DIY Home Remodeling...

[Shimmer]

I'm about to embark on the long, lonely, difficult, mistake filled trip of DIY Home Remodeling. Oh. Boy. We're talking...taking down popcorn acoustic, stripping wall paper, skimming walls, filling holes from little children and their toys, painting, removing carpet, tiling...


Share your stories...funny, offbeat, successful, lessons learned....whatever!

 

[IslandGirl77]

LOL...Funny you bring this up. My fiancee and I just bought our first house together. Wooo, let me tell you! This thing had border in every room! Not fun to take down at all. Everything was pink and teal! Hot Pink sponge application on the kitchen walls. Pink countertops, cheetah print in one room. It was horrible. We started our renovations as soon as we moved in. We didn't even unpack. Worked for almost two weeks straight, working until we literally passed out. I would say getting those borders off were the hardest. We kept trying to figure out the fastest ways to get it off. I attempted to cover some countertops myself, but um...yeah I sucked at it. LOL We put new tiles in the bathrooms and kitchen. We did have to go back to Lowes to buy more because we underestimated. LOL Oh, and we also ripped off the carpet and put down laminate flooring and painted all the walls. We still have more to do, but we got all that stuff out the way first.

The Hot Pink kitchen...yikes!


Kitchen after...paint,floor, and countertops all changed.




The Living Room Before


Living Room after


The Dining area

 

[Shimmer]

The new living room looks AMAZING!


I've got wood paneling I'm going to have to sand and paint, oh happy happy joy joy.






Wallpapering is like permanently glueing ugly to your walls. Ick.

 

[IslandGirl77]

Thanks, my fiancee is very handy. We also have a bonus room upstairs which is the length of the whole house. We have our old furniture and tv and pool table up there. He built that little wooden wall shelf thing on the livingroom wall and a built a light for a pool table.

 

[Shimmer]

Nicely done!

 

[Lalli]

we're having our house done as well next week. luckily we got painters doing it for us.. i remember stripping wallpaper last yr using a steamer and fell off the ladder n burnt my leg with the steam :uhh

ripped our old carpet up once and ripped my finger off haha well the skin.. ouch that hurt

tripped over a paint tin and stepped in the tray which had the paint in it.. safe to say dad wasnt to happy with having a footprint where his paint should have been

im gettin my room done.. cnt wait, have a border on the wall though.. im thinking whether or not i should strip it myself this time haha

 

[Shimmer]

dude. stay away from my remodeling materials.

 

[Lalli]

hahahaha i went to Asda.. which is part of wal mart.. and saw some lush things in a nice turqouise colors and coz ive learnt hw to be a stingy student

im guna do ma whole room maself

 

[Shimmer]

lol I'm doing my house myself.
I'm cheap so it'll be "one piece at a time" if you know what I mean.

 

[Lalli]

ahah i knw wot u mean.. we're getting all the doors replaced and its like 10 main doors.. minus the store rooms n stuff and mums like "im going to get one door at a time"

 

[MxAxC-_ATTACK]

I JUST finished putting in a wood laminate floor downstairs. and a month before that.. tearing up old tile and laying new tile in the kitchen along with new countertops and a new sink. Then it was the whole remodel of the downstairs bathroom. then the whole remodel of the upstairs bathroom..

Just me and my mom.. diy.

that was like 5 visits a day to Lowes.. haha

 

[MAC_Whore]

Holy shiz. Have I got some photos for you. When I can post photos again, I will show you what the former owners considered good taste! Our house is only like 10 years old, but the people who built it, took it back to the early eighties! That woman loved her some wallpaper! Either the entire room or a wallpaper border....Everywhere! And white ceiling fans with faux gold trim and frosted glass. Geeez. It was like we boarded the Loveboat. Needless to say, we have updated it all. We removed every speck of that fucking wallpaper and wallpaper border! I wanted to go dump it on the previous owner's new front lawn!

We did a lot of it ourselves for the "adventure" of it. After a while, we were not so big on the "adventure" anymore. I'll admit, we broke down and decided to pay to have someone else do it. I think in our case it just came to that as we didn't have the time and because we decided that we were updating everything, so it got a bit overwhelming!

Good luck, girl! Hang in there!

P.S. When we were doing our final walkthrough when we bought the place, the previous owner said, "Oh, I left the extra wallpaper for you incase you need to touch something up". As she said this, I was screaming in my head, "Or start a bonfire".

 

[Shimmer]

Hahahahahhahahaha

I hate wallpaper.




Unless it's like....super extra old vintage high quality fabric I hate it. And even then, I don't want it in my house.





I'm doing it all myself because a) I don't have much else to do and b) I'm not paying someone some exhorbitant amount of money to do something I can do myself. I was quoted over 3k to redo my bathroom: take the paperdown, cover the walls, and paint them. 3k. Fuck that.

 

[MAC_Whore]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shimmer .....I was quoted over 3k to redo my bathroom: take the paperdown, cover the walls, and paint them. 3k. Fuck that.

Fuck that is right. That's sick.

 

[Lalli]

3000?? thats like almost £1500 :O thats ALOT of money to strip a bathroom u could buy a s hit load of stuff and do it all urself! the dude whos painting our bottom floor is charging like £500 n hes a really good decorater but still i think its too much

 

[Shimmer]

Precisely. That's ridiculous, which is why I decided to DIY.

 

[Chic 2k6]

my bedroom been decorated twice lol, Mom said that its not gona be decorated before her room and it did lol, its Bright red with Pink ceiling n wooden floor

 

[IslandGirl77]

3g's!?! That's crazy. You can definitley do it yourself. They try to get over on people. The seller of our house said that they quoted her 10 g's to install a bathroom upstairs. And Mac Whore your house sounds like mine. I thought I walked into a house from the eighties. Everything in here was pink and teal. And then one side of the house was Cheetah print everything. LOL

 

[Shimmer]

cheetah.........print?

 

[IslandGirl77]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shimmer cheetah.........print?

Ooops, I meant to click quote. Anyhoo, yes. I mean when we came to view the house. There was one room, that had cheetah carpet, cheetah pillows cheetah border, even a freaking cheetah stuffed animal sitting on the couch. The bathroom had cheetah curtains and towels and more border. It was crazy. I still have to rip the top border off the kids room. THey just went cheetah crazy. LOL