Renovation

I bought a nice 3-Unit with 2 beautiful units plus this. I HEARD YOU GUYS LIKE BEFORE AND AFTER PICS

The tenants were very old and shortly announced that they were leaving. I couldn't rent the apartment in the untouched-for-decades condition it was in so I had to renovate. Every room looked like this. Not an inch of the apartment had been subjected to cleaning in years. Maybe tens of years.

See that guy on TV? He is praying for me.

EDIT: Thank you all for letting me know this is Nash Bridges. :-)

The floors were awful. The ill-fitting carpet remnants covered up disgusting wood. The walls had never been cleaned. Nothing had ever been cleaned.

Even the doorknobs were a mess. It took me about a minute to clean that up, how could you live there and never take a minute to prevent yourself from having to touch that?

It was sticky. I don't want to know why it was sticky.

The doorknobs didn't even fit in the doors for the most part.

That's probably not a blood stain.

The walls were damaged, the wallpaper was probably original. Every inch of this place taunted me. Every inch would need to be addressed.

This is from a kitchen cabinet. The gunk (grease, dust, human skin, whatever it was) could be scraped off in thick lines of stuff that the guys from Jackass wouldn't want to touch.

Let's turn on the oven and cook some food! Yum! The flavoring is built right into the knobs!

Despite the water damaged peeling wallpaper, this shot gives you a hint of the salvageable tin ceilings.

Gross. Just gross. How about we just don't ever turn on the lights?

This light bulb actually worked. For real. A light bulb new enough to function was somehow able to get this dirty, and this was from the bedroom, not even the kitchen.

But I promised before and after pictures, so if you view the rest of the album, you will be rewarded.

Not a big deal on this one, one of the panes was broken so I replaced it. Note how the other side is so dirty you can barely tell there's a person behind it.

Oh yeah, when I lifted up the top of the stove, I used my drywall knife to clean out some of the savory gunk only inches away from the cooking surface. Sorry, were you eating?

This is the broiler. See that clean spot? It was a hint that the inner surfaces of the 50 year old Boston Stove Company stove might actually be nice looking underneath. Was it?

Yes. It was. It was gorgeous. This took about 2 hours.

Oh, sorry, hopefully you've put down your food by now. Here's a drawer pull. This image zooms so you can delight it all its fetid sliminess.

Beauty isn't skin deep, sometimes it's lurking under a layer of filth. All the drawer pulls looked like the previous pic, they all cleaned up like this one.

Soaking the stove components in the bathtub for about 5 minutes.

None of that blue enamel was visible before I started cleaning. Only the black greasy sludge from a few pics up.

This was taken just before the tenants left for good so some of their furniture is still there. Guess what it looked like a couple months later?

New countertop and new faucet but everything else is revitalized. The cabinets were sanded and poly'ed, the sink was cleaned, everything was cleaned, painted, and caulked. Yeah, that icky paneling is still there under a layer of paint.

Again, the bedroom just before they moved out. This is pre-renovation. A couple months later and...

I actually felt comfortable stepping foot in it without a bio-suit. Patched holes, primed and painted the wallpaper, casings, and those magnificent tin ceilings.

The carpeting is the only part of this remodeling I didn't do myself.

Here's the livingroom going into the bedroom. It was hard to breathe in here, the dust and ancient cigarette smoke hung stagnant in the air.

Aaaaaand here's what it looks like today. All the door knobs and hinges are original. Those nice ceramic pulls on the pocket doors were covered under 90 layers of paint. The casings are all original, I try to save as much as possible.

After everything was done and the carpeting was down, I actually laid down on the floors. I felt awful beforehand even putting my feet on the floors.

Everyone loves those ceilings.

But let's get even nastier shots to close this album out!

I honestly don't know if anyone ever bathed in this tub. There are some sort of body cleansing products, but if they were used you'd think the tub might get a little clean by proxy. Just ... ew.

Same tub, same fixtures. The wall was a cheap Home Depot insert that I did myself after ripping out half of the old plastic crap that was there and finally giving up because they had cemented it to the wall. It still turned out okay.

I'm not sure if that Febreeze really did much to help. Maybe if they had Feburnination.

But it all turned out fine. I ripped out the bottom half of the wall and re-sheetrocked it. Put up some new trim and a nice bathroom set, you'd almost want to move in!

Oh, and besides the carpeting, I also didn't do the tiling. A friend took the helm on that one. I don't have a pic of it but I cut our initials out of some spare tile and we grouted it down under the sink as a lasting reminder of how awful this whole project was.

Now the money shot. The toilet. That toilet. Dear lord, I can almost taste the air just looking at this picture. See that carpet? IT WAS WET. Not wet from toilet water, wet from OLD MAN PEE. See those walls? See the brown stains? The flecked, dried stains? THAT IS OLD MAN PEE. Guess why I ripped those walls out? BECAUSE OLD MAN PEE. THIS ROOM WAS A SEETHING MASS OF OLD MAN PEE! IT'S BEEN YEARS AND I CAN STILL SMELL THAT OLD MAN PEE.

And now it's an awesome bathroom. Thank you and goodnight!

EDIT: This concludes the meaty pictures, but if you want other random pics from the job the full album is here: http://imgur.com/a/aaM7G