ok. i don't feel like writing. so here are some 'afters' (most of the befores are kicking around the rest of the blog). keep in mind we still have minor things to work on; touch-up painting, baseboards, but mostly just decorating. the green image is the patterned paper on the interior front door. not sure how i feel about it yet... we're thinking of changing the colour. the green is the same green as the bath wall and kitchen header. little splashes here and there:) i tried to do the pics as a little tour, starting with the entrance. i didn't add pics of bathroom and spare room. i will eventually.

wow. I've been so busy and tired renovating that I cannot seem to keep up with the blog!

We have come a long way, but we

still have so much work to do.

Currently we are working on our kitchen. Since our cabinets had to live in the living room and our appliances had to live in the storage ro

om, you can imagine what chaos we have been dealing with. We put a pantry tin the hallway closet which has been holding all our kitchen needs for now...Finally this past weekend we were able to move most of the cabinets into place and install the over the range microwave. We now have half a kitchen! We are sink and countertop shopping this week.

We really really wanted to do concrete

tops. But, we just can't manage the stamina for another huge project. It is entirely way too expensive to have a profes

sional make concrete countertops so i borrowed a book from the library and did a ton of research. We thought it would work for us, and we coul

d probably do it if it was the only major project we were taking on. For now though, we will have to reconsider that option.

We may have found a good deal on some nice quartz countertops, but we are toying with the cheaper, more environmentally sustainable choice of laminate. Obviously they both have pro's and con's. We need to keep resale value in mind and the quartz is stone which people seem to love these days. Also, we bought used cabinets and got a decent deal on our tiles so we

don't mind spending a little more on a surface we like. We will be looking at some laminate tops this week to compare, however.

It took us much longer than expected to lay our kitchen tile. We have to put cement leveler down...twice. Also, working with larger 12x24 tiles is difficult, especially when your walls aren't exactly square and your floors aren't perfectly level. But we pushed through it and got it done! It looks great!

finishing touches will take a very long time if we do them on our own. So, we have decided to hire our realtor/friend's dad who does handy work to come in an instal our baseboards and door frames and some other finishing touches.

We have installed new doors, prep'd and painted new bifolds for the closets, sanded the shit out of our bedroom door which we still haven't installed, put wardrobes in our walk in closets (which I have decided i don't like and down the road may consider built-in closet organization- which is what we wanted to do but unfortunately we made an impulse buy), we built a half wall in our bedroom, and we are still unpacking and organizing...

As I said, we are still living without a bedroom door. It's very annoying. We have hung a sheet for some privacy but we can hear everything happening outside our 'door'. We are at the end o

f the hall to the bathroom and front door so it's a busy place.

I will leave you with a few photos of our progress but i'll save the 'before and afters' for when we have completed the full renovations!

this is our hallway laminate

coming along

i'm too tired to write much, so here is a picture post. Before photos on the left and "so far" photos on the right:) I didn't photos of everything we've done yet so I will have to add more later. But this is a fairly good sample. We've painted, taken out floors, taken out most of the kitchen and are currently working our way through a second layer of linoleum we found in the kitchen! Definitely the original from 79! (top right)

yay productivity!

so, it's been a while since I updated. It's difficult to write a blog about renovating when all your spare time is spent, well, renovating:)

Glennis and I have finished most of the painting. We haven't made our wall in the bedroom yet though. We decided that choosing our flooring was more important since we hope to get it installed before we move in. Neither one of us want carpet in the place so it has made it challenging to search for flooring. After about 6 different carpet places and a thousand samples later, we finally decided on two lightly patterned carpets. One will be in the master bedroom and the other will be in the second bed and the living and dinning areas. They are both neutral tones, but the one in the master is a bit darker. I'm just about to head to the new place to meet the installer so he can measure. We need to order tomorrow morning and hope it doesn't take two weeks for delivery!

We had a very productive couple of days. We bought all our appliances while we were supposed to be carpet shopping. It just happened that there were appliance stores right beside the carpet places out in Coquitalm. We found great deals on all our appliances which is amazing as it allows us to allocate our monies to other areas, like flooring.

We also spent countless hours researching kitchen cabinets at Ikea, Home Depot, and a couple other cabinetry places. We hit up craigslist and decided to see if we could configure someone else's gently used cabinets. We looked at three sets in person (and probably 50 online) and found one set we both liked. The doors on the cabinets are maple which is great. We can sand a stain a darker colour if we decide to. For now we still need to take out the existing cabinets, which we got a good head start on yesterday. I posted the cabinets on craigslist, along with the old appliances, hoping to sell them for a few extra bucks. Today we pick up the new cabinets, and while I'm waiting for the carpet installer, I will start taking down the remainder of the existing, ugly old cabinets!

Pictures to come! But the place is starting to look great!

painting party

Last night we had a little painting party with our friends. Christal came by to help with trim on the ceiling. She saved my arms and my neck! I rolled the ceiling, and hated doing it. Ceilings are NO FUN, but they look awesome now!!!!

Tianna and Aran did the first coat in the hall and master bedroom, and Tina looked hot in her nice, non-painting clothes:) She did miscellaneous chores for us while Glenny fixed the holes in the wall created when we demo'd the closets. Our closets are a bit of a mess from the crap the previous owners constructed. But they are closets nevertheless so we will just have to be careful when we insert our closet organizers.

It was a fun night! We shall continue with painting tonight:) I'll post pics of before and after when we are finished!

paint is ordered

Driving to our new place from downtown takes a long time :( I'm going to have to start taking the sky train on days when I don't need my truck!!

Last night, Glennis, her cousin Calum, and myself loaded my truck wit the old carpet and lino and took it to the dump. Now, the funniest thing happened at the dump. The truck beside us was dumping RECYCLING bins! come on now. ridiculous. I have to admit that I have a lot of fun at the dump, and it made me love my truck that much more!

We also washed all the walls to prep them for painting. We put our paint order in yesterday and I'll be picking it up today! We're really stoked to see the transformation pass the demolition stage. Luckily we have a great friend who owns a painting company so we get an awesome discount. She is saving our budget!

We still need to chose our floors. We know we want to do laminate but the strata might poo poo the idea since they have a 'no hard surface flooring' bylaw. But we just can't seem to bring ourselves to spend much time seeking out carpet that we like. We did, however, narrow it down. We're just waiting to hear from strata so we can get started, which could take another week. In the meantime we shall paint!!

we bought a place!

Glennis and I bought a condo. It was built in 1979 and the interior looks like it hasn't been updated since! So, we're RENOVATING!!!

We decided that the most important reno's included, the floors, some new paint, and the kitchen. We will worry about the bathroom

down the road when we have more money. We bought

the place for a decent price, considering the market in vancouver and surrounding area, which means w

e have a bit to spend on updating the place. Hopefully we'll get the most 'bang for our buck'.

When we got our keys on Friday the 29th, we drank champaign with our realtor and friend and Glenny's dad come by to help us rip out the carpet in the master and second bedrooms. It was fairly quick and painless. We also decided to add to our work and make a partial wall in the master, which will allow us to put our bed against the wall, rather than have it annoyingly close to the heater. This wall takes an open closet space and closes it off partially creating more of a discrete

space. we hope it works:) Heather came by to help us decide on some paint colours and other decorating ideas.

Yesterday we bought the supplies for the wall and

practically trashed the stairwell from the parking garage to our suite! Drywall is messy. Last night we tore out the existing shelves in the closets because they were ugly and we'd like to replace them with nice closet organization. Unfortunately we made a few dents in the drywall, but nothing to worry about! It adds to the character of the space!

Today was lynolium tear out. It sucked. But we got through it nonetheless. We're both bagged already and we have just begun! Tomorrow we take the old flooring to the dump:)