House update! The "Office" / New Baby's Room

What a busy year! Most of our time has been spent with Markus -- watching him grow, play, and learn. But there are those rare times where I find time to continue to do work on our first home! First, here's a picture of me in the backyard blowing around a pile of leaves onto a tarp, which I will drag out to the front of the house for our town will pick up. I just thought this was funny.

(apparently leaves fall of the trees EVERY year...who knew?)

The room next to Markus' room was supposed to be our office. It took me practically the entire year to get it up to snuff, mostly because I couldn't do any work at night in that room because it would wake Markus up. It turns out that this was serendipity. Now that's it's finished, we no longer are going to be using this as an office, but it will be the new nursery! Everything happens for a reason. Anyway, here's the rundown of what was done (that I can remember and not necessarily in this order) and some before/after pictures, which are always fun.

• Remove old, stank carpet
• Remove old tiles beneath carpet
• Refinish oak floors - sand and poly (contractors)
• Remove old doors, closet shelves, and trim (all of it, except window sash)
• Remove old light fixture
• Change all old outlets to new outlets
  
• Change old dimmer with new dimmer
  
• Change old telephone outlet to modern outlet
  
• Remove peeling paint from walls (almost all walls)
  
• Prime and seal walls, remove few more spots of bubbling old paint, and repeat.
• Fix bumpy ceiling (corner near entry door was bad)
  
• Skimcoat all walls and ceiling (3 coats min, with sanding in between each coat!)
• Prime all walls and ceiling
• Install new door (solid, six-panel)
• Install new closet doors (bi-fold set)
  
• Install new trim (baseboards, door, window, and closet)
• Caulk around trim
• Prime and paint all trim and doors
• Strip old registers of paint (the reason I did this was because our registers are some unique size that Home Depot/Lowes doesn't carry. I thought this was a viable option and they came out nice). Spray primer and spray paint.
  
• Paint ceiling
• Paint walls
• Install new light and window shades
  
• CLEAN UP

I think that about covers it. I finished this about two or three months ago. This room is basically all new now, with nice smooth walls and ceiling. We will now decorate it for our new baby! Here are the b/a pictures. I matched up some of the photos as best I could.

(corner, new trim, register, blinds outlet, floor)

(closet, you can see the peeling paint)

(old door)

(new door -- thanks BRO!)

That reminds me -- hanging a new door (even if pre-hung!) is not easy when the entire house is lopsided! My brother and I changed 5 doors upstairs (3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1 linen closet) and each one was much more difficult that we originally thought due to the unevenness of the framing.

Anyway, the next and current project is the shag carpet room (update: no more shag remains!). The plan is to rip off the faux wood paneling (YIKES), change the two little closets into one pantry, remove the textured ceiling and faux wood beams (YIKES), put in some better lighting, new trim, doors, and some laminate wood flooring, which will continue to the basement laundry room. Piece of cake, no? I'll probably have an update in 3 years!