A little more about the house…

Last time I shared pictures of just the main level, so I thought I’d show you some of the upstairs as well as the basement. As I write this, changes are already taking place. I mentioned that we had the floors on the main level refinished, and they look fantastic! If you’re in the Atlanta area and you want a great flooring guy, let me know and I’ll introduce you to Craig O’Riordan at BEC flooring. They truly did a fantastic job! But their work wasn’t just on the main level. They also refinished the hardwood steps going upstairs, and they removed all of the carpet and flooring on the lower level and replaced it with LVP (Luxury Vinyl Planks). It looks soooo much better! I’ll show you in a minute. One interesting find they had when pulling up the old carpet is that they found SCORPIONS. Seriously? I had no idea they were a thing in Georgia and it totally creeps me out! Thankfully without the carpet there they shouldn’t have anywhere to hide.

We are also having the entire house painted, which is already making a huge difference. I’ll take some pics as I can this week and update you soon.

Let’s start with upstairs. When you go upstairs, there’s a lofted area that you can see was used as an office before. That’s our intention as well. I found a desk on Facebook Marketplace for Keith and will refinish the top of it when I get time. So you’ll see more about that in a future post. The lofted area will be getting new lighting soon, like much of the rest of the house! Next to the lofted area is a bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. We’ll be putting a king bed in there and use this as our primary guest suite. It also has a weird little balcony (picture below) off of the room. Not sure why, but we’ll leave it as is for now. I don’t love the carpet upstairs but it’s new and we decided to not spend the money to replace it. Note that all of these pictures were taken from the Zillow listing. This isn’t my furniture.

Moving downstairs, you’ll see that there’s a lot of space! Starting in the room that the previous owners used as a workout room. Our plan for this space is to make it a game room – think ping pong, darts, foosball, etc. It’s a low priority room so as I see things for a good price I’ll get them for that room. These pictures are from before and after the new flooring went in. Unfortunately we did have to remove the flooring in there and put in new LVP to make it all match.

Next door to that is our downstairs den. Like the rest of the basement, the nasty carpet was ripped up and we put in the LVP. It already looks so much better, but let’s address the elephant in the room. The weird fireplace. It’s electric. The mantle looks stupidly too high, and the weird stone hearth doesn’t go with anything else. Short-term, we are removing the mantle, which will make it look so much better almost immediately. Long-term, since the fireplace is electric, we can encase the stone with something to hide it (still TBD) and we’re thinking we’ll build some shelves on the sides of the fireplace. Again, all still TBD and a low priority for now. Pictures below are from before and after!

Off of the downstairs den is a kind of cute little bar area. We’re not 100% sure what we’re going to do with this space long-term. Short-term, we’re painting it along with everything else, so it will no longer be the strange faux-painted walls. I think that will immediately make it look better!

Down the hall is a bathroom. We don’t love the counters in there but they’re thick granite so we’re painting the cabinet a neutral lighter color to hopefully neutralize them somewhat. Expect pictures of that soon.

There are also two bedrooms downstairs. We’ll put two twins in one of the rooms and a king in the other. One of the rooms has a little alcove area that they put closet shelving in!?!?! Shaking my head at that design choice. They’ll go away now and we may put some nice shelves there or put a dresser in there. Who knows. We’ll also be changing out the ceiling fans in the rooms. I’m not sure what else will happen with these rooms so it will be a surprise for all of us!

We are officially moving furniture in this week and Keith’s garage stuff next week. It’s all a work in progress and it will be a while before it’s fully furnished, but we’ll have some fun along the way. Since we’re paying people to do the really hard stuff, we will enjoy more of the process this time! More pics and details to come soon!