House Updates

We bought this house last year because it has great potential. In Real Estate speak that means it needs work, and it does. Nothing big, just a pretty upgrade, because we like to say that while this house was build in 1990 it looks like it was decorated in 1970. We had about $80 on a Home Depot card after we took back extra stuff from the renovation on the house before we left KC. So that, and maybe $30 extra has funded the upgrade so far.

 Our first re-do was Caleb’s bedroom on the first floor. The kids really hadn’t had their own space since we left Lenexa in ’09, so we wanted to get bedrooms done first. When we first moved in we gave him the slightly larger room since it shared a wall with the bathroom. That way he got the noise J It was a lovely mustard color (I don’t know if I can really infuse those written words with the sarcasm that the spoken word conveys) and had Kelly green curtains. I went through the house the day we got here and took down all but one set of curtains. Randy couldn’t understand my mania but they were awful. The mauve plastic mini blinds in the kitchen survived slightly longer, but that was only out of necessity.

Since he was back in KC last winter we moved his stuff out of the room, scraped the ceiling, and painted the trim, windows and walls. We didn’t paint the doors; I think we will replace them later. That was one thing we learned from the flip. Replacing doors is relatively inexpensive and made a HUGE difference in the overall look of the house. Painting the cheap, flat, wood doors just made them look cheaper

 We moved into that room after it was finished and started on the, I can’t think of the proper adjective, avocado green room. It was a surprise for Caleb when he came back home for the weekend. I want him to feel like he has a place here even though he has been pretty transient with college and everything.

 We scraped the ceiling here too. Odd thing about the house is the different types of ceilings. Living room is smooth, kitchen and upstairs rooms are bead board, all other rooms are popcorn. The big chunky kind. I hate scraping ceilings. Randy does the big parts I do the areas around the light fixtures and edges. I will say though it is totally worth it to go to the trouble. If you dry scrape and paint them they look like they were knockdown from the beginning.

We also replaced the light fixture. We had one left over from the flip. It’s crazy how those simple things can have such a big impact. The ceiling fan in our room was actually really nice already.

I will post pictures of the other two bedrooms later. We haven’t done anything to Em’s she is having a hard time figuring out what to do. I think I have almost convinced her to just let me make the decisions for her!