It’s been almost a year since we completed our living room/dining room renovation. We finally have a social life again, we can relax in the evenings and on weekends and we really feel like we live in a home.
But that’s too boring, so we’re going to mix it up again.
Last year at this time, we were living like this:
Now we live like this:
But we want to sleep in the same comfort that we watch TV in.
Our situation isn’t terrible. Our floors are clean and we finally put our bedroom together.
But it’s not much different than when we originally moved in – except there are several new patches from holes we made during our electrical work.
So, we want to completely renovate the second floor. At least this time we have more experience, but we also know how hard it’s going to be. We’re hoping for a limited number of surprises, but that’s not how these things work.
Scope
Our plan is to redo the entire upstairs, except the bathroom (which we can do at a later date). This will include renovating the master bedroom, the middle bedroom, the back bedroom and the hallway. We also plan on doing something with our stairs and installing new closets (in 2 bedrooms and the hallway).
We don’t anticipate too many surprises. We had a small water problem in the middle bedroom last winter which we think was caused by a clogged eaves trough (which has since been fixed), but it’s possible that we’ll find severe water damage. The middle bedroom also has a tiled dropped ceiling and could be hiding a mess of a ceiling above it. We at least know that the tiles aren’t asbestos. So that’s something…
Schedule
We also know how important it is to completely plan out the work, so I have an even more detailed schedule than before. I used this blog to remind myself just how long things actually take, so my new schedule is a fairly realistic plan (or so I think!).
I have also allocated time to make design decisions. What delayed us so much last time was that we had new projects pop up and it took us a long time to figure out what to do. Or we had a vague idea of what we wanted but hadn’t fully flushed it out and then had to stop the work to figure out exactly what to do.
We plan on finishing the renovation by April. Finishing in the spring is good timing for a few reasons. First, it gives us something to do all winter when it’s not fun to go outside anyways. Second, hardwood floor should be installed in the spring or fall. Finally, we are considering embarking on a much larger kitchen renovation (with contractors and everything) and will likely start the planning of that in the summer, so it’d be nice to have the renovation done by then.
Cost
I’m not too worried about cost. Our downstairs renovation cost us about $5,000 (not including the electrical), so I figure it will be about the same upstairs. Spread over 6 months, we wouldn’t even need to dip into our renovation savings! We can just bank roll the whole thing and save our money for our future kitchen reno…
Let the renovation fun begin!