The renovation of our new home started in April during our trip to Germany. Perhaps new home is only a half-truth as it is on one hand our new place to be but on the other hand it is also a totally rundown apartment from 1972.
The previous owner lived there since 1976, tried to keep all useless junk in the apartment and to make matters even worse, he smoked there the entire time inside and in the end even up to 3 cigarette cartons a week! I believe now you may start to create a picture on just how messed up everything was there when we started. Sadly I don’t have pictures from before we started throwing stuff out but the several in the gallery might give you some idea how we struggled. These pictures were taken after most stuff had been thrown out and only some basic furniture was left.
I can’t give you any blueprint of the layout (sure I could draw one myself now but I am a bit too lazy for that) so I mention only the basics, 90m²/~968ft² with bedroom, children room, kitchen, bathroom, dining room, living room and most importantly for our little bunnies: a balcony.
In April we managed only to remove all the old stuff including furniture, wallpapers, carpet flooring and tiles in bathroom and kitchen. Especially the wallpapers proofed to be very hard work as nearly every room was decorated with Ingrain wallpaper, a nightmare glued to the wall…
Mother-in-law and my wife also helped a lot during the renovation process by cleaning the old radiators (there are several old cast iron ones!) and repainting them several times until they reached once again a nice white surface color. As the ceiling was very yellow due to all the smoking for so long time we had to prepare it before painting. This preparation meant we had to “scrub” the ceiling several times with a brush and washing soda until we could paint on few layers of special anti-nicotine color. At least my wife had some fun already by choosing the new wallpaper for each room with special focus for the baby room. Sadly we had not time to start put new wallpapers on the room for little Nathan as some guy still needed to fix a huge crack in the wall! (40 years ago the roof was leaking water in and that part of the wall settled a bit resulting in a crack in the wall…)
Now during our time back in Finland some professionals are installing new windows and water pipes as those two things are the original setup from 1972 and not working anymore as intended. In September we will then finally move to Germany but we will have to stay with my parents for at least a month as the apartment is far from ready. Tile and wood flooring are still missing and not to forget that there is no bathroom or kitchen yet. After all that we will have some busy time buying new furniture as we are selling most of our old stuff here in Finland to make the whole moving process a bit easier to handle.
Crazy Chinese Family 
Ah, your new place! I’m trying to visualise the layout in my head with your photos. It’s quite a sizeable home, and with it being an old one no wonder its taking a while for the makeover to happen. I do notice that there are lots of big windows, so lots of light coming through the apartment. It really doesn’t look like an apartment from 1976, so good on you for all the work you’ve done. Which is your favourite part of the renovations, so far? 🙂
The apartment has a good size for us now, of course at some point later we will look for something better but this will be perfect for the next years.
Each room, except dining room, has at least one window so there is alot of natural light during daytime.
I guess the best part so far was putting the wallpaper on the walls as everything finally started to look much nicer 🙂
Good to hear that all but one of the rooms have windows. Natural light always gives any space a good touch. My parents have a new house in the suburbs of Melbourne and the bedrooms have tiny frosted glass windows…near the ceiling so you can’t look out :O
Haha, it sounded like you had fun ripping the old wallpapers and putting on the new ones. They can completely change the ambiance of a room, depending on the colour and pattern.
Congrats on the new place! I am sure that with some work, it will be a place that you can call home!! I know moving can be such a difficult endeavor but it seems that you have got everything planned and under control. I look forward to seeing the finish product!
Thanks 🙂
It is especially nice as we can plan everything from scratch and have the materials and furniture we like in there, so we can create it according to our ideas. I will have probably in early autmn an update about the apartment to record the progress
so pretty, I’m so jealous >.<
My wife is very happy as she can choose all materials and furniture. Started already with the wallpapers, in the bedroom we have some “pinkish” colour and in the living room one wall with some pattern to bring a difference to the rest walls.
It is always great to create something according to your ideas/ dreams however it is also much work 🙂
You’ve done a lot of work. But when you’re done, it’s going to be beautiful. I remember how hard it can be to remove some wallpaper. Although some wallpaper comes right off, some doesn’t want to come off at all. We had both kinds in one house we remodeled.
It looks like you’ve made good progress so far. My husband isn’t very handy, so I’m still working on our little green house nearly a year after we purchased it. Smoke is awful, but it’s surprising what new flooring and fresh paint can do.
Oh well, any kind of progress is still good progress. I remember it took my parents nearly 15years to get our cottage renovated 🙂
It’s looking good! I have yet to decorate a flat of my own, it must be quite a headache!
It is terrible much work but also much fun. The decorating part is more my wife’s area of expertise 🙂