Anatomy of a Remodeled Rental: Week Two

Despite hours and hours of work, week two progress is a lot less dramatic than week one. That's the nature of remodeling; some weeks the changes are obvious, other weeks the work is longer, but the changes more subtle.

 

The good news is that we've gotten rid of the tobacco smell.

Stan did some online research and found that the best thing to do was to wash the walls and ceilings with a mixture of water, dish soap, and vinegar. We used a bucket of solution and a mop.



It is magical! No more smell. We have now lost our good helper Randy, and I get to step it up and clean walls and ceilings alone. Yay?

You can see how streaky this dining room ceiling is. It takes several wash/rinse cycles to get all the smoke residue off.

We are keeping the kitchen cabinets, hopefully without having to paint them. They are being wondrously de-fumed through the magic of baking soda.

We reluctantly concluded the odor sucker-upper extraordinaire popcorn ceilings in the bedrooms needed to come down. We'd hoped to paint over it, but there was just too much smoke damage. The master bedroom clearly was the favored smoking spot in the house. That strip on the right is the beginning of the de-popcorning.

After pulling down the popcorn, Stan spent hours patching and smoothing in preparation for texturing.

He also finished the preparation of the bathtub surround for tiling

and repaired bathroom walls heavily damaged by wood panel glue.

We spent some time at the store, picking out large, on barn-buster clearance sale tiles for the tub surround,

including the trim strip.

 

In a surprising turn of events, Stan was sustained as bishop of our home ward on Sunday. Theoretically, this means we now will add Mondays and Fridays to our previous Thursday/Saturday work days, but give up Tuesdays. Wednesdays will continue to be a church day. Theoretically.