Back to the beginning

Chuck and I closed on our house on Friday. Our dream come true - a fantastic fixer-upper in the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta, GA. And we're doing most of the work ourselves.



We took lots of pictures and intended to start blogging immediately, but couldn't come up with a name. After multiple attempts (names like Renovation Station or Destination: Divorce?) we finally agreed on D.I.Why? Why? Because we like it.

The main purpose of our blog is to share our home renovation progress with those who can't be here to see it in person. We also may vent a little, share tips and tools that we think may be helpful to other DIYers, and most importantly, continue to learn (and disseminate) as much as we can about the vast subject of renovating a home. We encourage comments and feedback, especially from those more knowledgeable than us. We may even ask for your opinion from time to time. And we may or may not listen to you.

Since we're a week behind in our blog, we'll get everyone caught up with the highlights. Unfortunately, we don't have as much to share as we would like, since we haven't gotten nearly as much done as we thought we would. (insert chorus of "I told you so's)

Stage 1 - Demo

We made our first glorious trip to Home Depot the weekend before so we would have all of the tools we needed to get started as soon as we closed on the house. Saturday was demolition day. We entered our house as official homeowners on Saturday morning and I immediately started looking for things to break. I targeted a gross gold towel bar in the bathroom, lunged for the heavy hammer and was about to take that sucker off, when Chuck grabbed my elbow, pried the hammer from my grasp and handed me a screwdriver. Lesson #1.

Our first project is to renovate the main bathroom. We were anxious to take this wall in the bathroom down, to see what we were in for:



It was clear there was water damage, but we had no idea of the source. A little scary, since we had no idea what we would find. But down she came:



Which revealed some sort of vent pipe that we traced up to the roof. Turns out that when the roof was replaced (around 2 years ago) someone didn't finish sealing the pipe. Chuck fixed the problem in 5 minutes with a tube of silicone. I sort of cursed the guy who left it like that, then sort of thanked him because we got to tear down a wall.

We also spied an old water spot in the corner of the ceiling:



So down she came:





Taking a very old plaster ceiling down is no easy feat, and provides an excellent arm workout. And leaves a gnarly mess:



I also tried my hand at removing floor tiles:



We decided to wait on taking the rest of them up, however, because we want to re-use the backerboard they were laid on, and we're about to make an even bigger mess.

Next up..... stripping all of the woodwork in the bathroom.