Quick Front Room Renovation

If all goes as planned, last Sunday was our last long work day at the farm house before we move in.   Wow.  And boy, did we tackle a big job! The front of the house has a room addition that I assume was once the front porch.  This room is over twenty feet long, but only about eight feet wide.  It has thin wood paneling on the walls, and had broken cardboard (asbestos?) tiles on the ceiling.  One of the first things we did was to pull down the tiles on the ceiling to reveal the old wood bead board ceiling of the porch roof.  The space below the roof was the favorite hang out of the Carlos, our house snake.  We filled that space with insulation, so I hope Carlos has found a new home somewhere else.  

We have been using this room as our tool room and kitchen/pantry for the past two years while we worked on the rest of the house.  It was disgusting!  Mouse droppings, spider webs, and general funk was everywhere.  Just finding homes for all the stuff that was crammed in there was a big job, and then I had to wash every surface.  When I wiped the walls, the rag would be black.  So gross.  But not anymore.  We painted the ceiling white, patched up the busted wall paneling, pulled off all the broken styrofoam  fake wood trim, pulled a million random nails from the walls, swept up the broken bits of concrete from the floor, and painted the walls with a gallon of paint my boss gave me.  Baby blue was not Brandon's color of choice, but free paint looks beautiful to me.  I scraped the bottom of several cans of paint in order to get enough white to coat the door to the living room and the trim along the ceiling.   

I told Brandon that I liked painting in a dark room at dusk because I couldn't see well enough to know if I was doing a good job.   He just kept telling me to go faster so we could get to the floor before we had to leave.  He couldn't figure out why I was taking the time to scrub the painted wood siding that covers the wall on one side of the room, but I was determined to get this space as clean as possible before we fill it with stuff again. 

 We splurged on some cheap vinyl flooring to cover the broken concrete floor.  This room would be a prime candidate for ceramic tile, but after tiling the bathroom, I remembered that I don't like to lay tile!  Not that getting a twenty food roll of vinyl in to this skinny room was easy.  

We had to open the window between the front room and the downstairs bed room so we could push the long roll of flooring into the window so we could get it into the room the way Brandon wanted it.  This was the first time we ever tried to open this painted shut window, and it was so stuck I was afraid that Brandon was going to give himself a hernia getting it open.  

Once it was in the room, we did some trimming to get it fit under the threshold of the door, and then we wrestled it into place.  

The sun was setting and we were beat, but we didn't stop until we had crawled all around the edges of the floor trimming the extra bits off.  

Now that the floor has lines in the pattern of the vinyl, it really emphasizes how much slope there is to the floor.  I'm sure a ball on the floor would roll to the wall.  But, if you don't look too close at the slightly wavy wall paneling, or my hasty paint job on the trim, it looks pretty good.  It's much better than it was before, for sure.  I feel like I could put my things in here without too much fear of spider colonization.  Once the trim goes around the bottom of the walls and the windows, we can call it done.