So, Candy and I have been busy lately.  We have decided to commence working on remodeling our home.  Our house was build in the late 60′s or early 70′s. I can’t remember which, but since we have moved in we’ve replaced all of the appliances, the water heater, the air conditioner, and the garage doors.  We have added on a car port, and a patio cover, and we have remodeled the bathrooms and our bedroom (which was done last year).  This year we were just going to kick back and take it easy, but we got inspired to do more.

With the help, and no interest financing (haha) ofHome Depot, we went and got some supplies, and got to work on the living room.  The first two minor projects are ones that will alter the shape of our living room floor.  You see, we put carpet down six years ago when we moved in and the living room carpet is now worn out.  We would both like to have laminate flooring in the living room, but the difficult part is the living room shared a wall with the dining room.  There was no separation between the two.  Of course we plan on remodeling both, but not at the same time.  So the question for us was, “How do we separate the two, and if we do paint and crown molding, are we going to have to put the same in both rooms?”  We definitely needed a way to separate the two, and we decided that a partition would be best.

Subproject 1: Partition

We bought some 2 x 4′s and some drywall and screws, and built a partition that extended the current partial wall over to the shared wall thus separating the ceilings and shared wall.  Pictures are as follows.  (Note: first picture was taken after we put up the first 2 x 4.)

before partition facing living room

before partition facing kitchen

The partition

The second project that would alter the shape of the floor was a big one that I had been putting of for years.  We needed to replace our front door and the screen door.  The living room would not look remodeled with the old front door.  When we moved in, we were fortunate to have a front door, and my father-in-law James was gracious enough to give us his old solid wooden one and his old screen door.  He even installed them for us!  The doors worked fine, they looked decent, and for six years they served us well, but the door frame was in bad shape and it was prone to letting our air conditioned air escape.  It was time for some new doors, and I knew that this would need to be done before we laid a new floor so that we would know whether or not we needed to alter the floor.
Subproject 2: Doors

We bought some new doors and supplies from a guy named Dudley at the local Home Depot.  Dudley rocks, by the way.  He has been helping us with our projects for years, and he remembers us when we come in because we are always looking at the doors.  I will say that installing the entry door was very difficult, and I had a small problem with a fiberglass door being scratched on the backside where we couldn’t see in until we were ready to install it, but Home Depot was good to let us return it, and we even ended up upgrading our original purchase to a textured and stainded fiberglass door.  Pictures are as follows.

The old door

The new door

The new door and storm door