Demo and Updating

Chip and Joana may call it “demo day” but ours took over two weeks.

Not fun.

(You can see the entire “Before” gallery here. )

Flooring was the first thing to go. The carpeting in the front room was the same as when my grandparents first bought the home. They never updated it. I can’t even comprehend what that carpet has seen in its 37+ years. Equally crazy, the carpet in the bedrooms was installed when they bought the home, making it exactly 37 years old. While updated from its original form, the bathroom also had wall to wall carpet. Can you say gross?

Next to go were a few pieces that bothered me the most - the fixtures throughout, the medicine cabinet, a display cabinet in the living room, and the decorative trim above the kitchen sink. 

Then there was the paneling. Originally the whole main area was covered with this dark wood panelling, but over the years, the living room and the kitchen had been replaced. Nonetheless, they were not my style and they had to go. The only paneling that remained was a single wall in the dining room (my girls talked me into leaving it as an accent wall, which I originally resisted but am really thankful for now). Removing them really took a lot of the old house smell out as well.

Then there was the kitchen. This was the heart of my grandmother’s home and the vast majority of my happy memories were right here in this very space. My love for it is deep and I wanted to preserve as much of it as I could while also modernizing it and making it more functional for our family. I hoped to keep the cabinets by rearranging them and giving them a makeover. I knew this would be a challenge and a large undertaking, but I also believed it would be worth it in the end. However, a few unpleasant surprises led us to put the kitchen plans on pause. For one thing, the cabinets were not modular. They were entirely custom built in place which meant that removing them would be a very big chore, they would not be as easily re-used, etc.

For another thing, we discovered that the bathroom could not wait.

Originally I had hoped to replace the floor and rebuild the awkward corner closet. It was a wonky, inconvenient configuration and with only three closets in the entire home, they were all going to have to pull their weight. This one just wasn’t going to work. Out it came.

Unfortunately, removing the walls of this closet exposed the poor state of the ceiling. The drywall was “squishy” and it became quite obvious the entire ceiling was sagging. The floor was already questionable, but with this discovery, a full gut and remodel was the only way to go. We stripped the room to the bare studs, which revealed a few electrical, insulation, and framing problems and reassured us we’d made the right choice. Also, with the full gut, we discovered that rather than removing building materials during previous remodels, they had merely layered them. We were able to strip out the layer of old wood siding and turn this dividing wall into a proper width interior wall, gaining inches inside the room.

Then, finally, construction began. I started in the bedrooms since these would be the quick and easy areas. They got a fresh paint job, new lights, and some blinds. (Swirl wall for J’s bedroom, drawn and painted by A with help from M)

The living and dining rooms got new planked walls, fresh trim, and refinished floors. In the process of recovering the walls, we also closed in the window/display case (that used to be a window before the front porch was enclosed) and the pass through door from the kitchen to the living room. Losing this door would change the flow of the home, but set the stage for a better kitchen layout in the future. The living room also got a new light. The existing chandelier in the dining room will be left for now, as a nod to the past (its original to my grandparents purchase of the home). My children also begged me to keep some of the old paneling - they loved it and I had no idea why, lol. We compromised by keeping just the one wall as an accept piece, and I have to admit, I’m really glad they talked me into it.

We added a door to the front room to turn it into a third bedroom for our college-aged daughter, removed half of the closet, replaced the light fixtures, painted the exposed walls, and installed new flooring. The bookshelves were left alone until we decide what to do with them. They are dark, but I love them (my grandparents custom built them and grandma had them crammed full with books) and can’t quite bring myself to remove them just yet. I also have a lot of books and would like to eventually make this my library.

We also spent a couple of very long days and nights refinishing the hardwood floors.

Then there was the bathroom. After gutting the room, hubs worked hard to overhaul the electric and plumbing, reinforce the floor and the ceiling, build a water closet, and hang drywall. He also replaced the old vanity with a double (thanks to the inches gained by removing old layers of construction material), installed a new shower, the vinyl floor, the planked ceiling, and some modern fixtures.

After a month of hard work to update the interior of the house, we moved into the home with our youngest in the fall of 2025.