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NICOLE: Coming up on Rehab Addict.
I'm continuing the work on a beautiful 1880s home
that had been boarded up for almost two years.
Don't jump, it's not that bad.
I'm turning it from a duplex back into a single family home.
Hey!
We no longer need the upstairs kitchen and living room,
so I'm creating a whole new floor plan.
From new walls that have to go up,
to a bathroom built from scratch.
It's gonna be a lot of work,
but I'm gonna give this house the master suite it deserves.
Bombs away!
I buy and sell houses,
but I'm not your average flipper.
Oh, my God!
Why in the hell would you cover that up?
I just want brick.
I don't just renovate,
I restore old homes to their former glory.
It's screaming, like, "Make me pretty again."
It's day and night.
There's always one last door.
Which is not easy when you're a single mom,
but I'm making it work.
I don't know, I still think I'm taller.
My name is Nicole and I'm addicted to rehab.
This project has been really satisfying to work on.
When I first found it, it was boarded up, dark and dingy.
Okay.
Now it's bright and inviting again.
We started with the first floor,
opening up the closed off living room
and dining room.
Restoring the amazing stained glass window out front,
making the kitchen functional once again,
and opening up the cramped bathroom
into a spacious powder room.
And now it's time to head upstairs
and create a master suite.
This is the old kitchen and the upstairs,
the upper part of the duplex.
And because we're taking it back to single family,
we don't need a kitchen.
The bathroom's going back here,
but we got to take out some walls.
What I want to do is demo all this
from the outside 'cause I want to see
that beadboard on the other side.
I don't know where it's going, it's going somewhere in the bathroom.
But it's better to carefully remove it
so that I have the option of reusing it.
All this to save this little cabinet here.
And for whatever reason I was drawn to this back corner of this house
and this is where the bathroom is gonna go.
We figured out we're gonna put the tub on a diagonal
and then I get to keep these really cool built-ins.
I'm gonna drop our sinks right in here.
So this is actually your vanity.
I love it.
It feels old, it feels original,
it feels like something you'd find in an old farmhouse.
We are totally rearranging the layout upstairs.
The old kitchen pantry is becoming the new bathroom
and old living room is going to be part of the master suite,
which means there's a lot of wall rearranging,
some going up, others going down.
The guys are here.
They are gonna be framing all the new walls in.
I'm excited to see the walls go up.
But then I'm also a little leery
that I'm taking this chopped up house
and just reversing the chopped-upness of it.
The wall is up
and we're slowly transforming this upper unit of the duplex
into just simply the second floor.
The walls are up, I see the layout.
I love it.
The space that used to be the kitchen
is now going to be a sitting room.
And the balcony out back needs a little rehab as well.
This old balcony is one of my favorite spots
of the house because I love having a balcony.
But it's been covered up with all this paneling.
Wow.
Bombs away!
Look at that beautiful ceiling.
And you can see that the original beadboard
is still under there.
It's just been covered up for a trillion years.
Hey!
Seriously.
The original doorway to the balcony
now leads to where we're putting the bathroom.
And that means we'll have to cut
part of the existing wall to the balcony
to make space for the new doorway.
As well as frame in and close up the old doorway.
Chopping into walls, new framing going up,
it all makes me just a bit nervous.
My ideas always make plumbers nervous.
They're used to plumbing like, this goes there,
that goes there, everything's square.
This is a traditional bathroom layout.
So he is a little unsure,
but I have it all up here in my head.
It's gonna be great.
You want it like, closer to the wall?
'Cause all that space up here will be wasted.
I don't care.
Look how much space I have in this bathroom.
When you look in here from the bedroom,
I want to see this pretty little spot
of this beautiful clawfoot tub and all I want to see is tub.
Okay.
I think if we-- We could probably--
It can probably go--
That's probably right about perfect.
Yes.
One bowl, two bowls?
I wanted two,
and they got to be really narrow.
Yeah, I still want two bowls.
So the toilet you want centered in this space?
I think it is right now.
Oh, 77.
So we'll put it right there?
Yeah.
Anyone else?
Clark?
I'm totally good with it.
Okay.
We're installing the original door
from the balcony
in the new space that we had to cut out
and create for the balcony entrance.
All right, let's try that door.
Let's see if it fits.
I don't remember where this door was.
Oh, it was the door.
This is such a better place for this door
because now we've been able to use that other room
for part of the bathroom.
We still have the access to the back balcony.
It's all good in the hood.
Whoa, that's like, perfect size.
Free doors are free doors.
Do they fit? Probably not.
Whoa.
Every single one of these windows is broke.
Am I shocked that I have to replace
every single window in this house?
Not at all.
It kind of comes with the territory.
You have an abandoned house,
somebody just throws rocks at it or shoots it with a gun.
Who knows?
If they were the original wood frames,
I could easily replace just the glass panes.
Old wood windows are old wood windows.
You go to the hardware, you get a piece of glass,
you glaze it, you're done.
But being vinyl, I'm looking at possibly
having to replace the entire frame,
the sash and the glass.
Definitely not cheap.
So let's say I get the serial numbers.
So I need to search for a serial number,
try to find the company that made them
and see if we can replace just the sashes.
Oh, it's up in the top.
Cost wise we got to replace
top and bottom sash and screen.
Do you have a rough price, kind of, or no?
Okay. Okay.
That's still cheaper than replacing the whole window.
Okay, thanks so much for helping me.
The good news is,
we don't have to replace the frame.
It looks like for about 80 bucks a window,
I can get all these windows looking new.
Vinyl windows on my house. Go figure.
Don't jump, it's not that bad.
Are you sure?
It really isn't.
I decided to move the wall
at the top of the stairs...
So we could gain an extra foot in the hallway.
When I moved this wall, I had no floorings.
But this was absolutely a necessity.
Now there is some room,
so you're not teeter-tottering
through this little tiny hallway.
Now we've moved the wall,
we have to feather in all of this hardwood flooring.
We've taken maple from other parts of the house
and now we'll patch it all in.
My problem is
that we have a really ugly transition right here.
So we're going to clean this up
by cutting it all out and putting a transition strip
going this way to make this all seem like
it was this way from day 1.
So this is gonna tie into the master bath
and the other transitions, perfect.
We're finally ready for drywall in this house
and there is actually a lot of drywall work to be done.
We've completely changed the floor plan.
We went from a duplex...
to one single family,
which means we had to take out walls
and doors and put up walls.
There is over 150 new sheets of drywall
that needs to be hung.
The drywall is going up super fast.
And this is my new master suite room that I created.
I've never seen it framed in.
So it's a little different
when you can't literally walk through all the walls.
And the house is finally starting to take shape.
I'm standing in what used to be the butler's pantry
to the upstairs apartment's kitchen.
Long complicated process
to make this the actual master bath.
But what I didn't want to lose in the process
was all these cool old cabinets.
The butler's pantry cabinets have now become
part of the bathroom vanity.
I've got scraps that we've taken out of the house.
I think that this is gonna work perfect for my counter.
Whoa, that's like perfect size.
Originally, I was just gonna put
a piece of butcher block on here.
And now I have a little bit of use for my old beadboard.
I have to build a support system
for all of this beadboard to stick to,
otherwise you'll lean on the countertop
and it's gonna break right through.
So it's really a matter of putting in a lot of slats
to do the support.
The countertop is all done
and now we're good to put in the sink.
By the way, I have no ideas
where these came from, so we just dropped 'em off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Funny things happen.
I have been sitting here saying I need to pick up
some French doors.
I've become like the orphanage
for old house parts that no one else wants.
These ones are straight out of the '60s.
However, I can make 'em look like
they match this house.
Do they fit?
Probably not.
I couldn't imagine being so lucky,
but free doors are free doors.
A French door set like this is a couple hundred dollars.
These doors are most important
because they're going to become
the entrance to the master suite.
Clark's one of my carpenters
and today he gets the wonderful job
of helping me retrofit these abandoned French doors
into this entry way to make the entrance for the master suite.
Oh, little abandoned doors.
Now they're gonna be part of this really cool house
and they're completing my master suite.
The plumbers are working away,
testing everything out, getting the water flowing,
and now there's leak in the basement.
Oh, looks like one of the glue joints came apart.
Somebody mis-glued it or didn't put enough glue on.
They're gonna have to pull it all apart
and replace those joints.
Have you got it bottled up someplace else?
Whoa.
Whoa.
I absolutely love this grey color,
but I'm telling you,
I just broke part of my timber.
That's called character.
There is never a hardwood floor that I can't save.
Ah!
( water trickling )
Oh, looks like one of the glue joints came apart.
Whoa.
Whoa.
We had sort of a little flood.
In testing the drain line, we found our broken, our leak.
So where is the leak?
Right here.
You got to get that floor drained.
How? Okay.
So just flooded the basement?
There is always something disastrous that happens.
And disasters only happen when I take a five minute break.
The good news is,
it's just a matter of clearing the debris,
using a wet vac and getting the water out of here.
This used to be part of the old kitchen
and the pantry.
And now I've made it the master bath.
And I really wanted to keep intact
a little bit of each of those rooms.
The beadboard, the old cabinets.
And I had to break apart this entire structure,
I thought nothing better than to take the wall out
and put one of these old beams in here.
So I took one of the old beams from the basement,
cut it up, put it up here.
And unfortunately,
somebody gets some paint on my 200-year-old beam.
We're just kind of sand it up.
It's coming off pretty easily.
And what I really want to do is just leave this raw.
I absolutely love this grey color,
but I'm telling you,
I just broke part of my timber.
That's called character.
But some of the beams sometimes are really rough.
And when they're rough, they're gonna collect dust
or whatever else is in the air.
Nothing good about that.
So that's when you want to give them
a really smooth sanding.
Never use an electric sander on an old beam
because what I really want to see is
all the grain left just intact.
And when you use an electric sander,
it does little tiny spindle circles.
It just won't look right.
So something as simple as this...
does the trick.
How do you know it's smooth enough?
When you can run your hand across here
and it's not hurting you,
that means you've done enough sanding.
All of these hardwood floors
have been a mismatch throughout the years.
The house was cut up into a duplex.
And actually a lot of the floors
have tons of glue leftover from where old kitchens were,
old bathrooms were.
Every floor is easy to refinish.
You just got to put in a lot of time.
And these floors are labor intensive.
There is nail heads, there is old glue, everything.
But it doesn't matter.
It's all natural wood, always can be refinished.
There is never a hardwood floor that I can't save.
Ed, this looks fabulous.
Yep.
'Cause that was the kitchen, that was the porch.
You're in the back porch right now.
Yeah.
I love that I left every single kind of
weird floor in here.
And this is gonna just be...
Looks good.
All right, I'm gonna let you carry on.
One of my favorite parts about doing this master bath
and the master suite is that I actually get to use
an original clawfoot tub to this house.
I'm gonna give a fresh coat of white
to the feet and to the exterior.
I just want to look into the bathroom
and see this beautiful, white clawfoot tub.
This is probably the best condition clawfoot tub
I've ever come across.
And here it was in a house that was set for demolition.
I've never actually left the clawfeet white
because it's on this solid wood floor
and everything else is white,
I think the detail will still pop.
I think it's very, very understated and elegant,
especially on old fixtures like this.
I've done million dollar projects before
and I have to say, when this bathroom gets done,
this will be the coolest master bath I've ever done.
You buff, do a coat of poly, you buff again.
If you don't buff it, you're gonna have floors
that look like you did 'em yourself.
Each floor in this house will have
three coats of polyurethane.
I make sure that my floors are absolutely perfect.
What most people forget to do
in between all their processes when they're doing
their own hardwood floors is to buff it
in between layers of polyurethane.
If you don't buff it, you end up with bubbles
and you end up with an uneven surface.
So you do a coat of poly, you buff,
you do a coat of poly, you buff again.
If you don't buff in between layers,
you're gonna have floors
that look like you did 'em yourself.
So I'm not gonna put all this work into it
and to do a shoddy job on the floor.
So my floors are just smooth as can be.
I used the old butler's pantry of the original house
as part of this bathroom upstairs,
but this Butler's pantry cabinet is very, very narrow.
Most drop-in sinks are 16 to 17 inches of depth.
So I have a couple of choices.
Special order one or just cross my fingers
and check online.
I checked online and here the sink was.
20 bucks.
That's exactly what I needed in here.
I love it.
Little mirror.
I wanted to put two sinks in,
but the odds of finding two sinks for 20 bucks,
not gonna happen.
And now I've plenty of space.
This is like blow dry, get your hair done,
whatever you're gonna do.
So you think we should do it over here?
I thought it would be a cool idea.
It's just different.
Yeah.
Right.
This was my first conversion
of a duplex to a single family home.
With this house being a duplex,
it created essentially two apartments
with three or four bedrooms on each floor.
This was built as a single family home
and I was taking it back.
Okay.
Lot of hesitation and a lot of rearranging,
but after all these revisions,
taking what was the living room and making it part
of the master suite was the best move I could have made.
I have no idea where I got this thought
of French doors for master suite.
But I always have this vision
of doors swinging open into a space.
Then you go into the bedroom
and then it leads into the bathroom.
All very glamorous feeling.
I love this bathroom.
I love it because it's a new bathroom,
but everything in it is old.
A reused original beam from the basement of the house,
the clawfoot tub, beadboard from the porch,
the original butler pantry cabinets.
The bathroom floor
has three different types of wood running through it.
We put little scraps of wood from other projects in the house
because we only have bits of the original floor.
Before it got sanded, it looked like a nightmare.
But now it's sanded, it's polyed.
It's beautiful.
Now I have this beautiful master suite,
the sitting or dressing area,
the bedroom,
and a great bathroom.
I would buy this house just for the master suite.
This is probably my favorite part of the house.
Next time on Rehab Addict.
Look how it's dipping.
That's not delicious.
Yes.
So is mine.
So is mine.
So is mine.
How many windows are on this house?
How many bullet holes are there?
This looks like disaster.