With everything you’ve described with that house, one has to wonder if, when they outsource the bedroom flooring directly with the contractor, if they’ll find a dead body under there or something LOL. Did they have the master bedroom floor in your current budget? Or is that an additional expense they’re hoping to be able to manage. I seem to remember they were planning to live in the master bedroom during the remodel so there wasn’t anything in the budget to work on in that room. If their budget was as tight as they say, how will they manage the cost of additional floor work? Good news is that’s not your problem.
I’m staying out of anything that has to do with master bedroom. I do not want to try to work where someone is living and it’s crammed with furniture. I’ll let the flooring guy work out that issue some time in the future. I’m sure they have to deal with a lot of homeowners who are living in their homes full of furniture.
My guess is that a previous homeowner had a dog that peed on the carpet and it soaked through to the hardwood floors…
It seems to me that painting the floors would be the best way to go. It can be a great look. They don’t have to have a perfectly smooth surface, like new floors.
I agree that the tile versions of Allure are more convincing. But, living in New England, I have seen people have problems with it shrinking in the winter and bubbling up in the summer when the sun hits it.
I would personally much rather have painted old wood floors than laminate.
If one of this couple were into it, they could do something cool with stenciling over paint, or taping off and painting contrasting geometrical shapes, even very simple ones, but it doesn’t sound like they would do it.
I can see that this young couple are not DIY handy. Why they ever bought such a serious fixer is beyond me. The one thing they did turned out really awful. They took it upon themselves to scrape popcorn off the small bedroom ceilings. They saturated the ceilings so much that the tape fell off the drywall joins and ceiling drywall joins are separated
Then they proceeded to’texture’ the ceiling themselves with some kind if spackle. It definitely is a really bad job and very noticeable. Im going to get it fixed
@coralbrook I’m starting to feel like they should name their firstborn after you. Hope someday it sinks in how big of a deal your skills are!
Good ol’ coralbrook jr.
I loaded some photos of the kitchen renovations. Today I went around the whole area and designed the lighting and set all the blue boxes for everywhere we are going to have outlets and switches. I tried to keep in mind that we wanted to save money, so I tried to limit the lighting and outlets to the amount of existing wiring in place.
Also loaded a photo of the lovely DIY ceiling
Regarding painting the floors. I think we would still have to sand them because they are buckled up from getting wet. And then we would still have the problem of transitioning to kitchen and family room which don’t have any flooring right now. I don’t think painted wood floors would wear very well with a lot of kid and pet traffic.
I now have to figure out if we can lay new floor over these old floors or whether we will have to tear them out and haul them away. I could lay on top of existing floors, but then there would be about 1/2" floor difference from living room into kitchen area.
OMG those floor stains are nasty!
OMG is right. No way I would try to salvage that wood.
I agree. Floors are out of there. In my opinion they are a health hazard. But that’s going to be a lot of moving stuff around and trying to demo out the floors and a lot of hauling to the dump. We are already on the 5th run to the dump.
I loaded up my first draft of kitchen design. We are constrained because of the post that had to be built to support the original corner of the house in the middle of the kitchen. We cannot have the full width of walkways/work area between the cabinets. I showed them all the alternatives and it was most important to them to have a good width in the thoroughfare between front door/living room/family room. So that is the widest walkway area and it is tight in a couple of areas. I have double checked everything and we can get dishwasher open… but you cannot open the drawer across from it at the same time. You can get refrigerator open but noone can walk behind you if you are standing at the refrigerator.
It is what it is, they are fully aware of all the limitations and made their choices on what was important to them.
We did a shopping expedition last week to several cabinet sources. I think she is leaning towards IKEA cabinets for highest value for the buck and greater functionality. Some of the other low cost cabinet stores have very limited sizes and shapes available. We need to find a vendor that makes a oven cabinet for the double ovens.
In hindsight… we should have purchased a single range. The double ovens are taking up a lot of potential pantry space. Oh well
What is your timeline for this project?
I’m curious - why don’t the kitchen cabinets go all the way up to the ceiling? If I had a small space, I would want to maximize storage even if I had to pull out a step ladder to get up there. Is there not enough money for that?
The kitchen sounds fine. We have similar constraints…can’t open the dishwasher…AND the opposite cabinets at the same time. If fridge is open, someone can squeeze past…but it’s tight.
No big deal. Honestly…it works just fine…and I love our kitchen.
I agree…if cost is OK…take cabinets to the ceiling.
The reason the pictures look like cabinets do not go to the ceiling is because the small kitchen addition in that corner has a sloped ceiling. We actually tore the ceiling/roof out and redid it to have more slope because water was n ot running off the roof properly and it had rotted the roof. So, it starts at 7’9" at about the right hand edge of the stove (if looking at the stove picture) and goes down about 6 inches to the left. This means that the total height of ceiling where the oven, refrigerator and uppers are is only about 88".
I didn’t bother to try to put that into the kitchen planning software but I know that I have a low height so cabinets cannot go up very high. For example, there are only two heights available in the oven cabinets, 80" high and 90" high. 90" high was cutting it too close and/or we were going to have to cut off the bottom of the cabinet/ not install the legs or toekick. So, I went with the 80" high cabinet. The height of that one cabinet dictates how high we can set the uppers along that wall. We could set them higher and order some higher cabinets for the rest of that wall, but it will look really odd to jump up to another height in the middle of the wall. It works OK if you have a central cabinet higher than the rest, such as the stove upper that has venting, but not if one half is low (refrigerator and oven) and the other half goes high.
There is another reason that the walkway between the island and the living room side of cabinetry is right is because the back of the island represents the back of the original house. There is a concrete stem wall running along there underneath the two rooms. The original kitchen sink plumbing is inside the original portion of the house. To save money I had to keep the kitchen sink plumbing inside that area. It was too costly to push the island into the family room a bit (which I would normally do to make the kitchen larger). That would have required trying to drill holes into concrete walls under the house and pass water lines and drain lines and electrical through the concrete wall under the house.
Can you put some shelving in that area where a cabinet might not work? I know it is not as useful as cabinets to keep messy things out of sight, but sometimes I wish I had open shelves to store things for easy reach like jars of spices.
Are wall ovens and a cooktop the right price point for this house.