Day 1 The Happiest Home: Our Renovation Adventure

So… we’ve moved. Again!

Today we closed on a house in Florida just down the road from my childhood home. It feels weird to be back in my hometown and not be on vacation.

Although our new backyard makes me feel like I’m on vacation. (Pool resurfacing and new deck coming in 2015)

When we decided to move back home I started looking for a house with good bones that needed some updating. I love renovation projects and I wanted to find a great house, in a great neighborhood, at a great price, that just needed a little love.

I ended up finding something in a neighborhood where most of my friends lived growing up. The house has had several owners over the last 45 years, all who maintained the house, but never really updated it.

I saw a diamond in the rough, and a house priced significantly lower than every over house on the street. A chance to take a house with great bones and make it the perfect house for our family. In fact I was so sure this was the right house we made an offer without seeing it in person.

While at first glance it seemed like you could move right in to this house, it really needed a lot of updating and some repair.

My father knows just about everything there is to know about home renovation (he’s built one house and renovated several others) so I knew we’d have a great resource when it came to renovating the house. However his health isn’t the greatest, so he’s supposed to be acting as our foreman and letting us do the heavy lifting.

We’ll see how that goes….

Today we closed on The Happiest Home. Demo began two hours later and we worked until bedtime. We are doing a lot of work ourselves, although we will be hiring help when we need it.

Since I’m a home remodel junkie and I can only assume some of you are too, so I’ll be sharing our daily adventures here. In part, so you can follow along, and also so I don’t forget how much work everyone did to make our house a home.

I’ll also be sharing costs and how we did it. I’ve spent hours researching all this on the internet, so why not share what works and what doesn’t with you all?

Today we pulled up all the carpet, started wallpaper removal, and kitchen demo.

The wallpaper came off fairly easilyy. (I’ve dealt with worse) The border, however is a nightmare. It’s like it was glued down with super glue… x 10. Notice the carpet up the wall? Thankfully the wall carpet wasn’t too hard to remove throughout the entire house. 🙂

Only minimal drywall repair will be needed from the carpet removal.

Things I learned today:

• Old carpet is gross.
• Wallpaper removal is as awful as I remembered it to be.
• A handheld steam mop makes wallpaper removal easier.
• My kids are actually great at removing wallpaper.
• When messing with pipes in the kitchen you should probably have a bucket or a rag or something to mop up the floor with after they leak everywhere.
• We have an extremely friendly neighborhood and have already met folks.
• Wallpaper removal is awful.

Kitchen before photo.

We are gutting the entire kitchen. Today we got the sink wall cabinets removed and dealt with some leaky pipes. The dishwasher is not in great condition so it won’t be saved.

Leaky pipe excitement… and why is demo always so dirty and gross?

Our dumpster arrives tomorrow, I can’t wait to get all the carpet, pad, and kitchen demo out of the house.

So far we’ve purchased caps for the pipes. I’m sure there is an official term for these caps, but I’ll need to ask my dad.

See all our renovation updates here! 

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