Home improvement

It was time to make the interior look as good as the exterior!

After framing the addition to my garage, I had to install the doors, windows, siding, trim, and hardware. Sounds easy but it was a ton of work.

Now that the foundation is done, the hard part is behind me and the walls are going up quickly!

I'm doing everything from the footers to the roof shingles, from designing the plans to raising the walls.

How to overhaul a kitchen, from floor to ceiling. Or, "how to polish a turd." Everything we did in 6 months: All new plumbing. All new electrical wiring and outlets. All new ceiling lights. All new appliances. New flooring. New cabinets and countertops. New garbage disposal and added a switch to control it. The interior doors where all renovated. Backsplash tile and paint. Removed the ugly AC unit that was in the wall (not the window, the wall) and patched up the drywall. Added a heater duct from the furnace to the kitchen (it used to be heated with baseboard heaters). Knocked down a closet that was taking up space for the kitchen table. Range hood vented through the roof. Custom cubby in the wall for the fridge. New baseboard trim. And more....

From the beginning, Logan and I knew we wanted wooden countertops in the kitchen. Thankfully, they were also fairly affordable compared to grantie or a similar stone countertop. And because they're made out of solid wood, I could do all the work of cutting and fitting them myself. Which is exactly what I did.

We ripped out the living room carpet on the first day we got the keys to the home in December 2016. But we were't fully finished renovating the living room until May 2018. How did we do it? Stay tuned and find out on this exciting new episode of This Old Fixer Upper! 

When we bought this house last winter, we did it assuming that there was a hardwood floor underneath the carpet. We were right: antique douglas fir planks! But repairing and refinishing them was not easy. We made a few mistakes, and one of them I can honestly say was the biggest mistake we've made yet during our renovation.

We completely gutted the stairs down to the stringers and rebuilt them. They challenged me at every step along the way - no pun intended. I had to use every tool I had, every skill I knew, and every ounce of my patience. Do not try this at home!

The upstairs bedrooms where the first rooms to get the renovation they so badly needed and deserved. 

We're so happy with our IVAR open wardrobe system from IKEA, but we had to "hack" it first!

For my This Old Fixer-Upper project, we decided to cover the plaster ceiling with pine tunque-and-groove panels rather than try to scrape off the wallpaper and paint the ceiling. The original plan was to use 4' x 8' sheets of panels that looked like tongue-and-groove boards painted white, but we found the actual stuff at Menards for only a little bit more money per square foot. A pretty good deal I thought. All of the materials cost me a little over $400, including the brad nails, paneling adhesive, polyurathane, etc. 

With nothing but grass growing in the 1/3-acre yard - and massive amounts of perrenial flowers surrounding the house that we had no idea about until spring - we had a big canvas to do whatever we wanted with. I wanted lots of trees! And a big garden! No, bigger than a garden. A food forest! At least that was the plan.

In this episode of This Old Fixer-Upper, Danny does electrical, HVAC, insulation... and then, tragedy strikes [not really]. All this and more, coming up!

Surprise! We bought a house! Overall I think it's a very very good starter home for a couple like us. It's a fixer upper, however, but it will be a great fixer-upper for first-time fixer upper-ers.