One room at a time.

Even before we “had” the house, we were all over floorplanner.com drawing the floor plans to our house. We just had a feeling about this one. Plus, we don’t have cable, remember? We have to make our own fun. And what could possibly be more fun than spending your entire weekend hunched over a computer, drawing walls and picking just the right hideous shade of red carpet? …wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.

Here it is for your perusal. Our house:

The entire house is just over 2000 square feet. That’s the size of four of our Brooklyn apartments put together. No joke.

Sometimes we look at the sheer size of the house we have to remodel and get a little pukey. We have full-time jobs, so it’s not like we can do this all day, every day. The idea of living in a messy, half-finished house freaks us out. And we might as well just take our wallets over to Lowe’s and hand everything over now. When we start thinking of what we’ve signed up for, we panic.

Luckily there are 2 of us, so one person can be the calm, rational one while the other person puts her head between her knees and breathes into a paper bag.

Our mantra: one room at a time.

After several breathe-into-the-bag episodes, we decided not to start a bajillion projects all at once. It’s a pretty easy way to get overwhelmed. Our plan is to take on one room from start to finish. Then move on to the next room and the next until the entire house is done. That way we can have some “safe zones” throughout the house where we can escape the sawdust and plaster, and pretend like it doesn’t exist. Denial is a beautiful thing.

As zen as our motto sounds, we’re already cheating and doing 2 rooms at once:

We decided to reach for the low-hanging fruit first and knock out the 2 rooms that will be the easiest to redo. Here’s our plan for the second floor:

• The guest bedroom is the most “finished” room in the house. Someone already insulated it, put up new walls and a coat of white paint. We could have just painted it and moved in, but we like making things harder than they should be.
• The Smurf room is pretty small — 8.5 feet wide by 15 feet long — and its floors and walls are in decent shape. We can bang that out pretty quickly.
• The full bath is dead last on our remodeling list because it was recently redone by whoever owned the house before us. We don’t love it, but it’s perfectly fine for now.
• The hallway pretty much just needs the floors sanded and painted. Since we’ll already be painting the floors in the Smurf room and guest room, we might as well finish off the hallway at the same time.
• We decided to blow more insulation into the attic, so we’re losing all the storage space up there. We decided to turn the 6′x6′ room into a storage room for all the stuff we don’t want to see on a day-to-day basis. Camping gear, suitcases, etc. We can probably knock out this room in one weekend because it’s so teeny. But we’re not going to deal with it now.
• Master bedroom? What master bedroom? It needs so much work that we’re ignoring it for now.

Once we’re done with the guest bedroom, Smurf room and upstairs hallway, we’re going to tackle the kitchen:

The kitchen renovation is going to be a huge job. We’re going to rip out the ceiling, rip up the floors, insulate the walls, make a custom island, redo the doors. We’re going to salvage the existing sink, but pretty much everything else is out of there. We go back and forth on the kitchen cabinets. They need a lot of work, and we also have to remove them to insulate the brick wall behind them. We have big, big plans for that room. So excited for when we get to it!

We’re also going to take a weekend to deck out our back yard with some sweet chaise lounges and a small outdoor dining table. We’re moving in right at the start of BBQ season, and we plan on eating while remodeling our kitchen.

After the kitchen:

• The stair case, dudes. Ohhhh, the stair case. It’s going to be a thing of beauty after the burgundy carpet is gone and we take a belt sander to it. And then stain it. And varnish it. Repeatedly.
• We’ll probably do the hallway at the same time as the staircase.
• The dining room is in pretty good shape, but definitely needs that carpet and ceiling redone. We might add in a Ben Franklin fireplace and set up a hookah lounge instead of a formal dining room. We’re nuts like that.
• The living room is amazing, but needs a lot of work. Ripping down wallpaper and repairing cracked crown molding kinda work.
• The bathroom in the kitchen blows. Same with the porch. We’re going to gut those suckers and completely redo ‘em. We can’t wait to take a sledgehammer to those hideous walls…but we will. One room at a time. One room. At a time.

There’s also an attic and a basement, but they’re not worth showing. They pretty much look like rectangles. You’ll be seeing a lot of pictures of those soon(ish), because we have some work to do there. Blowing in some insulation upstairs, reinforcing some old beams and maybe pouring a new cement floor downstairs. We also have to replace our boiler and water heater.

Oh mercy. It sounds like a lot when I list it out like that, doesn’t it? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a paper bag to breathe in. Get excited; we are!

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