Home Renovation Week 1 - Hello House

I got the keys late evening July 5th, it always feels like a long day on closing day because of the anticipation so I tried to set low goals for our large home renovation project since I knew we wouldn’t get the keys early enough to get much done. My plan was to go in and take “before” pictures and prep some social media content. I have some REEL-y big ideas (aren’t I punny :P) but Grayson and my brother were both off that week and were super motivated to help me. They had a trailer load of supplies and tools ready to go as soon as I got the keys.

Good-bye fireplace!

I hadn’t even walked in the door to the house and I was greeted by rolls of carpet being carried out from the basement, I kid you not! I unlocked the door for them and walked around to the backyard to make sure everything looked okay and by the time I got back to the front they had ripped up half the carpet from the basement, talk about quick progress! The rest of the night was spent clumsily dismantling the fireplace in the basement. It felt like a huge change in such a short period of time, I was really optimistic that these renovations would pass super quickly and I’d be moving in in just a few weeks!

Tuesday was less visually productive, we picked up a trailer from a neighbour who was kind enough to lend it to us while we are renovating, and then headed to the store to pick up the flooring. Naïve me, I thought we would be flooring in a day or so and wanted to pick it up so it was there when we needed it since most of our renovations take place in the evening after stores are closed. It took the remainder of the day to pick up and unload the flooring, 2.5 skids later on two trucks and the trailer. I think unloading the 130ish boxes nearly broke them. If you’ve floored before you know how heavy the boxes are and staircases seem a lot more daunting when you’re carrying that much extra weight. Thankfully there were 3 of them so one poor sole wasn’t stuck carrying all of it into the house.

Renovation tip: make sure your trailer is weighted down or still attached to a truck before you start pulling flooring off or it will tip the trailer and dump the flooring out on you. I was cleaning the fridge inside and heard a giant thud followed by some very concerned voices talking outside. When I went out, they were opening boxes to see if the corners of the flooring had been damaged – thankfully they weren’t but lesson learned!

I forgot to take a before photo of the fridge but I found this photo from a few weeks later which really shows how dirty it was! Magic erasers are great.

The rest of the week was spent cleaning and preparing the basement for flooring, removing carpet upstairs, and trying to clean the walls with TSP to help cut some of the smoke smell in the house. If you have a similar issue Vileda floor mops are wonderful tools, I used them as wall mops so I wasn’t washing the walls by hand. We also removed all the wallpaper in the house, that was a project. Some of it peeled off like it was peel and stick, some of it wiped off, and some of it had to be scraped off with a putty knife after being drenched in a mixture of water and fabric softener, kind of an odd combination but it seemed to work well. I’m glad it made some of the wallpaper removal an easy project so my whole house didn’t look like Edward Scissorhands lived here like my bathroom did after I took a putty knife to it.

Magic erasers were a life saver for me! The magic eraser took the world’s brownest fridge and restored it to a dazzling white machine. At the start of a giant renovation project, it probably seems silly to clean a fridge but I’m a snacker and having a clean space to store food and water is a high priority for me so it was one of the first projects I tackled… after I cleaned the bathrooms that is. Cleaning smoke covered objects is not for the faint of heart, it’s incredibly alarming to see the water start to look like mud after you rinse the cloth the first time. After I started cleaning the fridge I wish I had hired professionals because I really didn’t want to know how dirty the house, that I just paid an astronomical amount of money for, was.

It was a dirty and busy first week, but we made lots of progress and I’m optimistic that next week will be even better, even though we still have lots to do I’m excited to see how it turns out!