Renovations
Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash
Before we started any major renovations, I think the first project we did was fixing up a room for our kids after sharing a room with them for way too long. We had a boy and a girl at the time and we made it fun and colorful. I even stenciled flowers on the book shelf to match the carpeting.
I decided to paint a wall in the play room when my husband took my mother in law to Al Madinah. I was actually pregnant with my third and chose a water-based paint that didn’t have any dangerous fumes or smells. That wall was previously painted with a matt paint that would wipe away when I tried cleaning my young children’s art off the wall. I had had enough with their murals and decided to paint over it.
When my third was born as a gift for my two older children I stenciled flowers above my daughter’s bed and dinosaurs above my son’s bed.
After giving birth to our fourth child we turned a former storage room into a bedroom for the boys and redid the first bedroom for my daughter. She was five at the time and insisted all the walls be painted pink. She’s almost 14 now and hates pink! We also moved the living room to the previously play room and I finally made some matching art and felt that the house had my touch.( My husband had completely furnished our apartment before we even met.)
We started our first major renovation in 2017. Our first project was our master bathroom and my MIL’s master bathroom. The renovation was long overdue. We live with my MIL in my husband’s childhood home, he was born in what is now the dining room, so you can imagine how old the house is. (No, I’m not calling my husband old, house years are different than human years!)
At the time, we had four kids, our youngest was two and a half. A pattern we have noticed with renovations is, my husband usually has a work trip in the middle of it. With this renovation, he had multiple work trips and was barely home. It was summer vacation; my MIL was in her summer home in Jordan. So, I was alone at home with 4 young children and a major renovation project on my hands. Two of my younger brothers who were still students at the time, took turns staying with me to help out. That was a huge blessing!
The thing about renovating old houses is you are most likely to find some surprises! Not nice surprises, no, no! What-are-we-going-to-do-about-that, How-can-we-fix it? kind of surprises!
When we renovated the bathrooms, we found a concrete slab under the original concrete slab that had collapsed and was held up with the aluminum false ceiling. A very cool design feature back in the day. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had delayed the renovation? Who knows how long the aluminum ceiling would have held the concrete before it collapsed! We were lucky!
After this renovation, we started working on my mother in law’s house. (She lived on the ground floor, we lived on the first floor.) Every summer when she went away, we would choose a couple of rooms. We started with her bedroom, one thing led to another and we ended up doing the dining room, maid’s bedroom and living room. We also decided to change all the interior doors. That project, started simple, ended up being very complicated and stressful. We finished the day she was arriving and the cleanup job would have never finished without the help of two of my sisters in law and two maids we hired by the hour. The end result made it all worth it. My mother in laws delight with results helped us forget all the stress.
In the middle of the year when my husband was away for a week and my oldest had his foot in a cast with a fractured foot, I decided to change the carpeting and paint my dressing room and the stairs. Because, why not?
The summer after that we decided to do the formal living room, keep in mind I was about 7 months pregnant with my youngest and did most of the material shopping in the mornings under the scorching sun. It may have been hotter, but the evenings the traffic is horrible and the shops more crowded. In the mornings I had the streets and the shops to myself. Of course, we had to add more details to the renovation, changing the curtains for the living room and my mother in law’s bedroom a long with the formal living room. It may sound like simple tasks but choosing fabrics to match existing furniture is harder than you think. Especially when your choosing according to someone else’s taste. My mother in law prefers more classic designs, while I prefer more modern. We also decided to fix up the laundry room and maid’s bathroom, the kitchen ceiling and lighting. Not big details but they did require emptying the laundry room, buying tiles and lighting… Remember I was pregnant with my youngest and had 4 other kids. My kids were older this time and more help. I also hired a full time maid that summer. The biggest blessing!
The pandemic forced us to put our renovations on hold. Until a leak in water pipes in the street in front of our house caused the land to sink, and our main entrance and front wall shifting and cracking. We have to demolish the wall and buy a new door before they collapsed on their own. (It really needed an upgrade anyway) One thing led to another and what started as a new front wall (fence) and main entrance turned into a complete makeover of the front and back yard, and the addition of a third floor! The fact that we started the project backwards, digging up our front yard and then deciding to add a floor, made this project extra stressful. Some surprises along the way. (old house surprises are not fun) lots of setbacks, lots of mistakes, some were my fault. I may be an interior architect but I don’t have much experience. Some mistakes were misunderstandings. Some were just unimaginable. In the end everything turned out great and I am proud of the end result. The third floor is really a reflection of my taste and I love it.
It’s been over a year since we have finished that phase of the renovation and we are ready to start a new phase (and hopefully the last phase) of renovating our house. We are starting with my mother in law’s kitchen, which she has had for over thirty years± she is finally ready to let it go. We also have the second floor, with my kids’ bedrooms and my kitchen to renovate. Hopefully we will manage to finish everything quickly without any surprises.
I will take you along on our renovation as much as I can. Follow me on Instagram and Pinterest to see the progress.
If you haven’t guessed already, we started this renovation with my husband away on a business trip, haha.