minorthird

so…we’ve been in the process of remodeling our master bedroom since we moved in, just over one year ago. We started off strong, with my promises of having it done by Thanksgiving — true that was Thanksgiving 2003, and it’s still not done as of Tday 2004, but…once things got cold and the walls were gutted, work pretty much stopped, until this August. It’s wasn’t halted due to laziness, just that there were plenty of other things to do around the house, like replacing the roof, or the front steps…

but, yesterday Erika and I made a pilgrimage to Home Depot (no matter how pissed I am at them for the way they handled our roofing job I can’t seem to break the habit of going there! I suck at boycotts), armed with a 10% off coupon and a $100 gift card courtesy of our AMEX points, and started the journey down the path of completion: paint and flooring!

The walls are almost paintable — we found a few rough spots last night that need some more spackle and/or some sanding. Erika had ripped out a picture from some magazine, maybe Real Simple, that had a bedroom in a light blue color, with white trim. She just about matched the color with Glidden’s Blue Crystal:

It’s a little darker than the picture she had, but it will be nice and clean. We picked up 2 gallons of the Blue Crystal, 1 gal. of white, and 5 gals. of primer, plus various and sundry painting tools.

For the flooring we decided on a parquet tile. It was pretty much a pricing issue. The rest of the house has hardwood floors (under carpet) which we intend on refinishing at some point. We wanted wood instead of a laminate, but traditional hardwood planks just wouldn’t fit, depth-wise, after I leveled the floor. We decided on the Bruce American House Series 100 in the Desert finish:

The room is 13′-5″ wide by 16′ long, so we picked up 230 sq. ft. of tiles, and 5 gallons of adhesive, plus a new 1/8″-grooved trowel.

The trip wouldn’t be complete without looking at trim for the room. The house is 100 years old, and the trim in most of the rooms is made up of 1″x4″ pine boards with a crown molding attached to it. We wanted to keep with that style, even if there are better ways of doing it now. We went with 1″x3″x8′ pine instead of the 4″ boards, only because of price — the 3″ boards were $2.95 each and the 4″ boards were $6.75 each — sometimes you have to do what you can, especially when you’re picking up 20 boards.

Erika was pretty bummed going in to the store because she had a price in here head for the floor and the paint — she was thinking at least $900 for the flooring alone, and considering that when we painted the living room and dining room when we moved in we dropped $400 on that, she was very, very happy to see the final total: $495!

The flooring was really cheap, totally out to about $490. We spent about $150 on the paint supplies, and the the rest of the bill was the boards. The 10% really helped, and then the $100 gift card pretty much got us the paint and trim for free!

Now we need to actually do it…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 11:41 am and is filed under the joys of homeownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.