Follow along with a small remodel

We are remodeling the front porch, refinishing the floors in two rooms and replacing the ceiling in the living room. Follow along as we document the products and resources used to complete this project. Benefit from the valuable lessons that we learned. Learn which jobs you might consider doing yourself and which parts should be handled by a professional. The following difficulty rating is based on a one being very easy and a 10 meaning you should definitely hire a professional.

You'll notice that the front porch had ugly old black metal railing. The kitchen had linoleum in a white/gray checked pattern and the living room had white berber carpet that was badly worn. The home is at least 70 years old.

We hired Dick Robinette of New River Custom Carpentry to do the technical carpentry repairs. He repaired the porch roof and built a new wood railing. Under the carpet and linoleum we have hard wood. Dick replaced some of the wood that had old termite damage and a section of the flooring where an old air return used to be.

We decided to build the coffered ceiling ourselves, with the help of some very knowledgeable friends (Difficulty rating: 10).

We have red oak wood in our living room and yellow pine in our kitchen. After sanding the floors ourselves (Difficulty Rating: 6), we set to work creating sample boards so as to choose the correct color stain (Difficulty Rating: 1).

This created an interesting staining dilemma. Valuable Lesson Learned: 70 year old wood and new wood do not take stain the same! Sometimes, it is better to change your plans instead of sticking to an original idea that does not work for your home.

Our first color choice for the ceiling was just too orange and not quite right. So we put sample cards on the ceiling and looked at them, then we tried a bronzing product on one spot (Difficulty Rating: 1).

With the help of honest friends, we realized that we wanted the ceiling to look like a pillow of ours.

Valuable Lesson Learned: I loved the color matcher at Home Depot. You can take the item that you want to match and hold it up to the machine. It will tell you what color is the closest match. The machine then gives you the option of choosing lighter or darker options within the same family of colors. We were pleasantly surprised at what a great job it did (Difficulty Rating: 1).

The floor continued to be a challenge. We were pleased, however, with our base color choice for the ceiling. The next step for the ceiling included a bronze glaze. We put the glaze on using a paint-on/rub-off method (Difficulty Rating: 6). The glaze was mixed in a 1:1 ratio. One part bronze metallic glaze and one part clear glaze.

Valuable Lesson Learned: Speak up! If the project isn’t what you want it to be, say so. So we wiped the glaze off the walls and decided to start again. We opted to spray the finish for an all-over thin metallic shine (Difficulty Rating: 10). This time with a 5:1 ratio. Five parts clear glaze.

The floor got three coats of polyurethane (Difficulty Rating: 9). We had to stay off of the floors for five days.

The porch floor originally had green outdoor carpet. We ripped the carpet up and scraped off the glue and chipping previous paint residue (Difficulty Rating: 5). Of course, we tried a color sample.

The original color that we chose just wasn’t quite right, a little too pink. So we took the gallon of concrete stain back to Sherwin-Williams and asked them to spice it up for us. They added a little more gold, umber, maroon and white. Valuable Lesson Learned: Don’t assume that just because you walked out of the store there is nothing that can be done to change the color. Take the paint or stain back to the store where you bought it and ask them if they can tweak the color in one direction or another. That having been said (it is obvious that blue will never be pink) the color can be made a little warmer or cooler.