Our House // Before & Afters // Upstairs Edition

Preface:
This is a “Part 2”! If you missed Part 1 – head back over here & take a peek at what our downstairs looks like!

Prepare to be amazed by these before & afters! Are you ready?
Our second-floor underwent a complete over-haul. Literally. We ripped everything out and started from scratch.

When we bought our house, the upstairs smelled – like dogs and cats. It was strongest in the one bedroom, but it had infiltrated the entire house. Getting rid of that smell was our number 1 priority. It was so strong, it almost gave you a headache if you hung out in that certain bedroom too long [which was supposed to be our bedroom]. Once we closed on our house and began to really dig into the bedrooms, we realized that the only way we were going to get rid of the smell was to completely gut the rooms, and that’s what we did.

Here are the bedrooms before, this is Braelynn’s room:

This is our guest room:

And this is our bedroom [the crazy stinky one]:

Another huge selling point to our house was the 3rd floor – we have this amazing space up on the 3rd floor that we have big ideas for! Right now, it’s turned into a huge storage space, as it needs insulated before we can really turn it into a livable area, but like I said – we have big plans!

My Dad found some really awesome old documents in the attic – including this Diploma from 1900!

Anyways! Back to our 2nd floor! Before we realized we’d have to completely gut everything, we attempted to salvage the carpet. It was actually pretty nice and looked very new! My sister, Amy, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed that carpet – it helped a lot – but not quite enough.

So, away it went – along with the walls!
This is Braelynn’s room:

The guest room:

As we dug into layers of the wall – we found this:

And this is our bedroom:

Braelynn’s room:

The guest room:

Our room:

Braelynn’s room:

Can you say, dust?

These 2 guys right here – they worked their BUTTS off and gutted all 3 bedrooms in 1 day. And as if that wasn’t enough, the 3 of us also had all 3 bedrooms completely cleaned up by the end of that first day as well. They truly deserve medals of honor for all the crazy work they did that day!

The next task: drywall! And here we hit a snag – we realized that we wouldn’t be able to simply carry the drywall upstairs, as it wouldn’t fit up our staircase! A little bit of brainstorming – taking a window out – and with 6 people [including me & Derrick] we lifted the drywall sheets [something like 44 of them?] up to the second story.

Derrick’s Dad came down and dedicated a whole week to our house! He put up all the dry wall, spackled, and added the crown molding, among about a million other tasks.
This is Braelynn’s room:

The guest room:

Derrick sanding down the walls in Braelynn’s room:

And here we are with the finished project! Primed & ready to roll! [HA! Get it? Roll? As in paint? Roll?]
Braelynn’s room:

The guest room:

And our room:

And then – it was painting time!!

Braelynn’s room has an accent wall of pink polka dots! I LOVE how they turned out!! The master artist Emma & I hand-painted each and every one of them!

Braelynn’s finished [painted] room:

Here is our painted guest room:

And our painted master bedroom:

NEXT STEP: carpet!

Testing out the new carpet and checking out her new room!

Then it was time to move in!

Moving day! Can you find the baby?

Testing out her big-girl bed!

And here we go! The finished finished project! Of course, none of the rooms are completely finished – there are no pictures hanging on the walls & the closet doors need put back on, but we’re getting there!
Braelynn’s room:

And the happy girl herself! She loves her room!

Here’s the guest room/Derrick’s office. It’s our catch-all room at the moment, including housing our new vanity until we get it installed! We have had our first guest though – Ruby slept over Thanksgiving night & broke it in!

And – here’s our bedroom:

So, as you can see – our 2nd floor has gone through a complete transformation. It’s amazing and again, we couldn’t be more thankful for all the help of our families during this whole process! We LOVE our house & couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out! We have lots of ideas for the future too – like adding a deck, closing in the back stoup area to make it a laundry room with a half-bath, converting the 3rd floor into Derrick’s man-cave/music studio, re-doing the walls in the dining room, overhauling the kitchen! Lots of projects as always, but for now, we absolutely couldn’t be happier.