As soon as I stopped recording my last renovation mistakes podcast, I thought of like a bazillion more. So here are even When you’re tearing ish down to the studs day after day and week after week, you get a pretty good system together for renovation!
About the Episode:
After nearly 4 straight years of renovation, we’ve got our system down pretty well. In fact, these days, when we walk into yet another room to tear down and build back up it’s almost a bit, boring? Well, at the very least, there are very few surprises left at this stage in the reno! But if you’ve ever wondered how we actually get all the work done, this episode is for you!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- The order of events that we follow to make sure things are done right and done in the right order
- Why we didn’t tear it all down at one time (and I’m SO glad we didn’t)
- How we prioritized the different rooms within the house to make living in a demo zone actually liveable
And so much more!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow me on Instagram @FarmhouseVernacular!
EPISODE 22: Renovation Time Management: How to Get the Projects Done
EPISODE 25: More Renovation Mistakes!
Rockwool Insulation
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the Vernacular Life Podcast, where we talk about anything and everything that goes on in our turn of the century vernacular home. I’m Paige, your host, as always. And today we’re going to talk about our renovation process.
So, we bought this house about four years ago, and since then we have renovated almost nine rooms. I say almost nine because the upstairs hall is technically done, we just need to refinish the floor. So, almost nine rooms in this house. And by this point, we are very familiar with what this house needs, what we have to do in each room, and the order of operations that we take when we start a new room.
So, I thought by walking through what our process is, what our steps are to renovate this house and to renovate each room, it might give you a little bit of help to know where to start with your own renovation project.
Now, in this renovation, every room has needed to come down to the studs. There’s pretty much no room that has been able to just be painted and updated and then moved on. Every single room has needed massive structural work, total infrastructure rehab, drywall, trim, paint, redoing the floors. None of these projects and none of these rooms have been simple. It has been a complete overhaul in every single room.
And when we started, we had no experience. We had no training. We had never renovated a house before. We had not really grown up with renovations that were this extensive. So, we were pretty much going in blind to this house. And what I’m going to tell you about today is pretty much just what we have figured out. This is what works. This is the sequence that makes the most sense for us. This is the sequence that will get us moving. This is the sequence that keeps us on track, and hopefully you can gain a little bit of insight from it.
Now I will direct you to the episode on keeping projects moving because the lists and the 30 minutes of house technique that we talked about in that episode are hugely helpful for keeping this process going. It’s pretty much the only way we survive. But within this framework I’m going to talk about, we apply those lists and those small incremental progress days very, very frequently and it turns out pretty well.
So, as a step zero, because this isn’t something we do every single time, the first room that we did in this house were the halls. Now this house basically has an upper and lower central hall and those two rooms touch pretty much every other room in the house. So, we decided to start with those because those were going to make the biggest mess.
If you’re demoing those, you have to have lock off the entire house. You have to block off all the stairs. It was a huge headache and a huge mess to do those two rooms at the same time. So, we strategically decided to do those room rooms, partly because they were central to the house and it was going to make the biggest mess, it was going to be the most difficult, so let’s get that out of the way first.
But we also started with those rooms because they needed minimal structural repairs. We weren’t adding any doorways. We weren’t jacking up any foundation. We weren’t repairing a ton of water damage. We weren’t adding windows. We were pretty much replacing windows and electrical and drywall and refinishing the floors and that was about it.
So, we decided that that was a good place to start to get our feet wet, to get familiar with how to do some of the techniques that we were going to need in the rest of the house, without committing to things like tile and a kitchen renovation and stuff like that. So, that’s step zero. You’re deciding where to start in your house, start somewhere that can begin to give you the skill that you need in the rest of the house, but don’t stretch you too far.
So, assuming that you know where you’re going to start, as we move through this house, we are going room by room. We’re pretty much only doing one room at a time. And part of that is just simply to contain the chaos of the renovation there. I could not live if every room in the house was torn up to some degree, so it makes a little bit nicer to be able to contain the renovation chaos to one room. But also we just simply don’t have the funds to do multiple rooms at the same time. It takes a lot more money, it takes a lot more time, and so we just confine our renovations to one room at a time.
So once you have picked the room that you’re doing first, the very first step that we usually start with, and this is really all me, is the design. What does this space need to do? How does it need to function? What features do we need to add to it? How do we need to be able to use this space at the end of the day? And this is a really important place for us to start because it’s going to inform some of the larger decisions.
So, if you’re going to add a bathroom to this space, then you need to know that before you start taking down the walls. You’re going to add a built-in fireplace, you need to know that before you start building things. So, we do this two different ways. Firstly, I will just look for into inspiration and try to find Pinterest pictures that I like. I have a hard time with Pinterest because I never find anything that quite speaks to me. I might find a color that I like, or I might find something, one piece that I like. But maybe my style just isn’t really a Pinterest thing and so I just have a hard time finding a lot of inspiration there.
But I will just sort of start to think what I want the room to look like. And then the second way we do this is we make models. And depending on what we’re doing, they can either be physical models or they can be 3D models. I will go ahead and plug the program Live Home 3D here. There’ll be a link in the show notes. This is a wonderful program. I want to say it’s $40 for a lifetime access and it is one of the most useful tools that I have for visualizing our renovation.
It is basically a three dimensional design program. Think of it like the Sims, but without the Sims, like just a house builder. And it’s a little bit clunky, it takes a little bit of time to learn. But the thing that I love about it is you can change the color and texture of every single surface in the entire program. So you can make all of your walls the color that you want. You can make the floors the color that you want. You can change the dimensions of a stove and turn it from stainless steel to white. It’s so customizable that I found it really easy to visualize the finished room before we even start demoing. So, usually that’s for me just to make sure that I can get the house to feel right, get it to look the way I think it should.
But on top of that, if we’re doing something that requires a little bit more precision, if we’re doing something where space is a big factor, if we’re doing something where we need to make sure that there’s enough clearance around the toilet or in front of a sink or making sure the kitchen layout feels nice, we will do a physical mockup.
This was one thing I did, before we demoed the kitchen, is I pulled out about half the cabinets and I did that so that I could cut them up and move them around into the layout that I was thinking of because I had no idea if this layout was going to be efficient. I had no idea if it was going to work for us, if it was going to be comfortable to cook in this layout, if it was going to be okay enough for space and walking around.
I didn’t know. So, I wanted to make a mockup first just to see if I could use the room the way that I thought I could. For other things like bathrooms, we will use cardboard boxes and shop vacs and chairs and tables to lay things out in the dimensions that we expect them to be in so that we can get a sense of what it will feel like to be in the space when those things are in place.
And this is so helpful because it’ll help you spot a lot of issues before they really become issues. If something is too tight or if the spacing isn’t right, or if it feels awkward and claustrophobic, you’ll be able to figure that out now instead of after you’ve spent all the money on the renovation.
So, the first step is to really nail down the design. Really understand what you want it to look like, understand where things are going to be, make sure that it’s going to work for you, and we do that before we even tear into the room because we need to know where we’re going. We need to know our final end goal before we get started just so that we have a trajectory, just so we have a direction.
Now, once we finish the design, which is usually on me and then I just make sure that Brandon’s like, “Yeah, you’re fine. Not crazy.” Once we have that design, the next step is investigation. And because we have done so many rooms in this house, we don’t really do this anymore, but we did it in the very first few rooms that we did. Investigation involves just figuring out what exactly you’re working with.
So, for example, the first rooms we did were the halls. We pulled down the wall that was on the walls to expose the plaster and discovered that the plaster had holes drilled in it and those holes showed that all of the exterior stead cavities were filled with crumbling spray foam. We didn’t keep demoing that day. We looked at that, we researched it, we figured out what the heck was in the walls, and we were able to develop a plan of what we were going to do based on the information from that investigation.
This just gave us enough of a background, a little bit more information about what we were dealing with, so that we knew the steps to proceed. We didn’t want to just go tearing into the walls, not knowing what our plan is. Because it’s like, “Is the plaster bad? Do we really need to replace it? Do we need to pull up the floor? Do we need to take down the ceiling?”
So many places where it’s just, “Do we really need to do all of that or can we do a little investigation and try to get an idea of what we’re dealing with?” So investigation, you’re not going to get all the information, but it will help you go into the next step with a little bit more clarity than if you just start taking a hammer to the walls and swing for the hills.
So, the third step, once you have your design and once you’ve done your investigation, is to do the demo or the undoing because not everything involves demo. But usually when you’re working in a room, there are things you want to do. Either you want to take down the wallpaper or remove the trim or whatever you need to do. This is the phase where you do that. Clearing what you want, keeping what you don’t want to get rid of, and just making sure that you have a blank slate and a blank canvas from which to do your renovation.
Now, I will say this: As flashy as sledge hammers look on all the renovation TV shows, unless are literally demolishing a fireplace you don’t need a sledge hammer. Take it from experience. If you’re trying to go after a drywall wall with a sledgehammer, you’re going to end up with a piece of drywall that has a bunch of tiny holes in it and it’s going to crumble and that’s just annoying. Try to remove things in as large of pieces as you possibly can and then break come down when you get down to the trash can or whatever you’re doing. Because there’s no reason to make all that mess when there’s no TV cameras and you’re the one cleaning it up. Trust me.
So, our demo tools of choice are honestly a pry bar, a hammer, and maybe sometimes a reciprocating saw or a saws-all because sometimes you have some things that just need to be cut in order to get out of there. But you can tear apart entire buildings with just a pry bar and a hammer. I promise you.
Now, before you start demoing, even if you’re just taking off some trim, just be safe and cut the power to that room. Just turn off the breaker. Just do it. If you don’t need the power in that room, just turn it off. You don’t want to hit any wires accidentally. You don’t want to mess anything up. You don’t want to start any sparks. Just save yourself the headache and the worry, be a little bit safe, and just turn off that power before you start.
So, for us demo is a pretty extensive process. Because we’ve done so many rooms in this house. We know the sequence of how they renovated it, we know what to expect. But this could be different in every single room of the house, depending on when each room was renovated. This whole house was renovated last pretty much at the same time. So, it’s pretty much the same in the entire house. There is wall board that is paneled. There is paneled wallboard up on the walls. Then there are furring strips that space that wallboard off, there is electrical run in between those firing strips, and then there is plaster and lath and insulation.
It’s a lot. Demo for us typically takes about one to two weekends to get everything completely down to the studs. And that’s just what we need in our renovation. You may not need that. Your undoing or demo might just involve pulling up carpet and taking down wallpaper. Totally fine. The point of this step is to reduce the room as much as you are going to so that then you can start building it back up properly. Once you have your room in your blank slate state, then we usually start with structural issues.
Now this is a wood house. This is not a brick house. It’s pretty light overall. It’s pretty easy to repair. Lots of construction screws and two-by-sixes, and we can do pretty much anything in this house. So, because of that, we usually start with the structural repairs and that would water damage. That would be adding new doorways. That would be replacing the windows, anything where we’re really changing or messing with the structure of the house.
And for us, that usually includes new windows, like I said, because even though we’re putting vinyl windows back because all of our original windows were removed, we are restoring them to their original proportions. So most of the framing around the windows is garbage and needs to be rebuilt every time we put in a new window.
On the first floor, we had a lot of water damage in the outside corners. So, sometimes we had to open up a side of the house and restore the cladding that holds the house together and then put siding back up. Lots of things like that. Basically anything that affects the structure of the room. And we do that first because essentially we’re building a solid foundation in each room before we move on to more frivolous stuff. None of it is frivolous. But you know, if the foundation of the room is bad, then you put on top of it is going to be compromised and then you’ve wasted all your time.
So, we spend a good amount of time on the structural aspect of things. In addition to windows, we also shim all of our walls. These walls originally were plaster and lath and all of the studs were rough cut. So, they’re not perfectly in plain. They’re not perfectly even. Some of them bow out, some of them bow in. And the problem with that is that when you put drywall up on that, it’s going to buckle and crack because drywall is not meant to undulate like that. Plaster can be organic and if the wall is not perfect flat, it’s fine. Drywall does not like that situation at all.
So, we go to the … Well, I say we. Brandon goes through the extra step of making sure that all of the walls are relatively in plain so that when we put the drywall up, nothing’s going to crack, nothing’s going to bow, and it’s going to be as flat as we can make it. This is also the time where we will build it in any closet, build in the pantry, put new doorways into things, reinforce existing doorways, just going through and looking for anywhere that we need to improve the structure of the whole room.
So once the physical structure, the walls, the windows, the floor is repaired and stable as much as we would like it to be, then we’re going to move on to the infrastructure. And this is all the guts that go behind the walls. So, we really start from the deepest part of the wall, the structure, and work our way toward the inside of the room.
So once the structure’s done, then we go for things like electrical, plumbing, HVAC, insulation, all of those things that are necessary in a room, but you really don’t want to be running your electrical and drilling through studs and putting in your plumbing if you haven’t properly framed everything. Those need to happen after the framers.
If you think about how a modern house is built, the foundation crew comes through first and they pour the foundation and then the framers come through and they build all the wooden walls, and then the exterior guys come in and they do the outside, and then the electricians and the plumbers come in and they do that, and then once that’s done, they do the insulation. We’re following that same step. We’re following those processes the same. We’re just doing it on a much smaller scale.
So, typically if we have to do plumbing, we’ll do that first because that’s a lot less forgiving in terms of flexibility than electrical. So, Brandon will run any of the plumbing that we need to first. Then he’ll run the electrical if we need to, and then we’ll deal with any kind of ducting or HVAC situations that we need to in that particular room. And then finally, once all of that’s done and it’s all good and it’s all safe and it’s all buttoned up tight, then we will put the insulation on last.
And in the last episode on Renovation Mistakes, you’ll hear me talk about Rockwool, which is really a fantastic product. And that’s the insulation that we use. So, once everything’s done, we will pack the stud cavities with Rockwool, and then we’re pretty much ready for the next step, which is the surfaces.
Now this may be where you are starting your renovation journey. If you don’t need to gut a room to the studs and rebuild it, all of the previous steps with the exception of design investigation, you don’t really need to do. You don’t need to worry about structural stuff if your house is structurally fine, you don’t have to worry about infrastructure if your infrastructure is fine. So, the next thing we go onto are the surfaces and I include tile, drywall, plaster repair, floor finishing. I include all of that in the surfaces. We’re not really to the point of making things super pretty yet, but we are working on making those surfaces ready to be made super pretty.
Our normal sequence is that as soon as the insulation is done, we hang the drywall and there’s no reason to do it particularly fast after the insulation. We’re usually just so tired of doing all the infrastructure by the time we get to the insulation that we’re like, “Oh, finally, let’s put the drywall up.” So, we’ll add the drywall or we’ll add the bead board and then usually I mud and sand. I’m the one who knows how to mud and sand of our little motley crew and so I will do all of that. I will get the walls nice and flat and smooth and once the mudding and sanding is done, then we will refinish the floors.
And we do that just because we need to refinish the floors before we do any of the trim so that the floors underneath the trim boards are refinished. We don’t want to do it after. But I want to do the mudding and sanding before we refinish the floors just so I’m not dropping mud all over my nice, new, pretty shiny floors. Of course, in this latest renovation, we had some other weekend commitments come up, so we did it a little bit out of order, but it will still be fine.
So, this step is really just about prepping your surfaces for the next stage, which is really where we start adding all of our pretty stuff. So once the walls are muddied and sanded and primed, usually because we’re using drywall, not plaster. If we have plaster, we will patch it and make sure that it is all good to go and then prime it, and then we’ll have the floors refinished. And this is the part of the renovation where things get really exciting because the stuff we have left to do is pretty minimal, it’s very satisfying and rewarding, we get to make a lot of progress with just a little effort, and that up the trim.
If you are doing a new build or you are rebuilding something from the ground up, do not skimp on your trim. In my opinion, this is the number one thing that makes a renovation feel more luxurious versus feel very cheap, is the size and scale of the trim. I will make sure in the show notes that there is a link to the blog, The Joy of Molding, because this is what we use to learn how to do all of the molding in this house. None of the molding in this house is original. Most of it is contemporary to the style of when this house was built, but we built all of it from scratch using plywood and MDF and just basic pieces of molding that you can get from the hardware store stacked together and painted white.
So definitely check out that blog if you are wanting to add beautiful trim for relatively inexpensive to your house. And once you add it and you paint it and you finish it with a beautiful color, no one would ever know. And it adds so much elegance, it adds so much grandeur and presence to a room when you have this big, beefy molding.
So, after all the surfaces are done, Brandon will get all of the trim up, which usually takes about a week or two, and then it’s just on me. Then it’s pretty much my show. And that is the eighth step, which is painting. And whenever I talk about this, people say, “Wait, why don’t you paint before you refinish the floors?” Because of the sequence of painting that I like to do. Again, I learned how to paint from The Joy of Moldings. Ken over at the Joy of Moldings, wonderful human. And I paint in such a way that the floors really need to be done first.
So, once the trim is up, I will patch all the holes from the nails, I will sand them down, I will prime it. And then I do paint the trim first. I paint all of our trim white and I heavily over paint onto the wall. And what this does is gives you a very nice sharp line that you can cut with your wall color. When you cut in with the wall color on top of the white trim, I think you just get a much cleaner, crispier, crunchy looking trim than if you try to just cut in everything and do the walls first. I think it ends up looking way, way better in the long run.
So, my sequence is to prime the trim, paint the trim with the first coat, calk all of the trim, and then paint the trim with a second coat and then the most magical step of all and the step that usually leaves me the most terrified out of all of the renovation steps is to actually paint the wall color. And in every single room that we’ve done, every single room, the first time I put the color that I picked up on the wall, I am terrified.
Because I look at it and I think, “What did I do? This is way too dark. This is, is completely the wrong color. I messed up. I went too bold. Paige, you went too dramatic. What are you doing?” And it’s really, really fun to see because it’s so satisfying to cut in that dark, crispy, delicious color against the white trim. And then you stand back after you roll it the first time and the room that has been brown for so long from the infrastructure and exposed studs, and then white for so long from all the drywall, when you stand back and it’s finally just the final color, it is so satisfying.
So the sequence is: Trim, paint the trim, then paint the walls. Every time. Well, ceiling is in there too. Paint the trim, paint the ceiling, then paint the walls. So, once all that’s done, then it’s pretty much the fun part, which is the furnishing. Now, fortunately I have a pretty vivid imagination and with almost every room we’ve done in this house, with aid of my imagination and the digital models that I’ve come up with, I’ve pretty much known what these rooms were going to look like long before we finish them. So, furnishing is usually just a matter of pulling the pieces that I have collected for the room and putting them in place.
But furnishing is where you can start to add your rug and start to add your dressers and bed and your wardrobes and your chairs and your dining tables and all the things that really make that room just come alive and be very exciting. I will say in general, pick your furnishings first and then tweak your color to go with them because it is a lot easier to make sure that a dark blue compliments your rug than to make sure that the rug you have perfectly compliments this dark blue that you picked.
There are a lot of dark blues, more than one of them will look good in your house. So, make sure that you are coordinating your color choice with the furnishings instead of trying to force furnishings to match your color choice. I think you’ll just have a lot easier time than if you go the other way around.
So, that is basically the sequence that we follow. So we start with the design, which is usually me. Then we do an investigation to make sure we understand what we’re getting ourselves into in each room. Then we’ll do all of the demo and taking anything out that we don’t want. We will rebuild all of the structural elements of the room.
Windows, doors, floors, water damage. After that, we’ll move on to the infrastructure and make sure that we have our plumbing, our electrical, our HVAC, all of those things sorted and in place once the structural is finished. Then we’ll put up all of the surfaces, refinishing, the floors, mudding and sanding drywall, adding tile. Then we will go back and do the trim, paint that, and then paint the final room and furnish it.
And usually we make our first big to-do list after the demo stage. If you need a to-do list before the demo stage, knock yourself out, go right ahead. But that’s generally when we have all of the walls exposed, we have enough information that we can see, okay, need to rebuild that. Know I need to patch that floor, I need to fix that hole in the ceiling. And so that’s really when we can start to get a good sense of what we need to do to get this project moving.
The second place that we will typically do a list refresh is after all of the infrastructure is done. Once all of that electrical is in, that insulation is in, then we can do another list, which will usually take us to the end of the room. And we can say, “Okay, we’re going to drywall the north wall and the west wall and the east wall and we’re going to do the trim on window one and we’re going to do the trim on window two and we’re going to patch the trim, we’re going to paint it.”
So, those are the two places that we will typically do our big extensive lists to get our project moving and then otherwise that’s pretty much it. That’s the whole thing. So, I hope hearing about our renovation process might help you with your own renovation process, might help you get a little bit of clarity about what order we do things in, especially if you’re tackling a renovation for the first time.
So, I hope that was helpful. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much as always for hanging out with me. I’ve loved having you and I will see you next time. Bye.