Undertaking a 1920’s Home Restoration

When my husband and I decided to move into a 1928, never renovated coastal home we knew there would be some work to be done. Over the last 2 weeks we decided to take on floor and tile restoration and refinishing the kitchen cabinets.

After a couple trips to Home Depot we felt we were well equipped to start on our projects. I decided to tackle the cabinets first. With a drill in hand I started by taking off all of the rusty old handles. Next I applied paint thinner and tirelessly scraped through at least 5 layers of paint from baby blue to yellow and shades of green. After hours of sanding down the cabinets I was pleased to discover the most gorgeous hardwood!

Learning the wonders of paint thinner I decided to see what other treasures I could uncover. I tried a bit on some tiles at our entrance that had been painted a dark brown and a beautiful green hand painted tile surfaced. After another 2 hours of scraping, wiping and polishing I had completely restored the entryway tile. The living room floors became a much bigger project than anticipated. We decided to take up the blue carpet and found linoleum underneath after taking off the linoleum we found an old patio tile. We believe the living room was once an outdoor patio that had been enclosed. We used a concrete sander to remove all of the paint and then filled in the holes and gaps with terracotta colored cement to match. We are attempting to seal the floor this week.

The home is slowly coming together; we have 2 more weekends to work on everything before our move-in date. Although it has been a lot of hard work, through the early stages of this DIY renovation experience we have found a beautiful home that just needed a little TLC to bring it back to life.

Before After