The Playroom

Our next big project is just about complete! This was a big one.

Josh has been laboring away working on Audrey's playroom. This is the smaller of the downstairs bedrooms. It is next to the bathroom, in the back corner of the house. We chose this room because we can see directly into the room from the living room. Perfect since Audrey is old enough to play independently now and we can continue doing what we want, but are still able to watch over her from a distance. The room was in pretty bad shape when we moved in. Like the other rooms, the carpeting in here was disgusting and was immediately removed when we took ownership. There was some ugly brown vinyl flooring under the carpet that wasn't too bad, and we could have cleaned it well enough, but we decided it had to go, too. In addition to the furniture and other random junk the previous owners left in here, there were also a bunch of random wires hanging out of the wall that seemed very questionable.

I can't remember if I have mentioned this before on here, but when our inspector did his inspection on the house, he was checking out the roof and his foot fell through it. There was a corner of the roof that wasn't installed properly and had rotted out. So when his foot fell through obviously it left a big hole and the owners weren't about to fix it, so the hole just sat wide open for the next month until we closed on the house and got our roofer out here to fix it. We had lots of rain in that month and the rain poured through the hole and into the walls on the back of the house. Once we got the roof fixed we tore down the drywall on the back walls (because they were visibly wet) and discovered that there was mold growing. Luckily these beams hadn't rotted yet so all we had to do was treat the mold so it wouldn't return. That left us with bare open walls and ceilings though! Good thing Josh is super handy.

This room actually sat destroyed and in ruins for about a month and a half while we worked on other things - while the bathroom was being built, while we were settling in, while we were doing Audrey's birthday stuff, etc. Josh didn't have the time to devote to it, but when we decided to host Thanksgiving at our house, we made finishing this room a priority.

He hung the drywall on 3 walls and the ceiling in here, then together we mudded it up, sanded, mudded, sanded, then finally painted (ok, Josh did most of that, I pretended to help but mostly walked around complaining about getting dirty). Once the painting was done, Josh put up the crown molding and installed the laminate floors. We had all of this done by Thanksgiving. Actually, he finished it Thanksgiving morning. He's amazing. He did the baseboards Saturday morning. We still have to find a new door (we are thinking of getting a half door), get new windows, new light fixture, paint the closet, decorate, get some functional shelving, and possibly put up trim around the windows and doors. The issue there is that the window and door frames are metal and can't be nailed, so we're looking into finding a way around that. But for now - Audrey has a playroom!! Her toys are not in the living room! I'll be honest - even though I wanted a playroom, I thought for sure that she would just go in there and drag a toy out to the living room and that eventually they'd all be sitting in the living room like they were before. Or that she'd play in there for a minute and then realize she couldn't see us and come running out whining right away. But this is not the case so far! She actually goes in there and plays quietly with her stuff and occasionally comes out with a book for us to read together. She's so sweet. She loves her playroom, and we love the space we now have in our living area.