Room Renovation

The parents of the current owner of this house bought it in 1955. After growing up in this house, moving out, and moving back in as an adult, she figured it was time to do some major renovations.  She started with the bedroom and guest bedroom.

We removed the drop ceiling, wood paneling, all woodwork, and linoleum floor.  After installing new drywall on the ceiling and skim coating the walls, we painted everything.  We did not put up any new trim, because she is getting new bamboo floors installed.  That has to be done before the trim.  I feel like this is an unfinished project, but our role is done for now.  If I wind up doing to the trim work, I will update this post.

I have 4 pictures of this project from two different angles.  We did two different rooms, but I am showing you two angles of the room with more light.


This is how the room looked upon our arrival

This is after we removed the ceiling tiles/tracks, wood paneling, trim, linoleum floor, and an extreme amount of trash.

This is with new drywall on the ceiling and the walls skim coated

This is the primed and painted room. 

After this point, the homeowner got new floors and baseboards installed by someone else.  I was not able to return to show the final results. This does look like an unfinished project here, but I'm sure you can see how much we did.

Post Wood Paneling Era

There was a time when wood paneling was all the rage in the Philadelphia area.  Fortunately, those days are long gone, and these homeowners finally did something about it.

The true nature of this project was that they had a leak from above that damaged the ceiling, walls, and carpet in their basement.  So, they hired us to take the remaining paneling off the walls, re-insulate, hand drywall, repair the ceiling, install new trim, and paint the entire thing.  It took us 4 days to get it done, but it went from dark and dated to fresh and new rather quickly.

I am sharing 3 views of the same room. The "before" pictures were taken while we were removing the remaining paneling. They were also getting a new carpet and told us not to worry about it, so please pay no attention to how we destroyed it ever further.  

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

The Painting of an Entire House #9

First of all, the title of this post suggests that this is the 9th time we painted an entire house.  I want to assure you that we have painted many more than 9 entire houses this year.  This is just the 9th time that I chose to take some before and after pictures and share them with you. 

Even though we painted this whole house, I only have pictures of one room.  Of course it is the most impressive room that I wanted to show.  It shows everything that you need to see.  It is also 2 angles of the the same room.  The "before" pictures show how we prep the furniture and cut in the edges.  You can also see the repairs we made on the ceiling and walls.  I assure you that we covered the floor with drop cloths shortly after I took these pictures.

The previous owners of this house chose to put an off-white (almost yellow) semi-gloss paint on the ceiling and the walls.  This new home owner had much better taste and wanted to update the look.  So we got to work and gave the house a fresh and more modern look.

We used very high quality paint from Sherwin-Williams.  The home owner requested that we use the  Duration line of paints with a matte finish on the walls and Pro-Classic on the trim.  We also used the ultra flat white ceiling paint, called Eminence. 

Closet Rebuild

This job was a little outside our usual scope of work, but it was an interesting job that we could do.  These new homeowners wanted to change the closet system in their master bedroom.  A previous owner of this house built a wall of closets that was convenient for them, but these new owners wanted something different.

The new homeowners wanted us to take out the double doors and the closet on the right, so we did. When we were done the demo, it looked like this.

There was plaster on some of the brick and the ceiling over the old closets came down.  One plaster wall on the left also came down.  We added furring strips to the brick wall and reframed the ceiling.  Then we installed new drywall, added baseboard to the sides, and installed some crown molding.  The final result looked like this...

Unfortunately, we were not able to prime and paint the area, so this is the final photo I got.  However, you can see the amount of work we put into this.

The Painting of an Entire House #9 with some extras

This was the largest project of the year (to date).  It started as a routine "Repair and Paint" project, but after their electrician and HVAC people finished their work, this turned into something much larger. The easy part was repairing all of the electricians work.  The new air conditioner system was the challenge.  We remained flexible while moving forward with all of the changes and additions to the work.  It took two weeks for four of us to complete this work.

Many of the walls looked like the one below.  Part of the original job was to do this extensive plaster repair.

We were also asked to paint all of the radiators in the house

Another original part of the estimate was to make their staircase turn from blue and damaged to a beautiful white.

At the 11th hour, we were asked to make soffits for the exposed air conditioner tubes.  The new homeowners did not expect to have to do this, so we had to make the soffits as small as possible while fitting into the existing 150 year old house.

The HVAC people were nice enough to feed this one through the plaster wall

We had to extend the walls and match the baseboards for these two sets of tubes

The wallpaper you see next to these tubes was actually under some severely textured surface.  We had to remove the wallpaper under all of the plaster texture and apply 2 skim coats of joint compound to get a good looking wall.  You can't really see that below, but you can see the wall extension and new baseboards

This was the biggest challenge of the project.  The HVAC people put this giant tube right up to the ceiling creating a need for a very large soffit.  After the homeowners pleaded with the HVAC contractors, the were able to stuff the rear portion of the tube in the ceiling.  However, we still needed to create the smallest soffit possible so the ceiling was not reduced by 16". 

With some creative thinking, we dug a channel into the ceiling and were able to squeeze the tube into the soffit you see below.  Take note of another vertical soffit in the rear.  The baseboards matched perfectly.

Kitchen finishing

The owners of this West Philadelphia house had some work done in their kitchen several months ago, but never got around to finishing it.  They had their ceiling reframed and new lights installed, but never took care of the wallpaper or the finishing of the ceiling.   The kitchen just needed us.

The drywall installers spackled over the wallpaper, so that had to be removed.  There were also dry erase boards attached to the wall.  After removing them, we found that tiles were removed behind them with the mortar still in place. 

We removed the dry boards with the mortar and plaster behind them while removing the wallpaper everywhere else in the kitchen.  Then we repaired the walls, primed painted, added new baseboards (not pictured), and painted everything white.

Removal of Texture

At some point in the history of this South Philadelphia house, some one decided that it would be a good idea to cover the walls of the living room with a thick heavy texture.  It looked like this all of the room...

The wife and children went out of town for a week and we got to work.  The idea was to scrape the high points off then skim coat the room with some joint compound.  However, this texture was made of mortar or heavy plaster, and it did not come off easily.  The wall section under the stairs had some wallpaper under the texture.  So, the paper came off with the texture.  That small area was not a problem at all.

However, the other walls were not so easy. We tried to remove the texture with very little success.

So, after 2 complete skim coats all of the walls in the living room, sanding, priming and painting, it looked like this...

Deep Space and Chalkboard

I worked for this family a long time ago.  I did some work on their front door and painted the two rooms on their 3rd floor.  This time, they wanted me to paint their 2nd floor.

Some people contact me and just want their house painted.  They really don't know what they want, what colors to use, or how to create a space.  This is fine.  Not everyone is good at it.  This woman, however, had a vision and did not compromise it at all.

Her son's room was scuffed up, the baseboard was missing in some places, there were nail holes all over the ceiling and walls, and it needed some new life.  She showed me a picture from a design website and wanted what she saw.  So, we made the ceiling and the top 2/3 of the wall one off-white color.  We covered the bottom portion of the wall with chalkboard paint, even the closet.  She did not necessarily want her son drawing on the walls.  She just liked the look and the durability of it.  I had the chalkboard paint color matched for the trim.  So, the door frames were the same color as the chalkboard paint, but in a standard semi-gloss product.  We made the line go right over the trim.

Before

After

Her bedroom was a huge project.  We stripped the wall paper from the ceiling and made extensive repairs to it.  Then we painted the walls in Benjamin Moore's Deep Space with a Matte finish.  The trim and doors were also Deep Space, but in a semi-gloss. Considering the name, I was not shocked by the color.  I was shocked that someone would want it, though.  The ceiling was the same color as her son's room.  I did not understand it at first, but I do like the results.

Before

After

Before

After