Home Reno 2.0

We have been quiet on the home reno front since we finished the basement.  When it takes you a year and a half to re-finish your basement, you feel like you need to take a good break.  Well we decided that the break was over!  I struck a deal with +Jonathan Wilson back in October to repaint the living room over Christmas, as he was taking 2 and a half weeks of vacation then and I would be off from the 21st to the 2nd, so I could help him paint as he is not too keen on that.  Repainting the living involves taking everything out of the living room, patching holes in the wall, cleaning off the ceiling (as we had a popcorn ceiling that had two rather large smooth spots, so John wanted the whole thing to be smooth), painting and then taking up the carpet and either cleaning up the hardwood underneath or putting laminate down.  This would then lead to ripping up the carpet on the basement stairs, having someone come in and lay new carpet on the stairs and then finishing off the trim in the basement and up the stairs.  As you can see, this is a fairly large project to tackle, but I have been itching to do it because a) I hate the colour of the main floor, it looks blah, dirty and a little like student housing and b) I want to be able to have the basement completely finished.  So I struck a deal, and the plan was laid.

Here are the before pictures of everything:

Living Room

Hallway and Front Entrance

Living Room

Living Room 2

Stairs

Before Christmas we emptied the living room and front hall closet of all it's possession.  It's amazing how different it looks without any of the stuff in it!  Everything is now in the kitchen, basement and spare bedroom.  A little crammed, but it's only for a couple weeks.

Ceiling beforehand

After scrapping has begun!

The weekend of the 15th-16th, John began scrapping down the ceiling.  I was gone for the weekend, so when I came back, it was quite a different.  He had most of the living room done and didn't look too bad.  He wanted to be able to have it all done before we left for Christmas, but with a full week of work and things to fill our evenings, it didn't look likely.  We asked our friend +Paul Dagenais to come over and help.  He came the Wednesday before Christmas and cleaned the ceiling off and patched up all the holes and did some sanding.  He did a great job!  Although we couldn't do anything else before we left for Christmas, we were happy with what was done!

We came back from seeing family in the morning of the 28th and John decided that afternoon to work on the ceiling some more, to figure out if he needed to scrap it more, sand it or maybe just painting it would be fine. He started with the paint, it didn't really work out that well, so he went online, watched some videos and decided that he needed to scrap it down to the drywall.  As he was doing it though, he kept wondering whether taking the drywall down was the better option.  I didn't really know, nor cared, as this is really his expertise.  He went back and forth, but finally he went out and just started ripping it all down.  He got most of the living room completed by the end of the day. *(this was totally unplanned to the original deal struck with John, therefore I doubt I will actually help much with the painting aspect of things, luckily Paul's going to helping him out!)*

That is just part of the ceiling pile which I was cleaning up
while John tore down more!

On the 29th, we went at it again. John finished taking down all the drywall in the living room, hallway and front entrance.  I was on clean up and photo taking duties.  I cleaned up as much as possible, until we ran out of garbage bags, which was pretty well around the time John was done taking down the drywall in that section.  We had been taking throughout this process about what to do for lighting in the living room, as there was no overhead light before, there was only a switch which lead to one outlit, which we had a lamp plugged into.  We decided that we'd like to do potlights.  So once we were finished, we decided to head to Home Depot and pick up some more garbage bags and everything we needed for potlights.  We got very nice ones which will match the other lights we have for the front entrance and hall.

John's less than impressed that he has to tear down the ceiling.

Putting up the potlights

 Once we returned home, we put up the potlights, which went really quickly.  The hardest part was trying to get the cable to run down the wall to the light switch.  It kept getting stuck on the other wires, so we couldn't see it or reach it.  Finally, we found another cable we had, taped it to the cable for the lights and pulled it through.  Had we only thought of that an hour before...

After another half an hour, John got it all hooked up and it looked great!  There is going to be so much more light in the living room now, I'm really excited now to have a living room that doesn't seem so dark anymore!

Don't they look pretty?