As I've written about previously, we decided to put our house on the market this winter. But, before we could do that, our house needed some serious updating. We had put off updating it for years because we thought it would be too expensive and we were hesitant to invest much into the house because........well.........it's hard to put money into a house that you don't like and that you don't want to live in. But, we finally realized that we had to put money into it in order to sell it. So, we dove in full-steam ahead. And we had no idea what a transformation we were in for. And how cheaply we could do it all for.
Basically, we've done 4 out of the 5 rooms that needed to be done so I'm going to break them down into 5 blog posts, showing you before and after photos and a running tally of how much it all cost.
Today, I'll show the photos and the cost for the hallway and the stairs. This was the first thing that we did.
Our house was built in 1966 and there were still some original pieces left in the house. Like this horrible iron handrail that you can see behind Libby in this picture.
*Disclaimer: Because I didn't plan on doing this much renovating (we were just going to paint a few walls), I didn't take any before photos. So, all I have is whatever candids I found on my computer that showed you parts of the house that we redid. LOL! And, the after photos were mostly taken at night so they are very grainy.
That iron railing had to go! And, as soon as we discovered that the carpeting had hardwood under it, that had to go, too. This carpeting was just ugly, ugly, and filthy.
And, yes, that's Andrew's bum last winter when I took a photo of him vac'ing the stairs with his play vac. :)
We also decided that this metal stripping that was between the hallway and the kitchen had to go!
And this is the difference after replacing the handrail and removing the carpet:
*Disclaimer: This is our one huge mistake in the entire house reno. We totally screwed up the ballisters. In our defense, we had to make this entire handrail ourselves and we had never built one before. We weren't paying any attention at all to the decorative parts of the ballisters and simply cut off the top part so that they were the correct height. Duh! We cut off the decorative part. So, we have more ballisters that we're going to replace these with. :) It looks very goofy right now but I think you can still see how much better it's going to look than that old, ugly iron railing.
The carpeting extended all the way up the stairs and throughout the entire upstairs hallway so we ripped it all out and this is the after photo.
We had to put a carpet runner and padding down because the echo was tremendous once that carpet was all gone.
The materials for the handrail cost us $100 and the carpet runner cost us $48.
Total cost for hallway and stairs: $148.
Part 2 tomorrow. :)
