rennovation Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Of Sticky Tiles and Bathrooms

A few weeks ago, I started a tour of our house in Washington. At the time, we were just getting ready to list the house for sale in preparation for our big move to El Paso.

Well, God is good, and after only 5 days on the market, we accepted a full-price offer and sold our first home. It was a bittersweet moment, as you can imagine. We were flooded with relief because our realtor didn’t think we’d be able to sell the house for the listing price, but the listing price barely covered the original purchase price of the home, not to mention everything we’ve done to the home.

We couldn’t afford to lower the price. We couldn’t afford to negotiate. What an amazing thing for God to allow us sell the house, pay off our loan, and start new. We know we have not gotten a return on the investment we put in to the house, but life is about more than just making a profit. We took a house that was in sad shape and improved every bit of it. I think that’s my privilege as an image-bearer of God. I get to shape and transform the dust into something beautiful. At the end of the day, my bank account may not be swelling, but I believe we are radiating the glory of God by subduing our little corner of the earth with beauty and grace.

Which brings me to the rest of the house tour. I’ve got to finish it so I can tell you all about our move and that little incident in New Mexico involving three patrol cars and the threat of arrest. Yep. That.

But first, a little reader survey:

Do you like getting jabbed in the ribs by a toilet paper roll holder every time you use the bathroom?

Do you like to think about mint ice cream cones whenever you contemplate the bathroom walls while using the aforementioned facilities?

Do you adore stick-on vinyl floor tiles that don’t quite connect in a bathroom which is used by three boys?

If so, then have I got a bathroom for you! Ta-da!

This is our bathroom the way it looked when we first moved in. It had all those things going for it–mint ice cream walls, stick on floor tiles, and more (like an extra piece of white trim stuck to the top of the back splash for no apparent reason and brass fixtures that did not match the nickel lighting and…).

…and so I really did not love this bathroom.

That mammoth golden oak vanity was much too large for the space. Someone in a previous household had carved “HI! Hi! Hi!” into the side of it, probably in an effort to make peace with the beast.

It didn’t work.

Now, the builders were aware of the beastly size of the vanity and tried to compensate by installing installed a teeny, tiny toilet. Now, my husband and I are not small people. I have already told you that I am 3/4 Giant (on my father’s side) and while I am not rotund by any means, there’s something about being squished between an intrusive toilet paper holder and a shower curtain that made me feel about as comfortable as a sumo wrestler in an airplane lavatory.

Lovely image, I know.

To make matters worse, this is the main bathroom in the upstairs. It is the bathroom guests use and children crowd into to brush teeth. It is the bathroom I had to walk by every single day and groan at until we made some changes.

And boy, did we.

This is our hall bathroom after a significant face-lift.

The first thing we changed was that awful vanity. We found a smaller vanity on clearance at Home Depot. It was smaller in width and in depth which was perfect for our small bathroom. Suddenly, we had room for two more children to crowd in and ask me questions if I ever tried to use the bathroom alone!

For real.

We also bought an adult-sized toilet, the kind that did not come from a preschool. You cannot know how happy that purchase made my husband.

It made him even happier than replacing the stick-on floor tiles, which was the thing that sent me over the moon. It was like Christmas and my birthday combined when I got to rip up the vinyl floor tiles. I was as giddy as a school girl with that putty knife in my hand.

In place of horrid sticker flooring, we put down real slate tiles. We had been collecting them for quite some time from various building surplus stores. They’d turn up every now and again for just a few cents a slate from people who had leftovers from a project.

We looked for brightly colored tiles and scooped them up whenever we found them. Usually, we found only one or two useable tiles at a time, but we weren’t in a hurry. What we wanted was unique, interesting rock. After all, if we were going to be stuck with a small room, we wanted to make it count.

We didn’t find all of our slate on the cheap, but we found enough of it to make a dent in the cost of renovating our hall bathroom.

A friend of ours from church came and laid the tile for us. He even complied with my request to lay them on the diagonal, even though that meant a lot of extra work for him. But I wanted interest and movement, not boring, straight lines.

Plus, every girl knows that if you have a choice between a diamond or a box, you pick the diamond. Always.

Diamonds everywhere!

But wait! There’s always room for more diamonds!

We found these baseboard tiles after the floor tiles were laid, and they were perfect to finish the floor.

Jeff also added the accent tiles behind the sink. They look a lot like the baseboard tiles, but have glass tiles instead of slate for the accent. I love, love, love the addition of the glass.

These accent tiles were more expensive than the slate flooring, but we only needed a few because our bathroom is so small. Plus, they added so much to the room.

See?

Sigh.

So much better than stick-on tiles. Like, infinity times a gazillion.

You may have noticed that the walls are no longer mint green. Good-bye, ice cream cravings! I painted the walls when we first moved in because the mint green was just not working for me. We picked up some free paint at a paint recycle place near us. Did you know such places exist? They do!

I made a custom color for the walls (that’s a fancy way of saying they didn’t have enough of any one color so I dumped a few together until it looked about right). I wanted something to complement the colors in the slate (at least, that’s what I told my husband when the finished product came out blue-grey).

I also told him we were going with an ocean theme. Because I totally planned that. See?

That slate on the wall was my grandfather’s when he was a boy. It even has some math on the back written in chalk. I will never erase it.

The Ocean Bath advertisement was in a stack of papers from my great-grandmother’s attic. The colors are perfect for the room, and I love having little reminders of my family throughout the house.

I accessorized with a towel holder I made from a scrap piece of wood and some random cabinet knobs.

I also found a little abstract oil painting at a garage sale and had to have it because I was going for that nautical look, remember?

Note to all my OCD friends (you know who you are): Items in this picture appear more crooked than they do in real life. Promise.

I love how the bathroom turned out. For weeks after we finished the project, I’d say, “I can’t believe this is my bathroom!” because I’m weird like that. Jeff has short-term memory issues so he’d just smile every time and say, “I know! Isn’t it great?”

We’re perfect together.

If you have short-term memory issues or are prone to repetition, you might like to see one more side-by-side shot of the renovation. Here it is:

Ah! I still can’t believe that’s my bathroom. Except now it belongs to some guy named Eugene. You’re welcome, Eugene.

Next, I’ll show you what we did in the master bathroom! Hint: it involves more tiles and more of that Cabinet Transformation stuff, which, though I complained about like a whiny two-year-old in the chip aisle of Walmart, I ended up loving.

Stay tuned!

In a People House

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was In a People House. It starts like this: “Come inside, Mr. Bird,” said the mouse, “I’ll show you what there is in a people house.”

Together, mouse and bird explore the wonders of a people house. They open every door and peek in every room because all the people are out for the day and no one had security systems back when this book was written.

The opening line was the highlight of the book, which quickly disintegrated into a litany of sight words for emergent readers, including bureau drawers and baked beans.

It was not exactly Dr. Seuss.

But I read it over and over again because I loved the idea of being able to explore a house when all the people were away.

I still do.

Maybe that’s why I love Better Homes and Gardens magazines and Pinterest and taking walks at night when everyone’s windows are lit up and I can peek inside and see how they arrange their pictures above the fireplace.

There’s a word for that. It’s called nosy. Or, if you’re into psycho-babble, you might call it voyeurism, although I hate that word because it sounds like bon voyage! and I don’t understand what looking in people’s windows has to do with going on a cruise.

Anyway, my perfectly normal and not-crazy curiosity about people’s homes made me think that there might be some other perfectly normal and not-crazy people out there who also like to look in houses.

Like you.

And perhaps other perfectly normal and not-crazy people like you might like to look in a house like mine, especially since we’ve been hard at work renovating it and turning it into the house of our dreams just in time to sell it.

But we haven’t sold it yet! For now, it’s still ours, and you can take a look. In fact, you don’t even have to wait until it’s dark and the windows are lit up. You can come right in.

Our house looks like a two-story house from the outside, but in fact, it has four different levels.

When you walk through the front door, you enter the main living area: kitchen, dining room, and living room. That great room was one of the reasons we loved the space. We’re not formal dining room people, or formal living room people. Formal living rooms are places children hide when they feel the urge to eat an entire bottle of gummy vitamins in one sitting.

Not that I would know.

We wanted one great big room where the gummy vitamins remained in sight at all times.

Unfortunately, the builders of this house decided to break up the great room concept by putting a non-weight bearing 3/4-height wall right down the middle of the kitchen and living room.

You can see the pointless wall on the right. The island was attached to it, but was not nailed to the floor.

This is our house when we bought it.

I can just imagine the builders standing in this room and saying to each other, “You know what would make this house even better? A strange and completely pointless 3/4-height wall to divide the kitchen and the living room so children have a place to hide when they feel the need to eat an entire bottle of gummy vitamins all at once.”

And because their wives were not there to whap them on the heads, they did just that.

The previous owners did not know what to do with that pointless wall, so they used it as a growth chart and marked their kids’ height on it.

In Sharpie.

Classy.

Almost as classy as that gold ‘n brass light fixture which nobody seemed to hate as much as me. Am I a lighting snob?

The rest of the room had a lot of potential, but it was dated and cheap (sounding like a snob again…) as you can see from the pictures below.

The living room side. The sight of that faux-granite and gold fireplace gives me shivers.

An ugly front door (it looked worse close up) and steps leading up to the bedrooms

Every time I visited the house before we moved in, I would speak to that room in Veggie Tale and say, “We’re going to knock your wall down!”

However, we were not intending to knock it down right away because other house projects were more pressing and we had a limited budget. But I happened to mention my vision of a wall-less room to an eccentric handyman who was working for us until my blood pressure forced us to let him go because eccentric is another word for crazy and crazy people do strange things to your house when they own power tools and copies of your house keys.

Case in point: I pulled in the driveway one day, walked in the front door, and found the entire room was white with drywall dust. The wall that I had hated was gone–overnight! Wires dangled from the ceiling and a very large man was up on a very small step stool with a can of spray texture in his hand, looking as guilty as a handyman who had just knocked down my wall without asking.

“Greg!” I said in a way that may or may not have been louder than I intended. “What have you done?”

“I–I–” he stammered. “I know you didn’t want to knock the wall down yet, but I had to do it!”

Turns out, Greg is an insomniac, and instead of taking Melatonin like normal people, he gets up in the night, drives to other people’s homes with a sledge hammer, and takes out the walls that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I almost went into labor.

We had already spent that year’s “fix up this dump” money and I was about to deliver twins right there in the middle of the drywall dust because I had no idea how much time or money it was going to cost to restore my kitchen/dinning room/living room to usable condition and did I mention I was due to have twins within a month?

So he didn’t charge me anything for it. All it cost me was four weeks of bed rest and twice-daily hugs from a blood pressure cuff.

Looking back, it was worth it, but if you had mentioned it to me at the time you might have seen why high blood pressure and pregnant women don’t miss.

But it was totally worth it. Having that wall down completely opened up the space and allowed my children to run daily laps around the kitchen island like they were training for some kind of spastic marathon.

So that was great.

After the wall came down, we worked hard to transform the room, but it was slow going because we had another room that took priority (you’ll see that another day).

In fact, we finally wrapped up our great room renovation just a couple weeks ago. Now, it looks like this:

Ahhhh! I love it so much! Indulge me while I show you many more pictures of the exact same room.

You will recall I transformed that awful fireplace surround a few months ago and told you all about it in this post.

So much better! Good-bye, faux granite!

Here’s one shot of the dining room table, which looks out onto the back deck.

Notice how we ditched that brass ‘n glass “chandelier” and replaced it with this one we got at an overstock store. I don’t remember the price tag but I remember it was under $50 and it was my husband’s birthday present to me.

He just didn’t know it when I bought it.

Also, I didn’t crop this shot so you could see that we have spent every spare cent on building materials and nothing on furniture. Only two of our dining room chairs match, and both of them have broken backs.

But I’m not really regretting the choice to focus on home improvements when the before and after shots look like this:

It hardly looks like the same room, does it? Of course, we put a lot into it. But the cabinets are actually the same (even the island!), and so is the flooring. We did replace the carpet, but the Pergo had to stay for budget reasons.

Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you how I refinished those dated golden oak builder grade cabinets to make them look classy and new. The best part? It cost less than $100, including hardware.

I’m totally serious.

I’m going to talk about the counter tops too, which are granite, and explain why we put them in and how we got them on the cheap. Or at least, cheap-er. Because that almost killed me.

So, I hope you’ll continue to join us for more of what’s inside our people house. There’s a lot more to see!

*If you’re just joining us on this house tour, be sure to check out yesterday’s post on the outside of the house!

Love at First House

This is the way our house looked when I first saw it.

It was five years ago, and I had just found out I was expecting twins. That meant we would soon have a family of seven living in a two bedroom apartment in the downstairs of Jeff’s parents’ house.

It was time to move. But rent was more expensive than a mortgage, so with fear and trembling, I set about trying to find the perfect house. We needed something big enough for a (quickly) growing family but affordable enough for our one-income household.

It was a tough challenge. The Seattle-area housing market was super inflated, even though the housing crisis had already begun. Finding a house under $300,000 was a trick. Finding one in decent shape and in a good part of town was practically impossible.

I should know. I looked at a lot of houses. Some of them were downright scary. The ones that weren’t were far too small or on the wrong side of town or so close together, you could stand in your kitchen and look into your neighbor’s house and tell them they were adding too much salt to their rigatoni.

For a girl who has almost always lived in the country, that made me feel claustrophobic and squirmy and a little nauseous. I need space. Five kids need space.

I just didn’t think I would find it for us.

When I walked into this house, I knew I had.

The view took my breath away. I could see those mountains from four windows in the living room. I could see them from the kitchen sink and from the living room couch and from the dining room table.

It was love at first house.

But, this house needed a lot of work. We bought it because it had a lot of potential, and at the time, the price was very reasonable compared to other houses like it on the market. But it needed work. Did I mention that already? Because it did. It needed a lot of work. So much work. This was not one of those homes that would just appreciate while we slept.

Nope, this house was going to take some serious elbow grease.

For one thing, the siding was rotting in places and everything in the house screamed of fast, cheap construction. I mean, I’m not expert, but I’m pretty sure stick-on floor tiles are not the definition of quality.

The most quality thing about this bathroom was the toilet paper. Kirkland brand. Nice.

We set about changing every single thing. We did it over the course of five years because according to all the charts, we were impoverished. I know. Who makes these charts?

Impoverished or not, we had to do it on the cheap because five kids eat a lot, so we scoured the area for inexpensive building supplies and materials and begged cheap labor off friends and family. Chances are, if you came over for dinner, you ended up painting something before you left.

Sorry about that.

For instance, you might have helped us paint the outside of our house, which now looks like this:

Hold on–don’t scroll up. Let me make it easy on you. I’ve got a side-by-side shot right here:

The trees sure have gotten bigger! But you’re supposed to be looking at the house. Doesn’t it look cozy?

But wait. It gets better.

I already mentioned how when we bought the house, the siding was bad. You can see how the previous owners tried to patch things up with a lovely piece of sponge-painted drywall nailed under the deck.

So sneaky.

We spent the entire summer of our first year in the house repairing siding. Well, I spent most of the first summer in our house on bed rest. I’m using the term “we” loosely, like when I say “We gave birth to twins that August,” which, as I recall, was pretty much a one-woman gig.

So. “We” cut out and replaced the bad siding and trimmed out all the windows and any exposed seems. Then, Jeff went around and caulked every. single. seam and every. single. nail hole around every. single. square inch of the house. Using his fingers. It took forever. He bled.

But, he saved the siding from any further damage. In fact, it was just inspected again for the first time since we bought it and came back with an excellent bill of health.

That’s my guy.

Part of the reason the siding has fared so well (besides Jeff’s sacrificial use of his body in applying caulk) is because we painted the house with a high-quality paint. At first, it made me choke when I heard how much it cost. Seriously? Paint can cost more per gallon than a Starbucks triple latte? Well, I never. It was good paint, though, and we needed good paint because the siding is exposed to lots of moisture for about nine months out of every single year (you mean it rains in Seattle?)

Not only that, but when the sun decides to come out sometime in mid-August, our siding gets a direct hit.

We live in a very conflicted part of the country.

So, we bought the paint, and it has held up beautifully. I will never again balk at buying good exterior paint because it still looks brand new.

I took this photo yesterday, nearly 3 years after we painted the house. It still looks perfect.

We chose a darker shade of grey and added an even darker accent color. Can you see it above the windows? I was nervous about adding the extra-dark color, but I love it. It makes the trim pop and the whole house look neat and tidy.

On the outside, at least. Ahem.

We also added a new front door. We were able to find solid wood doors at a liquidation store, so over time, we replaced every single door in the house. The original front door was moved to the back to replace an even worse door on what is now Jeff’s office.

This exterior door cost $40. I’m telling you, God loves us.

I think it’s a huge improvement, considering we started with this:

That was $40 well-spent.

I also made some funky house numbers out of some leftover slate tiles from our bathroom project (you’ll see how we banished the stick-on tiles another day).

I love my house numbers, even though they look a little bit like they were created by a fifth-grader in the Craft Cabin of some summer camp in Wisconsin.

People think Faith made those for me, and I say, “Didn’t she do a great job?” because people like my weird house numbers better when they think they were created by a ten-year-old instead of a twenty-nine year old.

Or someone a teensy bit older than that.

Also, I know I probably shouldn’t put my house numbers online, but we’re moving and our house is listed for all the world to see anyway. Besides, if you come to my house with evil intent, I have five children and we have booby trapped the house with sharp, pointy Legos. While you are dancing around the living room with sharp, pointy Legos imbedded in your feet, they will climb on your back and call you a horsey and bombard you with a million questions about what life is like in prison.

I kid you not.

Moving right along.

You can see by the pictures that we added a lot of landscaping. Many of the flowers were donated from friends’ gardens. Most of the others came from a local nursery. I have scoured their “Take Me Home” table and 50% off sales for the past five years and have come home with many treasures that looked half-dead but weren’t. That allowed me to turn our yard from this:

into this:

Notice, I didn’t save that wagon wheel and we don’t even talk about what happened to that stacked frog “sculpture.”

But I did save the clematis that was already here. It is almost done blooming now, but it’s one of my favorite plants in the yard. Most of the others, including the fruit trees and berry bushes, we added ourselves.

My house is always full of flowers I picked from my yard, and the kids eat their way through the landscape all summer long.

It took us a few years before everything looked that beautiful, however. For instance, the side yard was basically a gravel/mud pit for most of the time we lived here. Originally, it looked like this:

And occasionally, it looked like this:

Or even this:

Just keepin’ it real, people.

This spring, we finally transformed it into this:

It was my father-in-law’s idea to mulch back there. We were going to level out the ground and put plantings in, but the mulch worked so much better. They even came and helped weed, lug mulch, and dig holes in rock-hard dirt. I swear, someone used to park an RV right there.

But it was worth it because it turned out so well. Sometimes, I come outside just to look at my shade garden. The kids like to skip across the stepping-stones, which we got for some ridiculous price at Lowe’s because the teller couldn’t find the price tag.

Which brings me to a word of caution. God does stuff like that for us all the time. So, if you own some kind of home improvement place and we walk into your store, there’s a good chance you’ll just end up giving us stuff. You won’t know why, you’ll just find yourself saying things like, “I don’t know how much a 2×4 costs. Just take it.”

Consider yourselves warned.

The entrance to the shade garden is an arbor I designed and built one year with Jeff’s help. It was a Mother’s Day present because he really didn’t want an arbor there. He wanted to be able to park things–manly things–beside the house. But he loves me. And he didn’t have a Mother’s Day present.

I win!

I planted grapes by my Mother’s Day Arbor because I have no idea how to prune the renegade grapes that are growing all over the arbor you can (barely) see toward the back corner of the yard.

Besides, we love grapes, as you can see by some of the harvest we’ve gotten in past years.

Once the side yard was completed, Jeff went to work on the back yard. He rebuilt the retaining walls and added steps because having a muddy Slip ‘n Slide down the backyard probably voids our homeowner’s insurance.

Although, according to all the neighbor kids, it was way cool.

When we first purchased the house, the back yard looked like this (and yes, that really is a slide off the back porch):

This is the way the it looked half-way through the project when Jeff came in and collapsed onto the couch in exhaustion:

And this is the way it looked when he was all done and I kissed him over and over again because it turned out so well:

My guy did such a great job, I’ve got to show you the before and after one more time.

If I could whistle in print, I would.

You probably notice the window in the after picture that wasn’t in the before picture. Well, that’s a little surprise waiting for you when I take you on a tour of the inside of our house.

Because you DO want to see the inside, right?

Join me next time! There is so much more to see, and I can’t wait to take you along!