dr. awsome's house remodel - DIY Chatroom

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 04:03 PM

The wife and I purchased out first home last April. It's located near the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The home was build in 1896 and was in good structural condition but in a desperate need of a face lift. I'll be posting pictures of the work we have done over the next few days. Hope every one is ok with me showing off my handy work.

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 04:27 PM

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 04:45 PM

When we bought the house the front room and the master bedroom looked horrible. From what we could tell there was at least 5 layers of wall paper over plater and lath. We had one month overlap between buying our house and having to be out of our apartment so we decided to tackle those two areas first since they would be the most difficult to do after we had moved in.

We recruited quite the army of people to help. We were able to have about 7 people helping us on the first day. With that much help we were able to peal off the wall paper (it turns out there was 11 layers) remove any loose plaster and hang 23 sheets of drywall with a first coat of mud. It was a long hard 13 hour day.

The father in law and his contractor starting to put up some dry wall.

More dry wall in the front room.

My parents helping out

getting closer to a finished look

In the bedroom all the plaster came down with the wallpaper.

More in the bedroom

With the new drywall

Close to 10:00 PM on day one.

More at the end of day one, and my poodle standing guard of his new home.

Sanding some mud

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 04:46 PM

More sanding

Front room after primer

The final color

stuart45 · 10-06-2009, 05:07 PM

Great job, well done. Like the colour scheme as well. You didn't fancy putting the lime plaster back then?

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 05:17 PM

Nope, not a fan of the plaster. We wanted a perfectly clean and smooth look. I don't have the skill or time to do that with plaster.

Since we have moved in we've also gutted and redone the kitchen and dinning room. Currently we are working on ripping out the back yard so it will be ready for plants in the spring. I'll post more pictures when I find them.

stuart45 · 10-06-2009, 05:29 PM

A wise choice, lime plaster is hard to use if you are not used to it. A lot of our old houses are Listed buildings and English Heritage make you replace the old lime plaster again. Luckily my house is old but hasn't been listed yet. It's actually a criminal offence to alter a listed building without their consent, and carries a prison sentence.

Dr. Awsome · 10-06-2009, 05:35 PM

My home is in a historic district. I read the rules and regulations very carefully before I started to do any work. In there rules they have lots of buzz words that would easily scare someone who doesn't know what they are doing, but in the end all it says is the home has to look like it would fit in the original era from a street view. Other than that it's up to the home owner to make it fit there needs.

**Scuba_Dave** · 10-06-2009, 07:06 PM

Moved to Project showcase forum

Looks like you have a big project

tripflex · 10-07-2009, 02:15 PM

pictures don't work...

scratch that...had to use firefox running through my proxy server, our stupid filter at work blocked the pictures...ugh

Dr. Awsome · 10-08-2009, 02:22 PM

I found some of the pictures of my kitchen remodel. When we moved into the house the kitchen was functional but horrifying all the same. The cabinets were old and built into the house. The stove was blocking some of the cabinets so they couldn't be used. At one point the PO painted the cabinets to try and make them look better. I guess he didn't know you can't paint over laminate and the paint was peeling off. The laminate flooring had some tares and it was obvious some water had seeped into the sub floor. We started by trying to do simple changes to help the aesthetics but ended up taring the whole thing out and starting from the ground up. It took almost half a day to pull out the old cabinets with my hammer after finding some used cabinets online.
Once the cabinets were out we started on the flooring. The old laminate came out nice and easy but we found a wonderful surprise under it. Who ever had laid it down had also put in a new sub floor of particle board that had got wet. We ended up pulling out the sub floor an putting in a new one.

Underneath we found the original floor from when the addition was made.

On the left you can see the rough plumbing for the new sink. We moved it from looking at a wall to looking out into the back yard. A much needed improvement.

We decided on a black and white linoleum.

Walls primed

The wife choose the paint color and it turned out to be too dark for the space. Plus when we painted the wall we discovered the PO didn't know how to mud or texture. We're not sure which they were going for.

We ended up having to skim the entire room with a few coats of mud to get it smooth again.

This is the color we ended up going with.

**Scuba_Dave** · 10-08-2009, 03:14 PM

Very nice change - I like the floor & the wall color
I has 12 layers of flooring at my last house - what a mess
Kitchen was one of the 1st things I did at my last house, 1st was the bathroom

sbmfj · 10-09-2009, 04:12 PM

what did you use to cover the black and white tiles, seems like a light green sheet of some sort....

Dr. Awsome · 10-09-2009, 04:15 PM

The flooring is a sheet linoleum and the green sheet you can see while we are painting is just a painters tarp.

kimber · 10-10-2009, 10:23 PM

great job..can't wait to see more pics !