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I recently bought my first house for me, my husband, and my three children. We bought a house with a lot of space, but that only had three bedrooms. So the first thing we had to do when we moved in was create another bedroom for one of my children.

For our next project we have to remodel out kitchen we are comparing granite vs quartz countertops in an effort to figure out which countertop we want to get and then we need to find some new cabinets. This is a project that will be too big to do on our own so we will have to hire a contractor.

I had a very long room that was entered through the eat-in kitchen and adjoined the living room, although there was no entrance to the living room. We thought it would be simple enough to construct a dividing wall in this extremely long room to create two rooms- a formal dining room and a bedroom for my eldest son. Continue reading →

My parents bought an older French colonial-style home that was built in the early 1910s. The hardest part about the home was the fact that while it was structurally a very lovely home, whoever had done the interior work was really terrible. The first thing I did going into the house, was pulling up almost 1700 square feet of old orange shag carpeting.

After pulling up the carpeting in the smallest room, I went immediately to the hardware store and bought a face mask. If you’re remodeling a home that is older than 50 years, don’t fuss around with the cheap painter’s masks. You really do need one of the respirators that come with filter cartridges. I got the one from 3M and several replacement filters for it. I can’t tell you how much pain it saved me, especially when discovering mold (not black mold, thankfully).

Also, depending on the age of the carpet, the easiest way to pull out the carpet tacks without damaging the floors (we wanted to sand the floors and refinish them, not cover them up again), is to use a flat-head screwdriver and PVC pipe at the fulcrum point so you can lever the carpet tack strips off the floor without damaging the floor itself. Also check and see when the local trash pick-up is and if they will take old carpet. Continue reading →

I’m getting a lot of requests lately for quotes on granite overlay countertops. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a supplier around here so I can’t give out prices.

I’m not crazy about them anyway. From what I’ve seen they are not that much cheaper than granite. Where they do have an advantage is in their maintenance. They are a lot harder to stain than regular granite because they aren’t porous. They actually manufactured like Silestone in that pieces of stone are mixed together with an epoxy to form a very strong slab.

The cost of granite overlay counters is about $60 a foot. That’s not all that much cheaper than regular granite. Between the less hassle of installation and that it’s really hard to stain you might really like the idea. It’s not a bad one. I think for the price though I’d recommend quartz countertops instead.

They are fairly easy to install as they can be put right on top of most other countertops. If you have an old laminate counter and you want to upgrade to a granite you can have a crew come in and install them right on top. They simply get glued into place. Continue reading →