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.