Living Room/Spare Room Reno - Part 2

The first weekend in May last year we started the gutting job for the living room. It took 5 guys, a bunch of beer and an entire day to gut the living room/spare bedroom down to a skeleton. We found MANY 100 year old cobwebs. As well, we discovered that our saging ceilling was the cause of shoddy work... some idiot had the roof being held up by a 2 by 4 on its face... UM DUMB!!!! Not only was it being held up by a 2 by 4 but the support beams on either side of the beam were held in by 2 nails... yes thats right.. 2 nails!!! We were both surprised the roof hadn't caved in yet!!!! MEGHAN AND RYAN TO THE RESCUE!

The problem with older houses is that the frames aren't 16 inches apart like they are supposed to be. Also the framing was all done with actual 2 by 4's (old school 2 by 4's are actually 2 inches by 4 inches, where as new 2 by 4's are a little less than 2 inches by 4 inches). SO we had to add lots of wood to reframe the rooms as well as put supports in for the roof. To do this we had a friend come in and fix the roof for us since that we thought we should have a professional do. Our ceiling is now supported by 2 two by tens which were glued and nailed together. Its not going anywhere now!! We also decided that we would make the spare bedroom an office as well. So we put french doors from the living room to the office/spare bedroom so we could open up the doors to make the rooms appear bigger. So we had the doors framed in. This picture is looking from the living room into the spare bedroom.

Next was the fun part, insulating and drywalling. We put insulation on all exterior walls as well as in the ceiling to help keep the cold out! Then it was drywalling time!!! I am become a pro drywaller!!! It took us a couple of months to get to this stage because we didn't have a lot of time to get around to the drywalling.

Once all of the drywall was hung it was time to get Ryan's brother in to tape and mud the drywall for us. He did a fantastic job!! Finally after 4 months of living in the kitchen it was the august long weekend and we took the entire weekend to finish the living room. We spent the Friday sanding down the walls to prepare them for painting. The Saturday was spent painting, now we have extremely high ceillings in the two rooms so painting the ceilling was a serious workout!!!! It was August and there was no a/c in the front of the house, so every hour we'd go hop into the pool because we were dripping in sweat!!! AFter the painting was done it was time for door frames and doors and baseboards. Ryans brother did our flooring when we were away on our honeymoon as a wedding present which was great!!! We had bought laminate flooring to install but hadn't had the time to get around to it. We had some left over flooring that we used to cover the bulk head that holds up our ceiling. It looks fantastic!! And TAH DAH our new living room/spare bedroom!!!!

These are the doors we used as the entrance to the office/spare bedroom. We bought a Minwax dark stain and stained them to match our new floors.

This is the spare bedroom/office. We painted it a pale green (picture doesn't show it) and added brown curtains to the french doors (which we stained) so when people stay over they have some privacy.

This is the living room (looking at it from our hallway). We painted it cabbage green which is basically a bright lime green and we LOVE IT!! We had to tone down the green with dark furniture but LOVE the living room! (this picture has bad colouring too it, but you can see what we did to the bulk head)