House Updates

It's been a LONG time since I chatted about our house.

We bought it for a really good price back in August and didn't move in until Halloween due to some major updates we made.


New floors-
New ceiling-
New paint-
New kitchen- completely new everything!
New light fixtures-

Lots of new changes...I am hopefully going to post about each renovation..if I can ever find all the photos in my archives ;)

Check out our living area before we updated:


The floors were really nice teak wood, but unfortunately they had been installed incorrectly, which led to "cupping".  Because they were uneven, we knew they needed to be changed eventually and it would be way easier to change before we moved in..without kids..furniture...living there.  Yeah, that was a good choice.

 The kitchen had really old cabinets and they also had some mold issues behind them.  Not fun.  The ceilings were popcorn which we changed...more to come on that.

 

And here's the after!!:

 New wood-look TILE floors. This was the BEST decision we made for our house.  In Florida it's always HOTTTTTT and these keep the house cool and are DURABLE and SUPER easy to clean.  Just vinegar and water, and they look brand new! I love the color as well and the cost was affordable as well.  This is the only thing we did not DIY - we hired a very talented tile layer who happens to be our good friend.  He was trained in Italy and is phenomenal at his job.  We did remove the wood floors though and that is something we may NEVER attempt to do again.  It was NOT fun.

We ended up renting 4 different tools from Home Depot to remove these floors and after it was finished, Seth said never again. LOL

My dad helped, our friend Jared helped, Seth helped, and I even did a little bit but remember, I was also 6 months pregnant ;)  Whoever layed these floors used about 132420984 gallons of glue...

 Once we removed all the floors, we had to get the bazillion layers of glue up.  We thought we did a great job until our tile guy came...He had this scraper that removed EVERYTHING and we obviously did not do as good as we thought. ;)

The floor removal took a good  7 days straight but we ended up saving around $1500 since we DIYed it.  We bought the tile at a local store called Floor and Decor and it took our tile guy around 6 days to lay the entire house minus the bathrooms.  It was only him and one other guy.

For the kitchen:  We also DIYed this with two of our buddies:  Cory and Billy.  We are so thankful we had such amazing friends to help us because we had no idea what we were doing.

We ordered the cabinets from a place called "Cabinets to Go" after a friend recommended them, but will NEVER use them again.  I'll have to go into that story when I have more than a few minutes to type.  Let's just say the lady quoted me for 3-4 week turnaround time and I didn't get the last cabinet until 4 MONTHS later.  Yeah, it was NOT FUN.


In the kitchen, we got new cabinets, new appliances, new counter tops, and light fixtures.  EVERYTHING basically.  Our two friends helped install the cabinets and Seth actually added the pendant light above the sink. There was nothing there beforehand.  

We also removed two cabinets above the bar and that helped open up the space a LOT.

So there it is!! I am completely in love with our renovations.  I will go back and try to source out everything in a little while. I am just too impatient to do it right now ;)   Babies are crying and toddlers are hungry!

I will also do a whole separate post on the ceiling too.  Stay tune, friends!


Xoxo,

Kaitlin