Out with the Old...

Sometimes celebrating a new year means saying goodbye to things that aren't working anymore. The same can be true of a new house! Since our escrow finally closed at the end of December, my sweetie and I have been having fun doing some demolition work on parts of our condo that we don't like or that need to be updated. 

One of the first things to go was the built-in furniture that you see behind the bed here. (This picture is from before the previous owners moved out.)

Here are all the pieces of that furniture after we deconstructed it. The room already feels much bigger!

Next was the soffit in the master bathroom. It housed a lens for a fluorescent tube light that we won't be using anymore, and was much sturdier than it needed to be anyway. It also detracted from our nice, high ceilings.

Adam and our new reciprocating saw made short work of that. He has since cut it down all the way to the wall and patched and textured the wall so it's ready to paint. Will still have one more soffit to take down in the other bathroom.

Speaking of paint preparation, here I am getting ready to sand down some doorframes so that we can paint them again without them getting too thick.

Here is one of our door frames before sanding (left) and after (center). It is so nice to see natural wood under there! It turns out this green paint (that seems to have been the unifying theme of the house) comes off much easier than expected. The image on the right shows a chunck of paint I took off a door in one piece, just by grabbing it and pulling. I only really needed to use the sander for some stubborn spots, and for the layer of paint below the green one.

Another thing we need to do before we can paint is get rid of the popcorn ceiling. The contractors are coming today to scrape it and I can't wait to see how it looks when they are done! We want to do most of the work ourselves but decided it was worth it to hire this one out.

Are you making any changes this new year that you are excited about?

-Assunta