theory is fun.
This room received Gentle Grape on it’s East and West walls, Steely Gray on it’s North and South walls, and an Ice Cube ceiling. The trim will be painted in Icelandic, which is the background color on this page! We’re really happy with how the colors work together. We would like to note that, for some reason, the Gentle Grape was a lot harder to work with. It didn’t adhere well to our primer and would come off on the roller when we tried to apply more. Even when we came back the next day to apply a second coat, the paint from the previous day sometimes stuck to the roller instead of the wall. We have a few theories about why it would behave so differently from the Steely Gray, but will hold off on guessing until we’ve worked with more colors.
Cost So Far
Our actual total expenditures so far are $577.72, but that’s including several gallons of paint that we haven’t touched yet and other supplies that are intended for other rooms. Let’s break down the individual cost of the painted laundry room.
At this point, we’ve bought a lot of tools and supplies. For the general supplies and tools which will be used in every room, we’ll keep a running total and divide it out into each room’s total cost. This cost will include a lot of things that we’ll have use for long after these rooms are finished like work lamps and the garden hose. There are a lot of standard household items that we’ve never had. Currently, the laundry room’s share of the general supply cost is $54.
We bought a gallon each of gentle grape, steely gray, and ice cube, which totaled at $96.80. We didn’t empty these gallons and are going to reuse all of these colors in other rooms. The estimated paint cost for the laundry room is about $50.
Homeguide.com lists the cost of repainting a room at $3-$7 per square foot of floor space, so our petite 53.5 square foot laundry room should cost $160-$374. $56 might not seem like a huge savings, but we’re feeling pretty good at managing a total cost that’s 35% less than the low estimate.
We have been keeping the big news mostly to ourselves for a few weeks now. This is not for lack of desire to share the happiness with you all, but more due to a need to let it sink in for ourselves. The new reality has mostly set in, and can largely be described as “a lot of problems we are happy to have”. The seller’s agent handed us the keys on May 4th, smiled wryly, and said “Good luck!” The house has been a rental for at least 10 years and, according to the neighbors, it’s been much longer than that since it’s had any updates inside or out.
There is a lot of work to be done to make this place feel like home, and we’re excited to share this adventure with you! We’ll be updating here with our progress every week as we remake this place, room by room. Tune in next week for the start of project one: Laundry Room!
