Mark's House: Before and After Projects

I guess my son bought the house, but he's more than happy to have mom do a "makeover".

This is the kitchen in Mark's house before...you can't tell from this picture, but the walls are pink sponge paint, with a pearly over-glaze. Pretty, perhaps for some, but not for my burly boy.

It was for sure one of the things he said HAD TO GO. Oh, as well as the nice pink trim on the counter top edges. No way was that sticking around! Other than that, there wasn't a terrible amount of work to do in this room to get it livable again.

The basics were good. Although I'd never seen a kitchen refaced with ALL Formica over the counters, cabinet doors and drawers, vent hood and back splashes, at least it was in very good condition and looked like it would be easy to clean up. And it was, with a lot of elbow grease, my friend Mr. Clean and his sidekick, that fellow they call "Magic Eraser", we had the kitchen looking good in NO TIME.

The thing about this white Formica is that it's super easy to clean up and even the inside of the cupboard doors are covered with it! Inside, though is still the old dark wood from the original seventies kitchen, but that was made lighter and better with a nice tan plaid kitchen cupboard liner.

To solve the problem of the pink counter top edge, we called the local counter top shop, which is less than a mile away and for $150, we could replace just the edges with these clean looking Formica mottled tan edges--it was all done in a couple of hours.

I think it looks GREAT and matches the floor, which was one of our goals to tie things together. We knew if we tried to match the white, it would make the rest of the Formica look yellowed because of age.

And this is the kitchen AFTER! Much better!

I'm sorry I had to use flash in these photos, but the kitchen paint color is a very light tan...or a sand color, best to match the floor. It's going to eventually have accent colors of light blue and robins' egg blue and brown.

The clock I bought is way too big...will remedy that later. All appliances came with the house including washer and dryer. There was even a gas grill on the deck that needs a little work, but hey, Mark works at a hardware store and can get all the parts there! There were nice updated brushed nickel knobs and pulls on the kitchen cupboards, and the new fixture over the table is also brushed nickel.


I will enjoy getting the curtains made for the kitchen....and won't miss these gaudy things you see in the picture below. We will for sure have more understated window dressings and it will more than likely be simple stripes and NO swags and NO sponge-painted wooden curtain rods and brackets.

This is BEFORE...and below...after.

We still have to trim the chain on the fixture over the table. I am watching at TJ Maxx for a rug for under the table. (The stripes on the wall on the left is a reflection of light off the french doors.) I also got my barn prints back the other day and the sepia prints will look great in here.

This kitchen is huge and connects to the living room through those cute french doors (with vintage glass doorknobs!). We were told that the original owners had a sitting area here where the table sits and their kitchen table was directly to our right.

This is our old table, we removed the leaves and set it up...this thing looked HUGE in our kitchen, Mark's kitchen is so big, it looks tiny! (This cape cod is 1780 sq. ft.)

This is the "before" picture of the scarlet living room. Mark hates the shelving surrounding the fireplace but right now, we've left it, and are deciding whether to paint it or remove it. It's great storage for electronics and audio and dvd's and video games, but it's all seventies faux wood grain FORMICA! Inside the lower doors, are also wonderful storage areas with pull-out drawers and more.

We matched the walls to the carpet, it's a darker tan than the kitchen but in the same family--a safe choice. The leather furniture seems to overpower, he may have overbought. At first he had just the recliner and the couch, but then he reconsidered and bought the love seat too. The seller at the store he bought was in a really good discounting mood and so he got almost a thousand off the set, I was impressed.

BUT, it is a guy's place and movies and video games are a big deal to these young guys, so they don't care if the furniture seems too big for the room; they just all want a comfy place to sit! (And this furniture IS comfy!) The carpet cleaned up really well, I don't think it's very old at all.

There's his TJ Maxx rug I got him and we went back together so I could show him this ottoman and he liked it. Inside, there were two matching footstools, and the top of the ottoman flips over for a dual purpose, the one side is for a footstool, the other has a deep tray for drinks (seen here holding his throw pillows).

Since I took this shot, I dug around in our little stash of goodies in the garage and found a temporary solution for an end table here. It's a two tier and works well for now, it was free from someone's trash! I can paint it in the spring when it gets nicer outside. I did the same thing for his nightstand, just looked through some pieces I had waiting for paint and they work for now!

We still have to bring Mark's deer heads down and his mounted turkeys...that will give his living room a little more personality. There are shelves to put back into the overhead storage areas that we had taken down for painting. I still have to hang the curtains I bought (with the big grommets).

Here is the upstairs bathroom. It's sponge painted too, but very subtly and it's tan and cleaned up very well. It matches the vanity well and so we left it. Most of what I did in here was CLEAN. There was hairspray stuck to everything! The ceiling was bad, too and I scrubbed that twice.

As I was cleaning this house, I found that the original owner of the house dated everything he did with his Dymo label maker, and this vanity is dated 1999.

ALL the white trim in the house was painted very poorly and that will be an ongoing project because there are MILES of white trim. All the doors in the house are six-panel wood doors and looked to have been stained dark originally. Whoever switched over to white primed them all, but never finished painting them.

This vanity is a great quality piece and looks very nice, it has aged well. I was pleased with how the things I bought for his bathroom looked very nice in this space.

I've discovered I don't much like cleaning glass-enclosed shower stalls. This one needs some caulking...that's on our to-do list. The gold trim and fixtures are outdated but are all very good quality name-brand pieces in excellent shape and so there is no reason to get rid of them.

The before picture of one of the bedrooms upstairs. It was yellow and Mark switched to a silly-putty color of tan.

His room is not finished, but clean, freshly painted and quiet and restful with tans and robin's egg blue accents. I still have to make the curtains. I hope to find a king sized headboard at a garage sale to paint and put on the bed. Like Mark said, "Your favorite season is coming and you'll find something, you always do!"

There was an entertainment center (a small-ish one) left in the basement that we plan to clean up and move in here for his smaller television. He needs no dresser because of his walk-in closet...so it's a spacious room now compared to the before picture.

Amazingly, most of this work was done by Mark, Me, Lem and Luke in a four day period of time. Mark had four days off in a row, Lem had two, I helped with them all and we worked nights, too.

Littler amounts of time since then have been taken doing the little odd jobs, but we did most all of the painting and cleaning in four days. We just worked our little bums off and it was fun.

I still have more to show, but this will do for now. We've got one biggie still going on that we've had to take a break on: the downstairs bathroom was still bathed in eighties wallpaper and border in teal, pink and blue.

It's been a fun time getting all that off around all the fixtures and built-ins. But, it's a second bathroom so no big hurry! I can't wait to show you the "before" on that and the difference the paint is going to make!

Mark's house is a piece of cake.

Really.

And the following story just may be why.

Did I ever tell you that in addition to the small nursery business my dad had "on the side", he also had a rental home clean up crew? Oh yes. We were they. The nursery business of planting trees and the like was mostly a fall and spring occupation.

And while I and some of my siblings were enjoying our pimply pre-teen and teen-years, and while other kids our age might have been playing sports like baseball or attending summer camp, water skiing and camping--some of us kids were enlisted in this strange army of my dad's. This army was called

"Clean out inner city rental homes after (very) disgruntled renters (or squatters) have left the premises".

HUP, two, three FOUR!

This "army of some" was required to:

A. shovel dog feces out of the living room, kitchen, bathroom or any room. (The smells. The SMELLS!) If the landlord had turned the water and power off to further "evict" as a last resort, there were even worse scenarios to greet us in the bathroom.

B. Scrape and paint inside and out.

C. Clean and scrub anything and everything and this included every. possible. thing.
Oh. My. Don't even get me started on that one.

D. Clean up the yard, this was a PIECE OF CAKE compared to the house. You just couldn't leave your rake or the mower in plain sight.

E. Make inner city house livable again, to quite possibly revisit in just a year or so. (You know: just so the new renter could move in, live there six months, stop paying rent, and then live there free as long as it took for the eviction process to take its course.)

This could be why big projects don't daunt me/us. It could also possibly be why I've never thought owning rental property would be a great way to make income.

It could also be why I've never had a crappier job since. Literally. NOTHING can compare. Maybe my dad did us a favor?! Yes, I think he did.

Our mom used to make us hose each other off in the yard before we could come back in the house once we got home from our pleasant day working in the city.

(She was afraid we'd bring cockroaches back home, and let me tell you, for cockroaches to survive Michigan winters, they had to feel quite welcome and at home in their environments.)

So....Mark's house was NOT a big project by any means. It was a piece of cake.

There was NO dog feces involved. There were no scary neighbors dropping over to tell you the stories of the house you were literally shoveling out.

You will be happy to know that I am officially de-enlisted from the little "Army of some" that my dad had going.

But the stories, the STORIES I could tell you!
I'll leave it there.
(You should thank me.)

In other news....

I guess today's makeover story makes me a participant in something wonderful called "Metamorphosis Monday", hosted by "Between Naps on the Porch".

If you like looking at makeovers, you'll love all the redo photos and stories hosted here.

One of my favorites is this one from our gal Shannan at "Flower Patch Farm Girl". She and her husband recently traveled to Korea to adopt their sweet son named Silas and she's also got lots of good posts from their trip, but in this reveal, we see Silas cute farm boy bedroom and a shot or two of the little man himself (he's aDoRaBLE!). So when you're done here, skip on over!

HGTV ain't got nothin' on us bloggin' neighbors!

Oh.
And.
There's going to be a
BACK ROADS BEAUTY
photo
giveaway
SOON!
(Stay tuned!)

Happy Monday to you!

Half Price House...

If you're not my son's aunt, grandma or sister, you may not be interested in today's post.

But then again, you might!

Son number one has been saving for a home since he was sixteen. I'm not kidding. He's a good saver. In his early twenties, he bought his truck, new, paid half down and paid off the rest in two years, to have a decent vehicle. This way, he figured he'd have a decent vehicle for at least a good ten years or so, and no payment on it while he was paying a mortgage. Good thinking, no?

Then, when he did buy, he wanted to get the home paid off as soon as he could. More good thinking. He wanted a good deal on a house, and by waiting, we found one. We had watched this one go up for sale--but it was $44K more than he paid for it-- when it was listed last summer.

Yup, 44K. I had looked it up at the full listing price last summer, and just wrote it off, it was way out of his price range.

But summer came and went, and fall arrived, and fall was almost over and the trees were bare before I checked it out again. The price had dropped 34K in those months since summer!

Something told me there was a motivated seller.

It was now something that was within his price range, but still 10K over what he wanted to spend. (We've always told our kids buy a home BELOW your means.... however, that is NOT what a realtor would have advised him. He made up his mind this house was the top of his price range.)

So we called, and went and looked.

It was a wonderful house, nothing wrong with it that a little paint, tile or updating wouldn't fix...just needed some TLC--no major remodeling, nothing really to stop him so he got brave and made an offer 10K below the asking price, which made it exactly what he thought he could spend and still afford to eat, drive and all those other things that humans like to do!

(His purchase price is just about half of what the previous owner paid for it.)

Sadly, we found out, it was a divorce situation and both parties had moved out and stopped making payments and had a short sale and a looming foreclosure. Mark made his offer and it took three months to find out, but the bank finally accepted it.

Within TWO WEEKS of acceptance, he had the keys and owns it. He took a fifteen year mortgage and the day he got it he told me "I can't wait to pay it off, I hate owing people money."

Paying off debt is the old-fashioned American way. In fact, I don't know WHO thought it would be good to sell the lie to the masses that mortgage debt is GOOD, but I DO NOT agree!! I think a person should have a goal to own their home outright as soon as possible.

I can't tell you how happy I am and how very PROUD I am of my son and his purchase. I'm thankful that he had an opportunity like this...and sadly, the couple owed almost 100K MORE than Mark paid for this place, and I'm sure they'll have to declare bankruptcy...their divorce is terrible, even worse than losing the house.

But I think that when you want something, and you're willing to sacrifice, save, and wait for it....wonderful things can happen.

And we've seen it happen with this.

For the last four or five days, we've been working on it, painting and cleaning and stripping wallpaper. It's actually been lots of fun! I like the house more every time we go there. Soon I'll have some before and after pictures to show.

The living room was red and the kitchen was pink so there's some major changes there! Tomorrow I have to go there because Mark bought some furniture over the weekend and the delivery man will be there while he's at work.

In a couple days, he moves out and is on his own.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Burly Boy Has A New Home....

Mark was my ten-months gestation baby.
The only one, thank God!
He had to be coaxed out with generous doses of pitocin.
(Three times.)

The first two times were unsuccessful. Poor me. I cried and stomped my feet.
And that didn't even work, until they broke my water.
THEN...BOOM! There he was!
Imagine that!

Nine pounds ten ounces of a bouncing baby boy.
Soon he was up on his elbows peeking out of the bassinet at all the other (itty bitty) babies.
(I'm not kidding you!)

He was a big boy, comfortable where he was. Why move out of the womb? Well, for someone due May 30th, he took his jolly old time and he came on July 3rd...and that was only because the doctor did NOT want to see me again on July 4th.
(He had plans!)


On top of that, I had run out of options on larger SHOES!
Ahem....swollen couldn't even begin to describe my legs and feet!

Well, I brought him home a day or so later, and shortly thereafter I was standing in customer service lines to return all the newborn clothes, he'd moved up a size while he took that extra five weeks cooking time.
(The little turkey.)

He was our jolly boy, full of laughter, always a talker, ticklish beyond belief.
(Where has the time gone?)


And now, he's moving on out again...(just a little overdue) in a move to his own home.

His sister flew the coop when she was 21 as soon as she was done with college. And as with all things, that's true to her personality, so funny.
(See, she sent me into labor right ON her due date.)

No coaxing for her, just a little independent spitfire right from the beginning.

Mark's a little tardy, (he's 25) moving out, but still.
It's true to form for him, too.
That's his personality, always has been: cautious and careful.
(He paid his own way the whole time he lived here once he became an adult.)

I'm so excited for him, happy and proud, too. He's going to move there with his two puppies any day now. Instead of renting in the years between 21 and now, he just buckled down and really saved and now he's getting a nice place to live.

I've been busily gathering things up (filled many grocery bags with cleaning supplies and bathroom supplies and all kinds of goodies) and his shoes and clothing are stacked in the garage, waiting for the day he gets the key.

Ann & Dan
My sweet grandpuppies that I'm going to miss!

I've been doing some shopping for him; he's not interested AT ALL in that part of setting up a household.

After all.
He's got bigger things to worry about.
The mortgage?
No.
Silly!
NOT the mortgage.

He's more worried about the really BIG things:
like the
BIG
HUGE
GIGANTIC
Flat screen HD
whatever-whatever
television.
(Of course.)

And the
brown leather couch and recliner.
(Hello! He's a GUY!)

And maybe a king-sized bed.

But that's 'bout all he's worried about.
(GUYS!)

He's picked out all those really important items and we'll go do the buying when he has the keys.

So...I got the necessities and before I haul all this good stuff to his new house, I thought I'd show you the goods that T.J. Maxx had for this burly boy's new home.

You know a guy living in his first bachelor's pad doesn't want flowery linens and towels: doesn't want frou frou and doesn't want any "pretty colors"....

But I managed to find some stuff that will work.
(T.J. Maxx is good like that. OH HOW I LOVE that store!!)

So here's a show and tell, just skip it if you want, but I knew his sister and aunts would like to see. (Pics of the house will come soon!)

My favorite find: these lamps for the living room.

Some paint chips...the tans will be for the living areas....the blues possibly for the bathrooms.

Rug for underneath the coffee table...

Kitchen rugs...

A not-too-fussy quilt for the bed...

Shower curtains (Linen! For $7.99 each!) that will be put to work either as shower curtains or as curtains for the windows with just a little tweaking.

One ginormous clock for the living room....now who would put the price tag on the FACE of a clock?! But, for $14.99, I'm not going to worry about it!

These towels are manly enough...these for one bathroom, and

these for the other.

And some "for show" washcloths...I've got white towels and white washcloths for everyday.

In this frame, I think I'll put some of those barn shots...manly enough, right?

These were in the shower curtain bin...manly curtains with gigantic grommets to match the gigantic clock!

And another set of CHEAP shower curtains in a great color that look like a million bucks, that will either be shower curtains or window curtains. Great washable fabric, all hemmed and easy to work with.

What time is it?

Time to get MOVIN'!!!

Comin' up is PAINT WEEKEND!
(Paint and lotsa wallpaper strippin'!)