Move over Chip and Joanna Gaines - The Larson's were here!
My mom and dad were in Rochester for the last 2.5 weeks and they put a TON of work into our house. Our living space has doubled! And it "only" took 2.5 weeks of non-stop, back-breaking labor, plus several clothes and a pair of shoes scarified to the drywall and painting gods. ;-) Andy and I helped as much as we could (we still had to work here and there). In the process I learned where everything is in Home Depot and also gained a ton of new skills and confidence when it comes to DIY things.
Let's start with the main floor of the house. Here are all of the things we accomplished in the normal part of the house, all of which I love and have made a huge difference to the comfort and enjoyment of our everyday living.
Existing Living Areas
- First and foremost they figured out how we could get our window AC units into our awning windows (something Andy and I had not been able to figure out on our own). We've been having a pretty hot summer, so having AC in the bedroom is a game changer!!!
We have 3 window units from our last place so now we have one in both bedrooms and the sunroom. Thankfully the people before left a bigger unit in the dining room so we are more or less able to keep the entire house cool-ish now.
- They also hung blinds in our bathroom window! When we first moved in there was a hideous curtain, and the curtain rod was only half attached to the wall... we took it down, but didn't put anything in it's place. Now that we have blinds, the neighbors won't get a show anymore! haha
- We also decorated! New curtains (Target) and rug (Lowes) in the dining room, plus place mats and a plant thing my mom brought. Sheena, do you recognize the little vase the plant is in? It's from your wedding centerpieces!
- My mom also brought a new table for us for our living room. I LOVE it!
I don't know if you can tell, but those are blankets stashed in the bottom of the table.
- And then my dad spliced some wires to rewire this light fixture and turn it into a hanging light. We got this back in April but haven't been able to hang it until now. I love it too!
I could dedicate an entire blog post to all of the cute decoration things my mom did, but this is going to be such a long post as is, I just wanted to highlight a couple to keep things moving. However I will say, our living room was giving me serious anxiety. The rug I picked out when we first moved in was not working for me (but how do you return a 7 x 10 rug in the mail when you're on crutches...), our entertainment center, our two chairs... everything I looked at made my blood pressure go through the roof (I know I am totally weird and needlessly anxious over dumb things like this)... but I say all of this to NOW say that after my mom worked her magic, the living room is my favorite room now and I love how it looks - even the rug lol.
So those are more or less the improvements done to the inside of the house that we were currently using.
Onto the outside of the house!
The Outdoors
- We mounted a flag holder to the outside of the house.
- My dad fixed the gate to our fence. One of the sides had completely come off it's hinges.
- We cleared out years of yard debris previous owners had just dumped in the back corner of the yard.
Now it's the home to a bird bath, and the future home of some plants, etc.
- One of our new treasures is my parents' patio table and chairs!
- And the most important outdoor project that we did... we fixed the front porch railing!!!! About two weeks after we moved, a big wind storm slammed our screen door into the porch railing, completely wrecking it.
We ended up ripping it out because it wasn't even attached to the house anymore. For the last three months, we've only had a post on that side. See?
The railing that was up was not intended for outdoor use - those are indoor spindles. After looking around I found a railing I actually liked, and with some dad magic, we had a real front porch again!
It still needs another coat of stain, although I'm not sure the new wood will ever quite match the old existing posts. Regardless it's so much better than it was, and we've already gotten a compliment from our next door neighbor. I'm sure she's glad to see we are finally taking care of it!
I should have mentioned earlier, when my parents came out, they DROVE out. In a U-haul. Full of house things for us, including all of my dad's tools for us to keep. THANK YOU DAD! I know that was not easy to say goodbye to those, but I promise they will be well taken care of and used for a loooooooong time. With all of the new tools, we needed to do some work in the garage too.
Garage
- This first picture is impressive because up until about two days before this picture was taken, there was barely enough space to walk from the garage door into the house. Now we can fit a car inside!
- Thanks to some shelves and a work bench my parents brought, plus some hanging things from Home Depot, we are on our way to a much more organized garage.
More or less, those were all of the spaces in the house that we were currently using. The rest of the house (sunroom and basement) were merely storage. Until now.
Sunroom
To keep the rest of our house livable, we used the sunroom to store boxes when we first moved in. Also there used to be a LOT more boxes in there before we took a bunch of trips to Goodwill right before my parents arrived.
However, it had the potential to be a pretty cool room, so we knew we didn't want to keep it a storage space forever. The sunroom is actually my mom's favorite room of our whole house, and she loaded up the truck with fun things to make it an actual living space. We still have some work to do to get the room finished, but she got us off to a GREAT start.
- My mom set up a nice little sitting area for us.
- And my parents' treadmill also found a new home in there too!
I AM SO EXCITED TO HAVE A TREADMILL!!!!!!!!!!! Not house related, but I've used it each day since my parents left (so four days now). I am happy to say that each day I've gone a mile, and yesterday was even able to run half of that! Way to go foot!!!! Oh and speaking of foot... my mom broke her's on Tuesday!!! I feel SO bad for her. So so so so bad. I hope it heals quickly. I'm so sorry mom!
Ok back to the house.
If all of that weren't enough, the BIGGEST thing my parents did while they were here was work on our basement. I've saved the biggest transformation for last. Buckle your seat belts.
Basement
Here's what the basement looked like when we first looked at the house. I don't have pictures of it from when we moved in because I was on crutches and the stairs were pretty treacherous (I don't know if you remember but Andy fell down them the first day we were there). However, these pictures aren't too far off from what we inherited as the person before left many things behind.. especially on the shelves under the stairs (thanks a lot buddy).
Very dark, very musty, very basementy.
One of the things though that really attracted us to this house was the potential the basement had. Here's a photo from the original listing of the back part of the basement. If you look at the photo immediately above, the dark door "hole" on the right hand side is what leads to the part of the basement shown in the listing photo.
As you can see, someone before saw potential in the basement too and actually got started on it. Unfortunately... they did a pretty bad job and we ended up re-doing a good bit of their work (although not all).
- First, Andy's friend who happens to be an electrician came over and installed a few more overhead lights for us, so we could actually see what we were doing. Those have really helped make it feel lighter and less basementy. He also redid all of the wiring the other person had done because it was all wrong.
- After clearing our own stuff out of the basement, my parents ripped down all the old shelves that were under the stairs.
That was a big improvement. Not only did it create more space, but the wood was gross and rotted and stinky and, did I say gross?? Yeah that stuff needed to go. For comparison's sake, here's a before and after:
- We also used "Drylok" to seal in all the raw parts we exposed to make sure the basement would stay as dry as possible.
- The next task was to tear down the incorrect framing that was in place for a bathroom. With that torn down, we had to frame a new wall that was actually done correctly (at least we think we did it right lol). When everything was all said and done, this project was my least favorite of the entire thing.
- Now that everything was framed, it was time to drywall. UGH, haha. I only say ugh because it is tedious, heavy work. But it was well worth the effort as it made a really big difference.
- Putting in drywall also means... putting in insulation!!!! Doing the insulation was my absolute favorite thing to do. If I lose my job I want to go into insulation installation. Here are a bunch of insulation pics, more for my own enjoyment than yours, I'm sure lol.
I like working with insulation because it is lightweight, easy to cut, and you get to see instant results. It does, however, make your arms a little itchy.
- We also slipped a note inside one of the walls before the last piece of drywall went up.
The only part that didn't get drywalled was the inside of the bathroom where the vanity will eventually go. 1) We need to get it plumbed for a sink, and 2) we need some electrical work done so we have a lightswitch (instead of a pull-string light) and an outlet. No sense putting up drywall that would just later be torn down. In the meantime that area remains beautifully insulated. What's that? You want to see more insulation pictures??? Well twist my arm... lol
- Oh yes another little project was installing a trap door in case we ever need to access the sewer pipe (shown in the picture above). I call it the poop door! I'm mature.
- Step two of installing drywall is to "tape and bed." Here's what it looks like after that happened.
This happened in two layers with sanding after each time. Here's what it looked like after the final round of sanding was done...
This whole process was very very messy.
- My mom also did a ton of work cleaning the exposed ceiling in the "big part" of the basement. This included zip-tying wires to make them nice and neat and cleaning 18,000,000 cobwebs.
- We were just about ready to paint but decided to rip out the landing at the base of the stairs... it was a little "sinky." No wonder! The wood was totally rotten and we also discovered a surprise sewer pipe lurking beneath.
- Finally it was time to paint!!!
Here's one last look at how everything was right before painting.
My dad sprayed a layer of primer over the whole thing, and then we painted the entire basement by hand.
I also managed to somehow paint my own hand. (Andy had paint on his elbow for a good week after we were done)
Now I hate to admit this... but at this point I was freaking out a little bit. I really like white, but this seemed like a lot of white. I tried to stay calm as there was still one layer of paint to go. The floor.
- Floor paint made a HUGE difference, and next to insulation, was my favorite part of the project.
Can we just pause to remember how far we came?
That's pretty amazing.
But wait! There's more!!
- My dad built a new landing. And I unfortunately threw out my back helping him carry it down the stairs. :( My mom also tacked down new rubber stair treads, so hopefully no one will fall on the basement stairs again.
- We also covered the underneath side of the stairs.
- Once the floor was dry, we hauled all of our stuff back down (it was living in the garage and sunroom while we were doing all of this). I obviously need to go through/get rid or/organize, but here's an idea of where the basement stands today.
Under the stairs...
Inside the new room...
My new exercise zone (in the making)...!
And the cutest basement laundry space ever...
Pretty incredible huh? My parents are AMAZING and I can never ever thank them enough for all of the time/energy/resources that they poured into our new house so that we could have more living space (and more equity). Also a shout out to Waste Management for collecting three weeks in a row of INSANE garbage piles. Our neighbors must really be wondering what we've been up to, haha.
So there you have it! I'll be sure to post more pictures of the house as I continue to get things unpacked and put together, but now we at least have more room to unpack!
While 99% of my parents time was spent underground sweating in our basement, we did manage to make it to 3 of Andy's concerts, as well as a trip to bingo and two trips (although one was super fast it almost doesn't count) to the casino. And of course, there was a lot of playing with Birdie. She LOVES her Papa Lyle and Mama Kay, especially when they have string cheese and popcorn. :-)
THANK YOU MOM AND DAD! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND AM THE LUCKIEST GIRL WITH THE BEST PARENTS EVER!!!
