Living in the Living room!

I found this on my computer, I think the Whiskey set in before this was posted!

If you have ever seen the show “Renovation Realities” on DIY network you might be familiar with DIY. Preston and I love to watch that show and laugh because we have experienced many of the same battles (although, none of them have experienced anything like shit-mageddon. That would have been an amazing episode, or flea ridden home for months, or well-read some of the blogs.) Well, this weekend we decided on a whim to overhaul our living room. It had been a source of anger for months but we had just not quite gotten to it. Our first night at our home we spent the night on boyscout cots to wake up covered in fleas. At 5 am in the morning we ripped out the carpet, under the carpet we found an odd sight: a floor covered in splattered white paint (we thought) about 200 staples with carpet fuzz still attached, and a large section right in the middle of the floor that looked as if whoever had stained the floor had not bothered to move the rug in the center of the room and just stained around it; beautiful, just wonderful. We just put this room off and tried to just live.  A few months went by and one nice evening, Preston and I were having a lovely time watching the newlywed game and of course playing along, and all of the sudden while Preston walked across the room he started shouting and grabbing his foot! Blood started gushing out from his foot and we found that one of the carpet staples had punctured his foot deeply. After that it wasn’t long before we had to get revenge on this living room. 

Well, the time had come and we decided to finally get revenge on this room. Without any real plan of action we began to empty the room, as we went we decided the popcorn ceiling HAD TO GO! Seriously, I would like to find the inventor of popcorn ceilings and punch him in the face.  Once we had decided on ripping out the whole ceiling and painting the walls our attention was drawn to the horrible fireplace, it was like something straight out of 1975 threw up all over it, and as a bonus we found the 102 year old mantle was literally falling off the wall and taking some of the floor trim, and wall paneling with it. After several trips around Floor and Décor we decided on new tile for the fireplace; a beautiful marble tile that looked like it had been sort of distressed. Since neither of us had ever tiled anything before we figured why the heck not just go for it! We are pleasantly pleased with the results. *pictures below*

Once we got to work on the living room we showed it no mercy, it took us 2 days to completely re do this room and we are pooped. During those 2 days we spent many hours demoing the ceiling and painting it with two coats of white paint, repaired the 1970s paneling (yes we repaired it, we don’t have the money to replace it all with drywall and since our house is still on knob and tube we’ll probably have to rip it all out someday anyways. As a side note, to cut paneling the best way is a razor blade, but any way you do it it’s still a pain in the ass) painted the walls a beautiful grey color, repaired 102 year old baseboards, painted the ceiling fan, ripped out and re-tiled the fireplace, and oh! That was all in one day. The next day (Sunday) we decided to take things a little slower, so we grouted the tile work we had finished at 1am, cleaned the floors twice; which ended up not to have paint splattered on it. Nope, it was the droppings from the popcorn ceiling that had been installed; thank goodness they had put carpet over it instead of actually cleaning it like non lazy people. Stained the floor a dark color and we are now just waiting for it to dry so we can polyurethane it. There is a little bit of trim work still to do, but this weekend is almost over and it’s whiskey time.

Oh, PS. Preston’s new nick names are: Preston-the Grout Master-Ragsdale and Preston-demolition-Ragsdale, and mine is: Bailey-the bad ass- Ragsdale and Bailey-the plant killer-Ragsdale. 

P.S.S John Wayne is still the best in my book. Second to Preston of course. 

                                                     

                                             Before: Please note they stained around the rug in the center of the room, there was horrible pop corn ceiling, and the fireplace was just plain terrible. 

 

                                                              After: Yes, thats much better. No trim around the top of the wall, we're going to have a trim party. Blog on that one to come. Also, the walls are the most beautiful grey but the camera phone didn't capture that and the ceiling is white.