Whole House Remodel

05May11

When my wife and I first saw our future home on Cook Street in southeast Denver, we weren’t terribly impressed. It’s a 1955 ranch with an addition and a garage that has been converted into a larger living space. However, I started to visualize what we could do with this house and realized that although it would take a TON of work, this would be a fantastic house for us.

Wall to wall carpeting. No lighting anywhere. A kitchen straight out of 1978 (currently the kitchen remains in it’s late seventies state. However, I have plans to gut this puppy and remodel it by end of July 2011) So before you ask why there are no pictures of a kitchen remodel…They were omitted on purpose! I’ll reveal the before and afters of the kitchen by end of summer…I promise.

Wall to wall rose colored carpet prior to moving in

We took possession of the house on September 10, 2010. We had three weeks to lay new floors, complete new electrical, remove walls, add new doorways, build a custom closet, and add carpeting to the master bedroom.

Like all houses, ours is also a work in progress. To date, we have completed a remodel of the entire main level – except for the kitchen – which will be gutted this summer. There is still a lot of work to do…And we have done a lot since these pictures were taken **added a built in desk “command center” to the niche in the center of the house** and **currently remodeling front bedroom into a nursery** (Pics to come late summer)

We chose a 3/4″ solid birch hardwood floor in 3″ plank width. It is a prefinished product. We chose prefinished because it cuts down dramatically on time to install. Also, if we should ever want to refinish the floors, we can. Unlike engineered wood, our hardwood floors are solid, so we can sand them down and then refinish if we choose to.

I incorporated recessed lighting wherever I could. We plan to add recessed lights to the kitchen and *ahem* also plan on installing two skylights in the kitchen to take advantage of Denver’s sunny skies.

These before and afters really don’t do the project justice, but at least you can see what we were originally dealing with…

: The view from the front door of our house. That’s our dog, Jackson.

: Dining Room. Carpeted. NO lights! No portals to other rooms! Great space, but needed a bit of work.

: View from the front door. Lots of carpet. (A running theme throughout the home) Also ugly linoleum.

: Front bedroom. **Currently being converted into a nursery…Pictures to follow when complete.

: What we call the den. This would later become our comfortable television room

: Master Bedroom. We actually like the wall color so we left it. But the carpet was terrible. Again, no lighting whatsoever.

: This is the northeast corner of the dining / living room. The other side of this wall is the kitchen, and we decided to create a six foot passageway between the two rooms for better flow.

: You can see that we’ve installed the new header and are just finishing up the framing here. Believe it or not, this all took place on Day 1 of home ownership.

: Sharon spent too many hours to count pulling out old carpet tacks.

: Chaos! The height of the demolition.

: The old entrance to the master bedroom was inside the cased opening on the right. We decided to move the door and use that space as a second closet for the master bedroom.

: New recessed can lighting was installed in the den. This was my base of operations while I laid hardwood floors throughout the main level.

: First day’s work on the hardwoods. I had never laid wood floors before, so the learning curve was pretty steep. I got the hang of it after a couple days. All in all, I installed over 1200SF of new hardwoods in our home.