Better late than never, but I’m back with Part 5 of my renovation journey. I hope everybody had a wonderful holiday season. Mine was a little more relaxed than years previously, which I was totally shooting for.

If you’ve missed any of my renovation journey, here is everything to get you up to date:

•  Renovating My House – The Beginning Exterior
•  Renovating My House – The Beginning Interior
•  Renovating the Exterior – Part 1
• My Renovation Journey – Part 2
• My Renovation Journey – Part 3
• My Renovation Journey – Part 4

If you read Part 4, you could tell I was getting very impatient with the subcontractors. They seemed to be going off on their own and the miscommunication was off. I bought myself some plants for the front of the house since that was finished. I figured that would cheer me up and it did.

The guest bathroom debacle was the start of it. After messing up the tile in the bathroom, I ended up finding one box of the exact match for the tile at the Habitat Restore and the rest at Home Depot. The workers fixed the surround and the floor. They brought back the toilet and the vanity and said they were finished. After that, I painted and added more tile to the top of the shower enclosure and now we have a finished bathroom.

After a couple of weeks this is what my house looked like inside. Definitely a hazard so I had to get them to clean it up. The living room and dining room were basically done, so I think they were treating this as some kind of storage room but I wanted them to at least get it tidy. Also, they didn’t put down any paper on my original floors that I was trying to save.

Even though they cleaned up, I still had issues with me coming by after work and it didn’t look like anybody had done anything. So I took a couple of days off to see what was actually happening and just as I suspected, nobody was showing up. The Project Manager assured me that they had to be pulled away from my job for a couple of days, but they would be back.

After thinking about it long and hard, I decided to work from a coffee shop that was down the street and sleep over at the house so I could monitor what was going on. I bought a small love seat from the Habitat Restore, brought a suitcase and my comforter and made myself comfortable.

Once they got the living room cleaned up, because it was essentially finished, I started priming the walls after I moved my stuff into the small office at the side of the house..

Then I was on to the kitchen cabinets. I took the doors off first and set up horses and a piece of plywood and got to work. The color is a light grey-green.

Here’s another view of my set-up.

These are the silver brackets I got from Home Depot and I set them up in my backyard to spray paint black.

I used to have a waterbed when I was in high school. I;m really aging myself right now. I used it through college and when I had my first apartment. Then the mattress had a hole and it used to leak. I tried every kind of patch repair I could find and it would never work. I would still wake up in the morning in a puddle. Eventually I just put the whole bed frame in storage; not sure why but it can’t be because I thought it was good wood right? If so, I might be smarter than I thought.

Here’s the headboard of the bed that I still have because I have plans for it in the future. It’s in a corner of my room gathering dust and holding some old hardback books.

I had a friend plane the planks of wood from the sides of the bed to get all of the dark stain off because I could never do it myself. I also gave him the lengths of the shelves that I wanted and he cut them for me. Here’s what they looked like raw.

I set them up on my workhouses so I could stain them with a clear poly.

The finished shelves looked so good!

Here’s one of the finished shelves put up using the brackets that I spray painted.

I tiled the backsplash with tiles I got at the Habitat Restore, but unfortunately I can’t find any pictures of that.

Here is the kitchen with the cabinet doors put back on and the cabinets painted. The workers also installed the flooring that I picked up at Floor and Decor. It was all starting to come together. The ceiling was still janky as well as the double oven wall, but it wasn’t in the scope of work. I was going to tackle those sometime in the future.

I’m getting caught up in the feelings I had at that time, so I’m leaving off here with me spending the night at the house and micro-managing the workers. The renovation was about a month behind where we thought we would be at this point and my 203k/FHA loan regulations required me to be done in 6 months. We were right at four months and I wasn’t really sure that we would finish on time. Thank God my boss was very understanding. This was pre-pandemic and not too many people were working from home.

If any of you have similar experiences with renovations, please let me know so I won’t feel so alone. I mean, I’ve seen worse things happen on HGTV, but when it’s happening to you it is so different.

Until next time.