Past Projects - Living Room/Spare Bedroom - Part 1

Where to even begin with this project. When we bought our house we knew our living room ceiling was drooping down and not support well. We knew it would have to be fixed eventually but we bought the house in January and there is little you can do in the cold winter months to fix a drooping ceiling. The plan for the FIRST day of home ownership was to just take all of the wallpaper off, paint the room and live with it until we had time to fix the ceiling. WELL as my brothers started peeling wallpaper we fast discovered that when you wallpaper over Plaster and Lathe the walls tend to come down with the wallpaper. Problem #1...... So our friend came over and took a look at the situation and advised that since it is a very old house and isn't insulated at all it would be beneficial to gut the 2 rooms, fix the ceiling and insulate then rebuild! Since it was still January we decided that would be the plan but we would wait until the first week in May for hopes that it would be warm. We did tear down one wall in the living room in the mean time (see picture below) OH before I forget I should definitely mention that 2 of the walls in our living room were dark pink STUCCO!! Yes the walls were stucco.... and ugly smoke infested pink. The other 2 walls were wallpaper over top of stucco..... Odd... very odd!!!!

Living Room before:

This is the spare bedroom before.. Yes you've got to love the pink wallpaper on the ceiling!!!!!

The caving in ceiling!!!

The start of a VERY LONG renovation. Ryan put his foot through the wall and was very proud!!! (Yes he's wearing my pj pants... don't remember why).

And this is how we lived for about 4 months. We actually hung our tv right on one of the studs.. it was kinda funny!!!

Seeing as this was our first big renovation on the house I was a little niave in how long it would actually take. I would like to point out that since we have radiators we can easily section off one half of the house, live in one side, renovate in the other side and not worry about constant dust! SO that was nice. BUT when you live in a 900 sq ft house and 1/3 of it is sectioned off it gets VERY squishy!!! From May until mid August we lived in half of our house, we could not use the front door so we had to get into the house via the back door. When we needed to turn the heat up we had to run around the house, through the front door and turn the heat up in there. We had a love seat sitting in our eat in kitchen across from the fridge with the tv positioned on a table only a few feet away. We literally had our bedroom, bathroom and kitchen and that was it! The rest of the house was full of furniture or was in the renovation section! NOW May was a VERY rainy month... which meant a LOT of being stuck in about 400 sq ft of space that is so crammed full of furniture that you can't move!!! Does that paint a picture of life for us for 4 months!!! It was tough and it was a real pain in the butt!!!! But we survived!! Stay tune for part 2 of the renovation, gutting the rooms and the rebuild!!