Beach House Progress + All Our Plans!

Over the last 10 days, Gordon and I have been working away, getting all the demo done on our beach house! We are happy to report that it’s all completely done and we are ready for our next steps. Woot! If you’d like to see the beach house in all it’s glory before we started any demo, you can see all those photos here.

Demo Progress

Here is what we got done together with the help of a few friends:

• Removed all the baseboards, trim and doors in the entire house
• Removed all the carpet, carpet pad and nail strips everywhere in the house
• Removed all the hardwood flooring in the basement (thankfully it was a floating floor, so it came up easily)
• Removed all the tile flooring and backsplash in the house
• Demo’d most of the kitchen
• Removed the pellet stove in the basement
• Removed the wood stove in the dining room

Problems

So, of course there are some things we found through the demo process that need to get addressed. Some simple and others not so simple. Here are the things we need to address:

• All the windows are installed incorrectly. Even though they are newer vinyl, they are missing flashing across the top of every.darn.window. This means we have to uninstall and reinstall every window correctly to prevent leaks.
• The leaky windows have caused water damage and the baseboards beneath the windows have mold. Not every window is bad. Some are certainly worse than others, but there are three windows on the south side of the house that need mold remediation. The subfloor by the basement south window also needs to be replaced.
• We also found some carpenter ants around that south basement window, behind the trim. SO FUN. But it was nothing terrible that an exterminator can’t fix.
• The back double deck is rotting a lot worse than we originally thought and are thinking we need to replace it sooner than later. Lame.
• The water shut off valve is broken! So we will need a plumber to come out and fix that so we can demo all three bathrooms.

Plans for Every Floor!

Since we ripped everything out, we now get to put it all back together. Whee! This is the fun part, for sure. We get to see progress step by step and room by room. Thankfully, a lot of this stuff is all cosmetic and nothing structural at all. Lots of paint, new flooring and light fixtures.

Main Floor

Across the entire floor, we are painting the walls and ceilings and adding new flooring. This includes the primary bedroom, bathroom, entry, living room, dining room, kitchen and laundry room. We decided on LVP flooring because we liked it so much in our current home. We will have a flooring company install the flooring for us.

We also already ordered grey cabinets for the kitchen from BOXI and have the new appliances in our garage. Instead of fixing the drywall, we will patch it and then add backsplash tiles from counter to ceiling.

In the dining room where the wood stove used to be, we will have a company patch the ceiling and roof from the chimney hole. We will also add can lights into the living room and move the dining room light over two feet so it will be centered on the table.

The master bedroom is a pretty straightforward change with new paint and flooring. The master bathroom is getting new flooring, a new vanity and new paint. Possibly will get a new glass shower door, but I don’t think it’s necessary at this point.

The laundry room will get new paint and new flooring. We also have a new washer and dryer to add and we are debating changing out the cabinetry. We will most likely leave it and figure out the best way to maximize space.

Basement

In the basement, we have this big room (which we call the movie room), a bedroom and a bathroom. We are replacing all the flooring with carpet and adding LVP to the bathroom. We will paint the bedroom a lighter color (either all white or my favorite grey called fleur de sel by sherwin williams) and the movie room a dark navy. We also will add dimmable can lights to make the experience that much more enjoyable. There was a pellet stove in the corner of the movie room which left a hole in the bottom left corner which will get patched as well. It makes such a difference removing it!

The basement bathroom is getting new paint and a new vanity as well. The closet in this bathroom has some large vertical pipes which we are hoping we can relocate so we can completely seal off the closet to them so we can actually use this closet as a closet. What a concept.

The basement bedroom is probably the room that has the most water damage. We are having a company replace the subfloor and fix the drywall where the mold is. Then we will be able to paint.

We are also adding a cute little under the stairs playhouse for Porter and Eddie which will be so cute!

Upstairs/2nd Floor

Up here, there are two bedrooms and a bathroom. Both bedrooms are really straight forward and are just getting new paint, flooring and light fixtures. There is a tiny amount of mold in the larger bunk room under one of the windows which we can remove ourselves.

The bathroom is getting new paint, new flooring and a new vanity. The two other bathrooms had linoleum floors but this bathroom had tile which was extremely difficult to remove. It was really slow going, but we got it done!

Next Steps

So, a lot of the fun stuff has already been ordered. We have the kitchen cabinets showing up early May, the flooring is on its way and installers booked. We are in the process of getting quotes for the windows getting re-installed correctly, patching the roof and rebuilding the deck.

I am heading out Thursday to meet a few workers at the beach house to get these quotes and I’m hopefully going to get a little painting done while I’m there, too! Slowly but surely things are coming along. Yay!