Living Room Update

The vaulted ceiling, for all intents and purposes, is finally complete! Next step is re-surfacing the fireplace; and let me tell you, I cannot WAIT to show you what it's going to look like when it's finished. Think minimalist, zen, and SO grand & tall.

Please ignore the layers of drywall dust still all over the floors even after mopping 4 times already...

What did we do in this room? Let's recap with some before & afters.

Vaulted Ceiling

When we looked at this house, there were foam tiles on most of the ceilings. You could tell there was a serious bow, but our realtor told us it's just what the tiles do. Unfortunately, when we went to take off the tiles, we found out that the ENTIRE plaster ceilings were caving in under their own weight after 100 years. We had to tear the entire thing down. We (mostly Ian) demo'd the ceilings (a job so miserable I cannot even begin to describe -- remind me to tell you about the actual night terrors I experienced from this!) and we had a contractor frame out the vaulted ceiling. If we were going to be paying this much for a new ceiling, we figured we might as well make it grand. Over the next 6 months, Ian painstakingly hung the drywall, taped, and mudded the ceiling to perfection. I did the flawless paint job myself, thank you very much.

Removed Wall Texture

There was this super nasty, pointy texture all over the walls in the living room. First we scraped all the walls with a paint scraper. Then we sanded it down with a random orbital. THEN we put a skim coat of drywall mud over everything, and re-sanded. It was painstaking and messy, but worth it. It was so tacky and nasty.

Refinished Hardwood Floors

We originally planned to refinished our hardwood floors ourselves, but we're super glad we hired this one out. The old varnish they used on these floors was basically indestructible, and with a random orbital sander, we would have paid the same in sandpaper alone. (Not even exaggerating, the stuff just did not come off.) We hired Smooth Sanding & Install to refinish our floors, and we couldn't be happier. They killed it.

Paint

Probably goes without saying, but we put up a fresh coat of paint all around. This room reeked of 40 years of cigarette smoke, so every drop of paint counts. We also painted the trim framing the doorways. The wood trim isn't the original to the house -- it looked way too 60's for me. So we painted it white. We are going to keep the baseboards natural though, to play off the wood window insides.