I haven’t blogged about this yet so I thought it would be fun to do a few posts here and there about the condo renovations we are making at a place we have out in Hollywood. We’ve done some extensive renovations to the kitchen which I can’t wait to share, but first I want to start with the foyer and the before photos. Here’s what this foyer looked like in the listing photo, and trust me when I say there was A LOT of photoshop and wide angle lenses being used in this photo because it looked much darker and smaller in person!
UGLY, UGLY, UGLY!!!
This condo was built in the 1970’s and needless to say, the finishes were (in my opinion) hideous! We actually bought the condo without seeing it in person…it’s the third time we’ve bought a place just from pictures! I figure I can make anything look better so it was really a just matter of price, location and floor plan for this investment. I have a really good eye for seeing past ugly and envisioning what a place could be – probably why I had a successful home staging business for many years.
As you see in the above picture, the condo had archways into the rooms and a wall of antique mirrors that really dated the foyer. First thing I did when we bought the place was have the mirrors removed. When we remodeled the kitchen last year, we had the arches removed to open up the space and give it a more modern feel. We also changed out the light fixtures. You’ll see those pictures in my upcoming post with the after photos. The entry/foyer is a nice size for a condo so I wanted to make it stand out. Unfortunately, we never decided what to do with the floor, and the kitchen was over budget, so we left it undone. Since we don’t live there (it’s rented to my son) it’s one of those out of sight out of mind kind of things, so we ignored it and saved the money! Looking back, I wish we would have just carried the new floors throughout and been done with it. Oh well, too late now. This week it’s finally time to get rid of the mismatched, ugly floors and finish this space!
I’m putting in the new tile floors myself, but I had a couple guys do the demo for me. So happy I did. There would have been no way I could have demo’d it myself. It took them 4.5 hours to get it all out. Some of the tile was even set in concrete. Someone must have been trying to level the floor and set tile at the same time!
With the subfloor in such poor shape, I’m a little scared I might screw this all up. But I know I can do it and it will certainly look better than it does right now. So stay tuned…I’ll post pictures of the new floor when I’m finished with it next week!
UPDATE: Well, I didn’t quite get it finished while I was out there 🙁 Tile didn’t get delivered on time before I left so I had to hire someone to finish for me. Probably better because I made a bit of a mess of trying to level the floor! I’ll be out there in June to put the baseboards in and get the final after pictures. Blog post forthcoming!