Labor day week was a week of serious labor.  I renovated half of the great room in my house.  It is composed of the foyer, the front room, and a dining room.  The only surviving picture of the previous room shows the green walls.  There were small grey boring tiles in the foyer, and poor quality faux wood vinyl flooring in the rest of the areas.  The vinyl had been scratched by typical wear and the previous owner’s dogs.   About half the walls had some kind of splotchy skip troweling done to them.  It didn’t look good.

That is a lot of tile

Old picture of the walls before

Tiling in progress

Whole tile right up to the back door!

Better with grout

Transitions help break up the rooms and make tiling easier

New blinds and finished molding

Painted the dark wood a nice white

I re-mudded the walls with the texture issue and was able to get them flat enough for most people not to notice.  Various other holes were patched in the process.  Peeling up vinyl flooring is much easier when you rent a machine built for that purpose.  The remaining glue was a mostly hands and knees kind of job.  It took nearly a whole day to scrape it all clean.  Tile and paint went down with out too many issues, just a lot of backbreaking labor.  Last but not least I replaced the dog chewed blinds, all the baseboard, and repainted some of the existing dark wood trim to match the rest of the molding.

All in all it felt like an insane amount of work at the time, but in retrospect always seems worth the effort.  Now I just need to muster the time and energy to tackle the living room and kitchen.  The joys of home ownership!

-Chase