Homeowners!

Yes - this happened!

We are pretty happy about it - great location, nice neighborhood, close to the beach. Our real estate agent rocked, she really helped us find the perfect first home as well as helped us through the whole process. We learned a lot, because there is nothing out there that mentally prepares you for the grueling process of home buying. Nothing. It was rough, an emotional roller coaster, but we made it to the finish line - and now we are home owners! See? Totes easy.

Now about the house, it's not exactly a move in ready home, and also not exactly a true fixer upper - but it still was one of those houses where you say to yourself "this has lots of potential" (potential emphasized in the form of a rainbow waving over my head with unicorns and sunshine).

Ah - potential. You are a sneaky thing. After the adrenaline rush of home buying (yeah right) we were smacked with the reality of all this "potential" we have been dreaming about for this house. 

So right into planning, budgeting, and remodeling/renovations - and I mean the "DIY everything because we aren't millionaires" kind of work.

Major demo/reno projects for this house:

1) Removing partitions (1/2 wall type structures that really congested the main area)

2) Ripping out all the old flooring, and replacing with new flooring 

3) Re-painting the entire house
4) Create a new doorway to closet that is currently only accessible through the master bathroom (we are closing up the wall in the bathroom)
5) Kitchen remodel/face lift

Oh boy, #1 was a doozy. To sum it up, I have never knocked down any kind of wall whatsoever in my lifespan, but I have watched enough HGTV to convince myself and the significant other that I was totally experienced in this sort of thing (Lies). Thank goodness for Google and YouTube, I'm just sayin'.

The plan was to remove the drywall in large enough pieces to reuse it for patching needs. It was pretty hard to refrain from ninja kicking or slamming a sledge hammer to the walls and smashing it to pieces - because that is obviously more fun. Alas, the things we must do to save a little money.

I am going to throw a disclaimer in here because we are not professionals - but we did our due diligence of research on how to safely perform these tasks and work on these home improvement projects while consulting with experienced professionals for advice and instruction when needed. 

Ok, now that is out of the way, what we basically did was remove the molding, scored the edges of the dry wall and tried to remove it in as large pieces as possible. Once the drywall was removed, there was a structure made of 2x4 boards that needed to be removed. There were also electrical outlets that were no longer needed so we terminated with caps and electrical tape (when dealing with electrical wires, you must turn your power circuits completely OFF).

Here are the before and progress pics:

This was done the first weekend we began working on the house - sweet victory!

We love it!  Removing the partitions already makes the house look so much more open in the common area.  You can see in the above pictures the original laminate flooring which is a reddish brown, the quality of the flooring was fine, but we were not really diggin' the color so we ended up pulling it all up along with the carpet. We decided we wanted uniform flooring throughout the whole house, with the exception for the bathrooms. The bathrooms had a vinyl tile that looked fine so we left that as is, but everything else was gonna go, including the tile in the kitchen. Since we live near the beach we figured laminate or tile was ideal - laminate happened to work best with our budget.

Over the past month, we recently finished installing laminate in all the bedrooms (except the master - some more work to be done for that room), the hallways, and living room, dining room, and entry way, as well as repainting the entire house. More progress pictures to come for that soon!