Attic before & after pictures

One of the very last rooms we finished, just a few days before we left France, was the attic bedroom where Zari, Dio, and Inga slept.

This is the "oldest" room in the house; you can see the original beamed ceiling and stone walls. In contrast, everything has been plastered over downstairs.

Before

The attic was definitely the ugliest area of the house with peeling plaster and paint, no lights (just one outlet for the entire room), and a crumbling painted floor. The main room is a large rectangle with an area for a big bed and built-in shelves.

The ceiling painted was cracked and peeling. See the single outlet? That powered everything in the entire room.

In the middle of the floor is the access hatch with a very steep staircase--almost a ladder--leading down. The circuit breaker is on the left behind the pile of bedding. The little "room" on the right, above the downstairs hallway, had no floor and was criss-crossed with electrical conduits.

Renovations included....

• Scraping, sealing, & repainting the ceiling beams
• Building an elevated wooden plank floor over the little hallway room (where Inga sleeps)
• Wiring the entire attic,adding 3 light fixtures and about 16 outlets
• Scraping, replastering, wallpapering, and painting the walls
• Repainting the bookshelves
• Leveling the floors, then laying the same flooring that's in the rest of the house (Amtico Spacia in Warm Teak)
• Installing guard rails on the attic window (it's an 8-foot drop to the staircase below!)
• Renovating the staircase (you can't see it much in the pictures, but it was old painted staircase with lots of chipping paint. We painted the sides white and put the matching wooden flooring on the treads.)
• Making sea glass art with pieces we'd found on the beach
• Sewing curtains & decorative cushions

After!

See Inga's little room? I made two curtains for it: one in the far back to hide some shelves and another in the front that was see-through. Just for fun!

Here's a wide-angle view of the room. The window of the right leads to a storage room above the back bedroom. We also wired that room with a light fixture. Let there be light!



We also built a wood hatch that completely covers the attic opening (not pictured). It can be folded in half or removed completely. It's strong enough for adults to walk on.

And that is the attic!

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Master bedroom: before & after pictures

Hooray! I love posting these pictures, because it means we are DONE. (Well, we still need to install a railing on the sleeping loft...)

Done enough.

Picture from the real estate listing

What it really looked like when Eric visited

Demolition

Remember when we ripped out the rotten shower? Mold and spongy wood everywhere.

Everything torn out

DONE!!

I have a thing for turning furniture into sinks....we found this marble-topped coiffeuse on leboncoin (40 Euros!) and added a sink & faucet. I found the mirror at a thrift shop (30 Euros) and painted it with silver gilding paint.

The green leather chair was an absolute steal for 30 Euros at my favorite consignment store. Wool rug was only 18 Euros. Sold. Eric found the antique writing desk on leboncoin. The seller lived in Monaco, so we made a day trip and visited the aquarium. It was a miracle that the desk fit inside the car.

I want to put an armoire along this blank wall.

View of the entry hall.

The sleeping loft. The kids are forbidden from going up until we install the railing. I found the chandelier for 10 Euros. I love leboncoin!

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Bathroom before & after pictures

The original bathroom in this apartment was a glorious relic of the 1950s or 60s, guessing by the color of the tiles. Many of the tiles were cracked. Some had been painted. There was no ventilation in the bathroom, so mold was growing on the ceiling and walls. The bathtub had also been painted, probably more than once.

Before photos: 

This bathroom had a window that opened into the back bedroom. Kind of strange, but it was the only source of light and ventilation, albeit secondhand.

The adjoining WC was similarly dismal. The original tiles--burgundy, pale yellow, and aqua blue--had been painted with matte beige paint. Well, everything had been painted beige. We have a humidity problem because of water infiltrating into our apartment, most likely from the neighboring building. The plaster is falling off the walls, the ceiling is stained and damp, and during rainy periods water slowly drips down the wall.

The bathroom renovation all started with leboncoin (French equivalent of Craigslist). I saw a new floor model Jacuzzi tub for a great price. This one:

We did some measuring and realized it would fit in the space with some creative rearranging. Once we actually brought the tub into the apartment, we realized that the tub was too big to fit through the bathroom doorway. Well, the tub HAD to stay so what else could we do but open up a hole in the wall?

Demolition photos

Demolition took nearly a full week with several people working. Back in North America, you'd simply chisel the tiles off and, if needed, take the cementboard or drywall off with it. Easily done in a few hours. Here, we were painfully chipping off tiles inch by inch; they had been double mortared onto a solid cement wall.

And the mess...oh the mess...plaster, cement, and earth dust everywhere. The wall was thick and mostly made of solid earth, embedded with bits of brick, wood, and even tiles in certain places.

I wrote earlier about the demolition, so you might remember some of the pictures. We also had to replumb the entire bathroom. 

We created a doorway where the window used to be. It improved the space dramatically. Now the bathroom has much more light and aeration. And it feels larger as well. I hope to install a sliding door, but for now we're just leaving the doorway open.

Now the "after" photos....

See wasn't that tub worth it???

We looked for tiles for weeks...couldn't agree on anything...and then these large gray tiles showed up on the clearance pile for 50% off. They are more gray than they appear in the pictures and look somewhat like concrete and somewhat like marble. Every tile is different, so they have a natural, organic feel. The accent is a 30 cm square sheet textured marble mosaics, cut into 10 cm wide strips. 

I love heated towel racks. They feel so civilized. Plus they double as heaters so they are practical luxuries.

We covered the walls with the same textured fiberglass wallpaper that is in the rest of the house.

I found this little hall table for 49 Euros at a secondhand shop. I painted it with oil-based glossy white paint. An irregular stone sink finished it off perfectly. We cut a little U-shaped notch in the drawer to fit around the drain pipe--so the drawer still works! I still haven't bought a mirror yet...waiting for the perfect one to catch my eye.

Here's the toilet room (aka WC). We just tiled it on Saturday and grouted it on Monday. The walls are white, like the rest of the house. Goodbye, beige!

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Living room before & after pictures

Hi friends, it's time for some updates! We've been consumed with renovating our apartment. Since mid-January we've had HelpX guests assisting us. Our last guest leaves this afternoon...I'm sad to see him go, but we're also excited to have our apartment back to ourselves.

Ready for some before, during, & after photos of our living room?

The "before" photos from the online listing

What it actually looked like when Eric was househunting

This is the living room, where our couch now sits. One of the students used it as a bedroom

looking towards the front door

clutter everywhere

dining room

The bottom part of the wall was beige, and the trim was a glossy yellow-cream. Note: beige and yellow do not mix well. We painted everything white: ceilings (matte), trim (satin), and walls (eggshell).

Taking out the dividing wall between the living & dining rooms

Dio loved helping chisel out the plaster. We ran phone & ethernet cables from our bedroom over to the wall between the windows.

The walls were slabs of poured clay with random pieces of wood embedded inside, covered with a thick layer of plaster. Dust was EVERYWHERE

Phone/ethernet cables embedded in the ceiling beam and wall. Our HelpX helper is putting on the first layer of plaster.

Patching up the floor turned into a complicated project. When we removed the wood, it jacked up a section of the floor (terrazzo tiles on top of old tomettes, and underneath that a layer of earth, all on top of wooden beams. We had to break up the floor with a hammer and pound as much back down as we could. The rest we chiseled out. Then we poured several layers of concrete to bring the floor back up to level. Next came a coat of self-leveling compound.

We had to save and reuse the flooring, so Eric and one of our helpers spent hours scraping glue & cement off the back of the planks.

All done! No more wall!

I sewed the curtains for the two front windows. It's a fresh green jacquard with fluffy dandelion patterns. Fun and colorful, but not too loud. The curtains were over 3 meters long! I bought it at tissurama.com; it's called Ombelle.

The next picture shows the reading nook & living room from the entry hall. I convinced Eric to buy the daybed (140 Euros at a consignment store). It took some persuasion but he is sold. It's nice to have another place to read or take a nap.

I am in love with the cushion fabric. I had the hardest time tracking it down, because it kept selling out online before I could order it. It's called Orlando Tropical in some places and Panama Orlando in others. I finally bought it here.

 

The couch turns into a bed. We're "babysitting" a painting by our friend Jonathan Gent.

Below is The Mirror. We found it via leboncoin.com. The owner threw in the two side tables and all of the leatherbound books, plus the big mirror over the daybed, plus another mirror in the master bedroom.

I found the antique sconces at a secondhand shop for 15 Euros total. They were an ugly, tarnished brass so I painted them and the mirror with gilding paint (dorure liquide).

View of the door & entry hall

See the window over the kitchen? It looks into the master bedroom. We built a sleeping loft right under the window.





Now I can spy on my children from my bed!

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