Our Progress
Our apartment renovation started as a one-year project in Vancouver, BC. With noble intentions & zero experience, we launched into an ugly version of our former lives. Why? Vancouver’s housing is amongst the world’s priciest – and we’d kill for a house with a view. (For all the hows, whats and whys – read more about our apartment-flipping project)
In-between? It sounded like this: #@¡*&$&*£*!# and looked like this:
There’s ugly – and there’s ugly. Beer goggles won’t save you now – we’re confident we bought Canada’s ugliest bathroom, and all its floorplan friends. At about 700-square feet, its ugliness was a thick, treacle concentrate. But we love it a lot, and couldn’t call it anything but our Ugly Baby (more on the name here). Meet its many parts…
Bathroom renovation progress…
- The astonishing ugly bathroom with which we started
- Bath tub and tile refinishing? Lazy girl’s dream!
- So organized it hurts: our small bathroom design plan.
- Using a kitchen island as a bathroom vanity: Ikea Groland
- Staining & sealing our bathroom vanity - Ikea Groland
- Oops! Things went dark when we forgot to choose bathroom lighting.
- New bathroom flooring for basically free: choosing vinyl tiles.
- Installing vinyl tile was probably the easiest thing we’ve ever done.
- And grouting it perfectly definitely wasn’t…
- Totally delusional about how long it takes to re-do a bathroom
- Changing our apartment’s only toilet had our full attention.
- Aaaand – after! The results of renovating our apartment bathroom.
Kitchen renovation progress…
- Why we bought a new fridge and range, but not a dishwasher.
- Planning the layout of our apartment’s galley kitchen.
- Researching “how good” our Vancouver apartment kitchen has to be.
- The demolition begins: cupboards off & kitchen renovation photos
- We tried to remove our kitchen soffit… it didn’t go well.
- Guess what! Our kitchen has smoke, soot & grease from 1970.
- We re-used everything by moving our kitchen cabinets
- Most disgusting task? Cleaning & painting the kitchen drawers.
- Spray painting hinges solved all sorts of problems.
- Finally things looked good! We used laminate for the kitchen floor.
- And installed a mile of Ikea butcher block counters.
- How much to renovate a small kitchen? We had our answer.
- DIY picture ledges (made from an old box spring) are a good extra.
Living room renovation progress…
- We bought a laminate floor from Nucasa (not Ikea)
- Day One, attacked the walls with home-made wallpaper remover
- Worst part of the project: removing the living room popcorn ceiling
- What was under the shag carpet? Some concrete sub-floor surprises.
- Then we had to fix the wonky sub-floor with levelling compound. Yikes!
- Before: carpet. After: laminate. A very big difference.
- Choosing a paint colour (turquoise) to match our couch was painful.
Bedroom renovation progress…
- Slight panic when we painted the bedroom yellow…
- Wall & ceiling repair: spackling tips 101
- What it took to install a laminate floor in our bedroom.
- Why we slept on the floor for a year after renovating.
- And didn’t have any door handles….
Laundry room renovation progress…
- Sadly realizing the limitations of our apartment laundry room
- And then we made a huge mistake: near-death by vinyl tile glue.
- At long, long last – the perfect solution to laundry room storage.
Right. Ok. Plenty more to follow – did you see that wallpaper? Don’t miss a minute: subscribe now or eat up email updates in your inbox. Goggles on? Let’s get ugly.
