in keeping with Crystal Paine’s theme of Making your Home a Haven on Mondays, I thought I would share my favorite budget makeover tip for old houses. Paint! Yep. For as long as we have been married (22 years in May) we have bought older houses. I like them, they have charm and I can do things my way. For several years we actually had a remodeling business that was born out of our need to learn HOW to remodel! Now I love older houses and I am very patient about fixing up getting done as the money comes in, but I have one pet-peeve. Things don’t have to be fancy but they do have to be cleanable! Our current house is a beautiful old farm house that was built in 1860. Beautiful if you have vision. We got a good deal on it because everybody shied away from it’s major problem area, the floors. There are lots of springs near the house and the dampness caused the floors to finally weaken. But hey, if it took this long, and we fix them they ought to outlast us. So we proceed, one room at at time, there are three main big rooms that needed fixin, one we did quick and temporary right when we moved in. Otherwise everyone would have been walking like a drunk sailor in there. The living room we completely tore up, replaced the joists and put new flooring on, but actually it was old hardwood that we took out of another building, looks great. But onto the kitchen, it needs work, not as much and probably not new floor joists but it does need help. Jim’s dream which is very realistic is to tear down a barn and use that wonderful old oak wood to plane down and make flooring out of it. But in the meantime my old ratty wood floor in the kitchen needs to be cleanable. So I went to the hardware store and got some good old fashioned oil based porch and floor paint, in a brick red color, only $13.99 a gallon. And, you guessed it, painted the kitchen floor! It works beautifully, lasts about 2 years even with lots of traffic and sweeps as well as vinyl, but with lots more character and a lot cheaper. I have heard you can even paint vinyl floors, although I have never tried. So when we had a bridal shower here recently, we repainted the kitchen floor, painted the main bathroom and touched up the trim anywhere needed (always keep a gal of gloss white latex on hand) and everything looked really really nice. You would never guess we have a fixxer upper only half done so far!
and .. your thoughts?