Our First Reno

Master Bedroom Before

Our first home was a condominum.  My husband purchased our condo a little over a month before we got married (March 2008).  We spent our evenings and weekends working on renovating our master bedroom and bath so it would be ready for us to move into after our wedding.  The first project in this space was to scrape the popcorn texture off the angled portion of the ceiling.  This is a messy job!  We found it worked best to just saturate the surface with a spray bottle of water then scrape away with a putty knife.  Be sure to put down plenty of plastic to keep your flooring/adjacent walls from getting destroyed.  Once we scraped off the popcorn we let it dry out overnight. 

Spraying Down the Popcorn with Water

The next step was to patch any holes/imperfections with drywall putty. The next night we primed the drywall with "Kilz Low-Odor" primer. We let this dry overnight and then we were ready for paint. 

In order to make the space feel larger, we painted the angled portion of the ceiling the same as our wall color. This made the ceiling feel higher. Before the ceiling felt like it was creeping down the wall.  Another change we made to the space was to remove the big, bulky, and low hanging ceiling fan.  We replaced it with a simple semi-flush pendant (see picture right) that we found at Lowes.  The last little spruce up we did in this space was to remove the "flashy brassy" door hardware and replace it with a dark bronze, "Schlage" handle that we also found at Lowes.

The master bath was a bigger undertaking.  The below picture shows that this bathroom was straight out of an early nineties cookie cutter contractor handbook.  The floors were beige vinyl, the cabinetry was oak, and the light fixture was straight out of a hollywood dressing room.

Demolition in this space included everything except the acrylic tub/shower.  We undertook our first tile job in this room.  We found a full bodied 13"x13" porcelain tile and laid it in a running bond pattern.  This is labor intensive but well worth the end result.  We also replaced the oak cabinet with a dresser-like option we found at the "Home Depot".  We also found a pre-fab granite countertop at the "Home Depot".  A fresh coat of paint, new plumbing/lighting fixtures, some blood/sweat/tears and the end result is below.