A Little Renovation Fun!

Not too long ago, my dad had a little house renovation project he wanted to do, so of course I jumped on the chance to help out with that! He wanted to change an open living room into a closed off room/home office space, so the plan was to add a wall and a cool barn style sliding door. I had never done renovation stuff before so I was pretty excited to go through the process! It ended up being my dad, me, and grandpa doing all the renovations, we made a pretty good team!

Before starting any of the actual work, they let me take care of the set up (thanks guys 😜) so I moved as much as the furniture as I could, covered everything in plastic, and laid down some red rosin paper to help protect floors. Eventually we decided we were going to paint the walls as well, so later we did take all the furniture completely out of the room.

In order to add more wall to the already existing wall, we had to take off moldings and part of the drywall that was already there.

When taking off the moldings, we had to be careful not the ruin the parts that we would be able to reuse, which isn't always easy when you're prying something off of a wall!

In order to put up more drywall and a door frame, there was lots of measuring and remeasuring before cutting the 2x4s and putting up the new frame. I happily let my dad deal with all the measuring and number calculations though!

Since we were putting up barn doors that slide to the sides of the doorway, we had a build a strong header in the framing that extended all the way past either side of the door so that the top door rail would have something strong to anchor on to.

The nail gun we used for putting up the frame was incredibly loud and my dog was terrified and I found him hiding underneath/behind my mom the entire time....

He may look vicious at times but he is the biggest baby!

Once the wall and door frame were all put up, it was time to measure and cut the drywall! My dad and grandpa did the measuring, and then I cut all the drywall.

We needed separate drywall pieces for either side of the doorway and at the top of the wall, so three different pieces for the outside of the wall and three for on the inside of the room.

Next was the mudding process! We had to do about three layers of the mud, and each time we had to thin it out a little bit.

We also had to add the metal sheets around the frame of the door.

After the mudding was complete and dry, it was time to sand, prime, and paint!

I ended up doing most of the painting, and obviously I had to use a long paint roller to get to the tops of the walls, but it still ended up making my shoulders super sore. HOWEVER, apparently the painting rods could have extend even longer than I realized, and my dad didn't tell me that until AFTER I finished the painting..... 🤦‍♀️

Then we put the molding back up and refreshed the paint on the rest of the molding areas, and let me tell you.... that was the WORST part! I think since it was for someone else's house I was more OCD about wanting it to be perfect.

Next was the part we were all excited for.... getting the sliding barn doors up! Since the new room was meant to be an office space, they picked out some sleek and modern looking doors that really pulled the whole thing together.

There's the main track on the top as well as floor mounted channel guides that keep the doors from swinging out away from the walls. Before those bottom pieces were added though the doors were able to be pushed from the inside and were basically like giant cat doors, so getting that bottom piece in place was important! We also eventually had to get soft close mechanisms for the doors that made them stop in the middle of the track instead of being able to be pushed all the way to the other side as well as preventing them from slamming closed. So there are multiple parts to go along with sliding barn doors that may not be visible but are very important to think about if you're considering them!

As far as the renovations go for this project, we were done after that, but the setting up the room and decorating it was one part was definitely looking forward to! Since the room was intended to be set up as an office space for my dad, I had to find a rug that would fill the room but also be thin enough for a rolling desk chair to go on it. I found the perfect one at Homegoods that was nice material but still thin and it went well with the other decor themes in their house (It also happened to match Zoki, my dog, perfectly!) It's hard to tell from the picture, but the rug has all the different shades of grey Zoki has, plus a little bit of a light blue that matches his one blue eye..... He loved laying right in the middle of the rug!