Putting It All Back Together (Part 2)

The master suite isn’t the only part of the flip that has experienced a few changes.

No sirree.

Let’s start at the entryway, shall we?  It looked like this when we started:

Let me tell you, that terrazzo flooring is no joke.  It’s about 6 inches thick and has to be jackhammered out!  Soon, it was ready for new concrete so that the entryway would be level with the rest of the slab (in preparation for new hardwood floors!).

You can also see in this photo below that the plaster moldings and really icky plaster texture are no longer around.  Everyone can rest easy now.

And don’t mind what’s going on in the den on the left – we’ll get to that in a minute.  Oh, and you’ll also notice that the parquet flooring in the dining room and office (that both adjoin the entryway) has also bit the dust – that’s a story for another day, but yes – it’s gone.

Ah, the den.  So much potential, but a few odd quirks as well.  The first quirk?  The ceiling fan hanging from the beam.  Now why would you hang a ceiling fan from what could (and should) be an awesome feature of the room?  That just won’t do.

So we took it down (and we’ll patch the hole in the beam like we did here and in our own home) and added recessed lighting.

Much better!

There was also the obligatory 1970’s wet bar in the corner of the den.

I thought that it looked odd and also took away valuable space from the kitchen (which is just on the other side of that wall), so we opted to close in the wet bar and turn it into a large pantry accessible from the kitchen.  The carpenters matched the paneling and were able to find a pretty close match for the moldings.

The last thing that needed to be dealt with in the den was the proliferation of curlicues on the built-ins.  We’re in Dallas, Texas, not a Swiss chalet!

The carpenters were able to cut off the curlicues on the desk portion of the built-ins, but they had to pop off the face frame on the bookshelves and create a new, curlicue-free face frame.

Here it is all ready to be installed:

Now onto the breakfast nook!!

That little window that looked into the patio conversion was just sad.  It was off-center, tiny, and had a dismal view.

So we made it bigger!  We mimicked the height of the windows at the front of the house, but made it much wider.

And now that the patio conversion is gone, there’s tons of natural light in the kitchen!  It’s hard to tell since the “before” photo had artificial lighting and there are no lights in the photos of the space as it is currently, but trust me – there’s a huge difference in the amount of light in the kitchen.  And there’s also now a great view of the backyard which I think potential buyers will really love.

The built-in hutch in the breakfast nook didn’t escape the curlicue-infestation.

So the carpenters took a Dremel to the curlicues and they are no more.  Hallelujah.

The doors and drawer fronts on this hutch will be replaced to match the new cabinets in the kitchen – or, at least, closely resemble them.  That too is a story for another day!