I’m a strong believer in leaving something in a better state than when you started. Sometimes, that’s just vacuum and mop. Sometimes, it’s to pull a few extra weeds.

Occasionally, it’s a bit more of an undertaking: getting floored.

This room was purple and gray (door). My daughter liked it, but I’d prefer, for now, to unify the color across the rooms. Also, the paint work was very much substandard. Wall color was on the window casing, cieling, door knob, outlet covers.

Do it better.

Also, the previous tenants had pets. Not that pets are a problem, but if they pee on the carpet, it’s going to seep into the pad… then onto the subfloor.

Everything had to go.

And, no, it’s not a solid wood floor. The amount of work, additional tools, and material cost, would be insanely high. So, we’ll use a reasonably-good quality laminate solution.

It took a few hours to address that transition between the closet and the door getting everything just so

Let’s see, what else will I need to address?

• Baseboard: none of the woodwork in the house was stained. This is actually a good thing. It means we don’t need to match a color and hope for the best. Just the specices. Wood will darken naturally over time. It will still need to be sealed and lacquered, of course.
• Door casing: The aforementioned pets were, presumably, not fans of wood casing. Or they were fans and thought it tasted good. Same prep as the baseboard. The door jambs are misalighned in a few rooms and also had some really minor animal damage. I’ll need to see about reinstalling them properly.
• Doors: This is interesting — there’s bare wood throughout, but the doors are the hollow-core, six-panel, primed variety. I think what they did was obtain the door jambs and doors separately then combined them on site. Oh, and the doors weren’t painted. They were hung in the primed state and had wall-color slapped on the doors in the two front rooms. I’d very much prefer solid wood doors, but I don’t intend making this a Forever-House (never mind, of course, that it nearly was) so the hollow-core variety will do… but I will paint them.
• Touch-up: An often-overlooked concept. The walls are going to get bumped and dinged while putting in floors and woodwork. A small, but significant thing is to put the final touch on the paint and make the walls as perfect as you can.
• Window dressing: we live here, so we’ll install suitable window dressings — that don’t have paint on them.

Oh, and repeat the process on three more rooms.

Then I’ll also see about refining that shelving/nook area by the door. I’m thinking about doing some simple wood shelves to protect them.

But those are all future projects.