When we purchased the house on East Street, it was unoccupied, unheated and outdated. The downstairs was functional, but the upstairs needed some modification. Bad layout, beat up floors and walls, gold ceiling fans and dark woodwork. What’s not to love?!?
We decided to change the layout of the second floor, shifting around closets and bathrooms, to create two bedrooms, an attached master bath and a (very!) small powder room across from the kids’ bedroom. The downstairs layout remained the same, with a living room, dining room, office, kitchen, half bathroom, laundry area and a mudroom/storage space. We also decided to replace the forced hot water baseboards with kick space heaters in the upstairs to allow for more wall space for furniture.
Demo!
The interior walls were removed upstairs, insulation was blown into the exterior walls, the plaster was strapped and the new walls were framed in. We stole some space from the boys’ room to create a closet in the master and reoriented the bathroom to avoid another shower in the knee-wall space. We also layed down new subfloor through out the upstairs.
The one thing that we decided to hire out was the sheet rocking and mudding and it was worth every penny! Within 4 days, the upstairs was ready for paint.
For the boys’ room, we decided to go with light gray with a navy accent wall. The master was painted a blue/green and the bathrooms were painted a warm gray. Dark wood laminate was put down throughout the bedrooms, and in the bathrooms we used a matching vinyl plank.
The master bath was small, but we devoted a lot of space and time to a beautiful tiled shower with a bench.
In the downstairs, we added insulation between the living room and the porch, retreaded the stairs, painted the walls and the trim work and layed the same dark wood laminate. The downstairs “bedroom” did not have a closet and contained the entrance to the basement, so we turned it into an office.
My husband took on the task of building a sliding bookcase that would conceal the entrance to the basement.
The kitchen cabinets were in great shape and fairly new, so we just added a backslash, replaced the appliances and covered the linoleum with stick-on, grout-able tiles.
The finished and listed house:
We were sad to leave the house and the neighborhood, but we were moving on to a bigger home, with more space to grow (and a lot more projects to complete)!
