Our Fixer Upper Home Tour: Master Bath & Living Room

If you read my post last week then you know that we were recently able to purchase a house (read more about our new house here). This week I’m sharing a fixer upper home tour of the master bath and living room.

I mentioned in my previous post that we encountered a few surprises like having to replace the carpet and finding tree roots growing in our master bathroom toilet which meant that part of the bathroom floor had to be dug up so that the plumbing could be re-piped.

Moving into a fixer upper with a tight budget means that there are some things that we will be living with for now like the ugly linoleum and partially exposed concrete floor in our master bath. This is a photo I took before we cleaned everything up but it doesn’t look much better now. At least we have a new working toilet!

And thankfully rugs can cover part of the ugliness …

and the rest of the bathroom looks okay.

Previous Owner’s Furnishings

Our first order of business once we closed on the house was painting. We didn’t love the warm color palette that the previous owners had chosen so we repainted in cooler tones.

Paint can create a relatively cheap and dramatic makeover. We used Behr Premium Plus paint in Dark Pewter and I love the contrast of the dark gray with the white trim.

Once we finished painting the living room we realized that the popcorn ceilings looked really dirty and there is not a good way to clean them or paint over them.

After consulting with friends who renovate homes (and my very wise mom!) we decided to scrape the popcorn ceilings before we moved in. We only had a week before move-in at this point, I was still painting and my husband had to work so we decided to spend a few hundred dollars to have someone else do the work.

Because we had already painted we had to cover the walls with plastic to protect the paint from the very messy process of removing the popcorn texture. The ceilings are wet with a sprayer and then the texture is scraped off so you can imagine the mess! Once the texture is removed the ceilings are repaired and prepped for paint. We chose to have completely un-textured ceilings with a flat white finish.

After a few days of work we have beautiful, smooth white ceilings throughout the house. Now that we have moved in I am so thankful that we paid the extra money and took the extra time to clean the ceilings up. It makes a huge difference and would have been crazy to try to accomplish with furniture in the house.

So here’s a peek into the almost finished living room. I still have to hang art work on the walls but it feels nice and cozy — and our very old couches don’t look quite as ugly against the dark gray walls.

We would have preferred to have hardwood or wood-look laminate floors but the budget was tight and carpeting was the cheapest flooring we could purchase at the time. The important issue for us was to have clean flooring before we moved the furniture in.

All of the other decor items were from our previous house except for the basket to the left of the couch which I found for $2.99 at our local thrift store.

Speaking of thrift stores, I found this amazing entryway table this past week. You can read the story here on my Instagram (follow me while you’re there. 🙂 )

Here’s how it looks in the room.

And one more view of the living room so you can get a sense of where everything is.

I am still not in love with the entertainment center but I like it better now with more paint. I am trying to decide if I want to paint the sides of the bottom section or if I want to strip the paint from the sides of the top section. Another option is to paint the entire cabinet but I like the way that the drawers and the front panels are outlined with the natural wood.

I heard from many of you that you are interested in seeing our progress so I’ll be showing you more of the house over the coming weeks. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. 🙂

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