I haven’t written in a long time because we have been crazy busy. After refinancing we realized we had enough money to redo the floors and carpet in our house. This quickly turned into, if we are going to redo the floors, then we should redo the baseboards because they have to take those off anyway. Which turned into, if we redo the baseboards, then we should redo the trim around all of the doors too. Which turned into, then we should probably paint because we hate these colors and have always wanted to change them. This would be the perfect time. Which turned into, well we shouldn’t paint until we fix that ugly TV wall thing that we always hated. Which led to, while we are at it, we should stain the cupboards and the railing to look more updated too.
So what started as a simple thing where someone ELSE would install the new flooring and carpet while we went to a hotel for the weekend, turned into a complete redesign of most of the main level of the house. And what was then supposed to take until Christmas, turned into trying to get most of it done in 3 weeks.
Here are the before and after pictures and then I will go through some of the things we did and what we learned.
This one you can see that we used to have at least 4 different colors on the walls:
The view into the hallway:
The stairs:
The kitchen:
The TV corner:
And some more after pictures just for funsies: It is really hard to know beforehand which angles you are going to want to show off at the end so some of these don’t have a good before picture, but you get the idea.
Now that you know the before, here is the part you can skip, the in-between.
Shey’s room: Before we could do anything else we had to put a door on Shey’s new downstairs room and put in a closet door for her too. We finished her new room early on in the corona world. She had already moved in, so we figured any more remodeling needed to start with finishing her room.
We had to hang the new door 3 times to get it to work. I started out using shims and doing it like the youtube videos say, but it kept coming out wrong. Finally I got a guy in our ward to come help me and he showed me a new way to do it. Put 3 screws on each side, then screw them in or out a little to adjust the door and make it straight up and down. No shims! It was so much easier. I didn’t think it would feel very solid, but it does. With the new trim up you can’t even tell.
The TV wall: This is something I was dreading. This house was built with this corner fireplace thing that only goes up halfway and vaulted ceilings. I had no idea how I was going to get all the angles right to frame out the rest of that and make it look like one wall all the way up to the ceiling.
We started by ripping out the old ugly plywood thing that hid our little tv. See what I mean about those angles?! No one on the Googles had ever done a corner like this and shown how they did it. There are plenty about extending a wall up, or doing a corner, but none had vaulted ceilings too.
I bought a bunch of 2x4s and a digital sliding T-bevel to help figure out the angles. Eventually I ended up with this:
We wrote all over the wall before we covered it up so the next owners can know our names and other pertinent information. I did a 2×4 on the bottom, measured up to the ceiling and drilled another one into the ceiling. Because of the vaulted ceiling, the top one wasn’t drilled in flush with the ceiling, I had to drill it in angled a bit to make a flat surface for the rest of the trim and shiplap. I also did little 45 degree pieces on the edges to support the frame and so that we would have something to nail the shiplap and the trim into.
The T-bevel and the miter saw were critical to making this work. Also, sidenote, I made good friends with Harbor Freight during this project. I had never been there before, but by the end I had a miter saw, air compressor, and several smaller tools from them because they were way cheaper than Home Depot or Amazon. The number one rule is: never buy anything from them without a coupon. I also went to Home Depot far too many times, but we aren’t friends.
The electrical was the next worry. In that back corner we have an electrical outlet, another plate with an ethernet connection isn’t hooked up, and some wires coming out of a hole in the wall with no purpose that we have ever figured out. Once again I looked all over online about how to handle this and didn’t find any great answers. In the end we decided that this is a “faux wall” which means it isn’t a real wall, it is just a covering of sorts for the corner. So we left everything like it was, made a hole big enough so you can get in that space and change things, and put in a power strip extension cord that is mounted to the inside of the hole so it is easy to access. We also put one of those flat antennas on the wall inside so we can watch “real” TV sometimes, if we want to watch commercials and be forced to watch whatever happens to be on. How did we survive before? Here’s is what it looked like:
I was pretty excited about it. We used a few nickles to do the spacing in the shiplap and it was the first time I got to use my new air powered nail gun. It’s an 18 gauge porter cable gun from Home Depot. I would have bought the one at Harbor Freight for much less, but I went 4 times and they were never in stock. I guess a lot of people are getting into projects that require new tools this summer.
The hardest part on this again was the very top of the wall because of the angle. I can’t just cut a 2 foot long 12 degree angle with my miter saw, even with the sliding function. So I had to draw it out and use the jig saw. We also made the mistake of buying all the shiplap and bringing it home before realizing a lot of it was twisted and bent. Some of that you can fix by nailing it in, but we ended up having to take over half the pieces back. We made sure to check the new pieces in the store. Like I said before, we went to Home Depot A LOT for this remodel, but we aren’t friends.
We painted it white with 2 coats of paint so you can still see a little of the wood through it (one coat just didn’t look right) and we bought a mantle from someone online. I could have built it with my new miter saw and nail gun, but someone local makes them for cheaper than we would have paid for the wood alone. Also, we buy our wood from Home Depot which isn’t the best quality or the cheapest to begin with. That place is the Walmart of home improvement. I don’t want to be seen there, but they have the stuff I need and I am too lazy to find a quality specialty store.
The hole in the wall might look a little high, but we wanted it to be even with the planks, and we knew we wanted the top of the mantle to be about 52 inches high. So we needed some space between the mantle and the TV. We also bought a new 43″ Rolu TV from Costco which I think is the smallest TV they sell. We stained the mantle to match the cupboards and railing which we will talk about later. It’s an amazing transformation that I had no idea I could do. Here is another look:
Paint! So this was a big deal. While I was building the TV wall, Laura basically painted the whole rest of the house which was a ridiculous amount of work. But I know the most important question is, what is the name of that color? It’s called agreeable grey which was created by Shermin Williams, but little known fact, Home Depot can make the same color and put it in their Behr paint. We went with the most expensive version of their paint and it was amazing. We did our whole house with no primer and just 2 coats. It took 5 gallons, but it was completely worth the extra cost not to have to do a coat of primer first.
It took a while to pick the right color. There are several really popular greige ones (That’s the kind of term you learn while doing a remodel. I must have been sick the day they taught us that color in 2nd grade) that are really close to this. We got samples of several and painted a section of the wall. We knew we wanted the trim to be a white color called polar bear (not polar bear white, that’s totally different, seriously) because we had used it in a few other rooms. Color is an amazingly scary decision to make. It is going to be on every wall in the house and painting is not fun, so we didn’t want to have to do it again if we didn’t like it.
I know what you are thinking. It is basically the same color as the grey you already had on several walls. We found that was a theme in our remodel. The paint, the new floors, the trim color. We didn’t make any bold, crazy jumps in design. This wasn’t a TV makeover show. We know what we like. We just wanted a cleaner, more updated look. The old colors were earth tones from the 90’s. The grey looked like cement. Agreeable grey is a little lighter, removes the earth tone, and fades into the background so that the decorations and everything else in the room can stand out. It somehow is….agreeable with just about evey color or decoration in our house. With the white trim it is just enough contrast, but it isn’t the focus either. So we realize most people will come into our house and not notice much of a difference in the color of the walls and the floors, but it will feel just a little lighter and updated somehow. That’s what we were going for.
Our biggest fear in painting was the walls with the vaulted ceilings. I have a ladder, but 16 feet high at the top feels really high. We got a edger brush with the wheels on one side and did that part on the ladder. The rest we did with an extendable painters pole that we bought. It was worth it because we didn’t have to do any taping around the ceiling and the lines still look great. Except for the edges, we could paint the whole thing without having to get on a ladder.
Also, it was very helpful that we did the painting BEFORE replacing the floors. We got paint everywhere, but it didn’t matter because we were ripping out the floors and baseboards anyway. Also, we used the wagner EZ Twist roller and it helped a lot. It lets you suck up the paint into the handle and you twist the handle as you need more paint. I’m sure you waste a little more paint this way, but it makes the work a lot easier. We had a lot of walls to cover and this made a big difference.
Stain. We watched several youtube videos to figure this one out. We started with the stair railings where Laura wanted to do a two tone thing, the top rail would be the stained color and the spindle things would be white. I didn’t think I would like it until I saw the videos. In the end it turned out really nice. We started with a gel stain called Hickory because in all the videos they do several coats and it gets darker each time. After several coats it wasn’t the right color, so we got the next darker gel stain called Kona. That one worked great with just one coat. We cleaned everything with mineral spirits that was going to get stained, and lightly roughed it up with 220 sandpaper. We really didn’t want to completely sand down everything. We used foam brushes from the dollar store that worked, but they disintegrated as we used them. We got a box of disposable lint free rags/paper towels to wipe up the excess. Then we did just one coat of a water based finish that was in the same aisle as the stain. It was supposedly tripple thick. I don’t know how true that was, but it seemed to work fine with just one coat.
For the spindles some of the videos show people using special paint for wood hasn’t been completely sanded down, but we just used a few coats of the regular trim paint and it seemed to work fine.
One thing we learned is that even though the can specifically says to use 220 sandpaper on the final topcoat to remove any imperfections, 220 is way too strong!
This is the $40 piece of oak we got for the top of the kitchen sink shelf. I did an amazing job cutting this with a jig saw and sanding it all down to fit the place perfectly and wrap around the edge in the wall. Laura did a great job staining it. The top coat had some little bumps from the brush, so I tried to fix it with 220 sandpaper. Rubbing very lightly for just a few strokes produced this scratch that was all the way down to taking some of the stain off.
We luckily found what worked, the green scotchbright pads. All of the topcoat is going to have little bumps from dust or whatever in the air that settled while the topcoat was drying. Going over everything with that green pad made everything perfect and it didn’t take off too much at all.
Flooring. When we moved in we did all of the flooring with allure from home depot. It scratched the same day we finished when we slid an empty box across the floor. We have hated it since then. So this time we knew that we could not do the installation ourselves. We went with a place called Mountain West flooring in Lehi. The owner is amazing and was incredibly patient as we struggled to figure out what color to do for the floors. We went through so many samples it was crazy. Ultimately we went with Cascade Capri from UrbanFloor. The planks were nice and wide which was good for such a big space. And they have a slightly beveled edge that we liked because it seperates the planks a little, visually. The color was very similar to what we had already, but without the yellow and just a little more updated. We could have gone more trendy with the whitewash look or a super grey look, but we wanted to like it in 15 years still. So we went with what we already knew we liked.
This was a hard choice because you can’t see how the whole room will look until it is installed. You are trying to go off these samples that are only a few planks wide and look very different in the showroom than they do in our house with our lighting and our stuff. I think this was the most agonizing decision of the whole process. We had to look at how well it would wear, how much dirt they would show (we actually put dirt on the samples), what the texture would be like, what they would look like against the baseboards, the furniture, the table, and the cabinets (after the new stain) all during the day and at night. 80% of the cost of this whole remodel was going into this one decision. I was glad the owner was so patient and let us take a few weeks to make a decision.
Then we had to pick a carpet. This went faster because we were kind of burned out with the flooring choice. We were suprised that our kids had VERY stong opinions about what color their carpet should be or should not be. It is crazy hard to tell what a whole room will look like with the carpet samples you get. Luckily we picked one, the kids didn’t hate it, so it worked out. It is a little darker than we thought we wanted, but now we love it because it is way better quality than the builder grade stuff that had been in the house for the last 16 years.
We rented a dumpster, ripped up all of the old carpet and flooring ourselves (which was far more tiring than expected), moved into the basement for a few days, and let the installers do their work. We had just done 3 weeks of crazy work to our house and just before the installers came it looked like we hadn’t done a thing. When you rip everything down to the subfloor, your house looks like an empty disaster. But the installers came. They made a ton of noise cutting, sawing, and pounding. I thought they were finishing the work of tearing the rest of our house apart. But after a day and a half we had all new floors and carpet on the main level of the house. It was an incredible difference.
Side note – It was nice to have someone else install everything because we don’t see any of the mistakes, if they made any. It also would have taken us at least 2 weeks to do the same work (based on how long it took us to do the floor the first time) so it was totally worth it to have someone else do it quickly and do it right.
Baseboards and Door Trim. This part took a little while. We were tired from the previous 3 weeks of rushing to have everything ready for the flooring guys. But we got it done. We used 5 inch by 1/2 inch baseboards that are simple and good looking. We did 3 inch by 1/2 inch for the sides of the doors. The tops of the doors are 5 inch by 11/16 inch, so they stick out a little from the 1/2 inch sides. I got a little plastic tool to help measure for the bull nose corners. Things didn’t look amazing until I went through and did all of the caulking.
I know the videos show people just using their finger for caulking, but I had to use one of those little rubber smoothing tools for some areas. I did use my finger for a lot and it felt like my finger might fall off afterwords. I also used a wet wash cloth to wipe off the extra caulk from my fingers or the tool. That helped a lot. I also cut the top of the caulking tube as small as I possibly could. That helped with making sure I didn’t use too much. It took almost as long to caulk as it did to cut and put the baseboards up. Luckily I had a rubber kitchen matt to kneel on that needs to be replaced now, but it saved my knees.
Conclusion. If you read this far you are crazy. I more expect that you just scrolled down here and stopped at the pictures along the way. This project was huge for us. It took about 5 weeks. Our kids were often ignored. We ate out, got pizza, or just had fend for yourself dinners quite often. And we drove to Home Depot far too many times. The food and gas were not figured into our project budget, but they should have been.
Had it not been for the self imposed deadline, we set a date with the flooring installers and then figured out how to get everything done before then, we wouldn’t have gone as fast. This thing consumed every minute of our waking day. Although somehow Laura also designed a minecraft themed escape room for Donny’s birthday at the same time and kept young women’s running with activities for like 40 girls the whole time. She also did most of the painting and staining which took a ton of time. My contribution of measuring, cutting, nailing, and caulking pale in comparison.
We also got a lot of help from Laura’s brother, Jay and his family. They came and moved all of our stuff into the garage and then helped us move it all back once the floors were done. It went quickly, but it would have taken Laura and I a long time to do all of that.
The house looks amazing now. My parents called it “elegant” which I like. I like that we didn’t design it to be sold to someone else, we just did it the way we wanted it. I like the light grey, dark brown wood, and white 3 tone look we ended up with. It allows for everything in the house to feel cohesive and for the decorations and pictures to stand out. It isn’t the super trendy white painted cabinets, or flooring that stands out, but it is a style we like and hopefully it lasts for 15 years or so before we want to change it up. Thanks corona. I’m looking forward to a few months now of not doing any home improvements. It sounds like Laura likes it enough that she wants the basement to match. But that won’t be until next year.
Nigel Bloomfield 
