Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
NICOLE: Coming up on "Rehab Addict"...
Aah!
...I continue working on the interior
of this cute little 1920s bungalow.
There was a huge hole in the roof when I found it...
Oh, boy.
...and a lot of water damage to the kitchen walls
because of it.
Look at all that water damage coming in from the roof.
The roof is patched,
but there's still a lot to take care of in this kitchen.
The wall needs an all-new skim coat and painting,
there's the vinyl flooring that has to come up...
Hardwood floors.
...and the original cabinets need a fresh sanding.
That's good old kitchen grease.
This kitchen could be one of my greatest...
I can't finish the kitchen when I have a leaking roof.
...if I can only get it finished.
I give up on this!
I buy and sell houses,
but I'm not your average flipper.
NICOLE: 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.
-- Captions by VITAC --
Closed Captions provided by Scripps Networks, LLC.
The latest home I'm working
to bring back from Minneapolis' condemned list
is this cute little 1920s bungalow.
I started with the exterior, adding a new roof
and rebuilding all the decorative brickwork
to match the original bungalow look and feel.
On the inside, I completed
turning the attic space into a spacious master suite,
including an added bathroom with a gorgeous claw-foot tub.
Now I want to finish the kitchen,
where years of water damage has left the room dirty and smelly.
This kitchen doesn't have much to demo.
We have these beautiful original cabinets,
the sink, and that's it.
I'm gonna take all the beadboard off.
We're gonna rip the floor out.
I'm hoping we have some hardwood floor underneath there.
These are like smelling salts for me.
It's a room deodorizer,
because this house smells so wrong.
It's a combination of wild cats and water damage.
Aah!
[ Laughing ] Oh, my God!
That is so disgusting!
[ Laughs ]
I'm gonna smell like an air freshener!
All right. Let's do it.
This is a really cool feature
that you find a lot of times in 1920s, 1930s homes.
It's stamped plaster to give it a subway-tile look.
I've replaced the leaky roof
but still don't know the toll it took on this wall.
Look at all that water damage coming in from the roof.
Hardwood floors.
And the nice thing is, because of the water damage,
the floor is flooded, so it's all tearing pretty easily.
Lookit.
This kitchen has a couple nice surprises.
One -- The beautiful hardwood floors
that we see throughout the rest of the home
are here in this kitchen.
And, of course,
it's just got all the glue and adhesive on it,
and all the water damage that was in here
really made the floor easy to pop up.
Now it's just a matter of sanding it all down.
And, really, the rest of it
is all skimcoating and plaster repair.
Other than that, I'm absolutely in love with this kitchen,
'cause I'm gonna add a dishwasher
and build a cool little cabinet underneath the sink,
and that's it.
So now we've ripped all the linoleum out,
and now all we have left is the usual.
It's just this tar-paper backing,
and we could sit here and try to get it off,
but it's kind of silly.
We run a drum sander over it for a good hour,
and all this will be gone.
Otherwise, we would be in here
scraping forever and ever and ever.
You think it's maple?
I do.
Yeah.
A lot of older houses had maple in the kitchen.
Okay.
It's gonna be pretty with those water stains,
to tell you the truth.
Normally, I go with all the water-base,
but every single piece of woodwork in here is natural,
and they used oil, so if I don't do the floors in oil,
we're gonna have this weird differential.
It's gonna look really good.
...this is gonna be the one time, George...
...I let you do oil.
This time, I'm going with an oil-based polyurethane,
which will better match the amber color
that's already on the cabinets.
A water-based poly would keep the floors a bit lighter,
and then they just wouldn't blend in.
But first we have to finish sanding.
There was so much water damage in this kitchen
because the hole in the roof was literally right above here,
and for the last three years, water has just come in
and buried itself right in this wall,
which means the entire wall had just pretty much come apart.
We let it dry out,
and we're just gonna put a nice bit of skim coat,
which is really just mud,
but it puts a nice, clean surface over everything.
What I love about this kitchen
is that it has stamped-plaster walls.
I see this a lot in older homes,
and it was just a design right into the plaster
to make it look like subway tile,
versus the expense of putting in subway tile.
Years ago, a plaster guy would come in,
he'd put all the mud on the wall,
and then he'd draw --
He'd stamp in the subway-tile look.
I don't walk into too many homes anymore
where the stamped subway tile is still in place.
A lot of people just end up painting it
or drywalling over it.
I'm saving the stamped plaster down below
and simply skimcoating the walls higher up
where they need repaired.
Skimcoating is just kind of evening out the surfaces,
making it one even plane so that I can sand and then paint.
You do a layer. You walk away. You let it dry.
You go to another project in the house.
You come back, put another layer of skim coat on.
It's definitely not a five-minute process.
Many hours of skimcoating
and many, many more hours of just letting this kitchen dry,
and we're finally ready for paint.
And with all this -- I know, call me crazy --
I'm going with white.
This kitchen is very tiny.
I'm just gonna put a stove here,
use the sink that's already here.
But this bank of cabinets over here that's all original house
has more storage than most big kitchens have in it.
This big silver monster had to go in
'cause of the HVAC system,
and out of all the places in the house,
this is the room that I could actually sacrifice
about a 1x1 space.
I just need to frame it in and cover that thing up.
This is one of my worst nightmares.
Every single day, this is what I face.
Downpour of rain, which means more soggy basements
and the paint that we've done already not drying.
I'm calling the roofer
because we just put a new roof on this house,
and it is leaking.
That is a water leak.
Hey, I got a roof leak where you guys did that patch on 25th.
This is in the kitchen where we had that big hole.
Yeah, the whole wall is all wet and bubbling.
I can't finish the kitchen when I have a leaking roof.
And now all of that will have to be cut out,
and I'll have to redo it all again.
Ugh!
If I see this stuff again,
he's coming out to tear off that roof.
[ Alarm blares ]
I'm on hold with 911.
OFFICER: Yeah.
You know you have this in backwards, right?
There might have been just a spark of hatred in my eye.
Oh, wow, Clark.
Good news -- The leak in the roof is fixed.
Bad news -- I have to start the process
of skimcoating and painting all over again.
NICOLE: Roof leaks are notorious.
A little, tiny drop of water
can come in way over on that side of the house
and find this weird little trail and end up here.
But usually, putting on a new roof
should solve your problem.
I'm gonna scrape the wall again.
I'm gonna skimcoat again, and I'm gonna start from scratch.
And then if I see this stuff again,
he's coming out to tear off that roof.
I can't sell a house with a roof leak.
With all the walls scraped and skimcoating redone,
it's finally time to repaint.
The best way to find a leak is to repaint, dry anything out.
If for some reason there's still water in these walls,
it's gonna bubble right through,
and I'll know within a day or two.
But for now,
I'm gonna give the roofers the benefit of the doubt.
I'm gonna recoat the walls again,
and hopefully it takes this time.
We're ready to have the water turned back on in this house,
so there's a city worker out to install our new water meter.
See if there's an MIU box. That's it.
What does it do, then?
Okay.
That sounds great.
Okay.
We got the water turned on today,
which is a miracle in itself.
It took like nine phone calls, three visits,
and now we finally have a new water meter.
Okay.
New readings. New everything.
I need to put on a new back door to this house,
so I'm having my carpenter work on installing one.
You know you have this in backwards, right?
I'm just kidding.
I didn't even get, like, a glimmer of anything from him.
There might have been just a spark of hatred in my eye.
Oh, wow, Clark.
It was Monday. [ Chuckles ]
[ Alarm blares ]
I get here, and there's this alarm going off.
I'm on hold with 911. Like, they put you on hold.
'Cause I want to know what that sound is.
Do a little stroll around the neighborhood,
give 911 a call,
and find out it's the house across the street.
It's a smoke alarm.
The house across the street is also being renovated,
so I have to track down who's working on it.
I called them, and luckily
their crew pulled up just as soon as I got them on the phone,
'cause I was ready to jump through the second-floor window.
They're saying it's a fire alarm that set it off.
The police show up. It's always a little drama.
OFFICER: Yeah.
Yeah.
They've got it secured now.
Now I can go back to work.
Over the years,
somebody really did a number with a knife on here.
And this is completely easy to fix.
I have this huge piece of metal going right through the kitchen
because we had to put all the vents in for the furnace,
so my best idea is to frame it in
and cover it up with some really cool old materials that I had.
That way, it looks charming
and doesn't stick out like an eyesore.
I think if we just build a frame out from this, right?
But I want to do it as tight as possible.
I don't want to lose any space in here.
Basically, 12x16 is what I need.
Okay.
Okay.
Later on, we can cut them and put them back where they were.
[ Saw whirring ]
There we go. All right.
I'm using some leftover beadboard from my last project.
I think it'll add some much-needed character
to this kitchen.
I had just enough leftover, I think, to finish this,
but it's gonna take every single little piece.
So, with this, you never want to make the wrong cut
because then I'm out of materials.
It always looks like a crazy patchwork quilt
until I put the final touches on it.
This is a very cool original kitchen.
It's very rare for me to find one in a house this old,
so adding old house materials isn't gonna ruin it.
[ Bell dings ]
The average hardware in America
has been in business at least 30, 40 years,
which means they usually have a back room full of stock.
So, if they can't find it, I always say,
"Can you look in the basement or the back room?"
And this is exactly what I needed today --
the kitchen-sink faucet.
You can't walk into any big-box store and get this
because it's for an apron sink, and it goes into the wall.
But every hardware I've ever walked into
seems to have at least one in the back room for me.
MAN: Have a good day.
You, too.
[ Bell dings ]
There we go. I like it.
I bought an 18-inch dishwasher to add to this kitchen,
and even though it's small,
it's proving to be a big challenge
fitting into this space.
Okay, so this is where it's gonna go.
Wow.
JEFF: I do like the panel. I like the way that looks.
Okay. Push it back over there again.
If we did that...
Does it look less crazy if we do that?
If you did it like this, now you just need one end panel,
and you could maybe have some kind of a countertop.
Can you put this back in place?
I think I'm gonna like this better, to be honest with you,
'cause it looks like it's proportionate.
JEFF: Yeah.
Overall, the cabinets in this kitchen look pretty good to me.
They're a little gross, and they're dirty,
and someone definitely thought,
"It's a wood countertop. I might as well cut on it."
Look at all these knife marks.
If somebody has used your countertop as a butcher board,
it's time to refinish it.
I don't want to do too much
because the original finish is always the best.
It's oranged over the years because it's oil-base,
and the sun shines through, and it actually oranges the wood.
The wood countertop is gonna get completely sanded
and then a nice coat of new polyurethane over the top.
Oil-base so that it matches the rest of the kitchen.
But it's most important to know
this isn't something you rip out.
This is something you refinish. It's solid wood.
It's been here since 1928.
It's been beat up, but the nice thing is,
because it is solid wood, I can easily refinish it.
Over the years,
somebody really did a number with a knife on here.
And this is completely easy to fix.
I'm just taking my sander,
and I'm gonna do a nice, smooth edge right here.
I'm gonna do a smooth edge right here.
So, I can take out all these gouges,
one by one, and make this a smooth surface again.
Gross.
This that's peeling up right now --
That's good old kitchen grease.
With 80 years of knife gouges and kitchen grease
to sand away,
this job is going to take a while.
These countertops have been in here since 1929.
Where most people see a soggy, wet mess,
all I saw was cabinets and sink.
I'm adding a nice, clean coat of poly to this countertop.
We have it all sanded down now.
I need to make sure that I match the gold that's already here,
and by using an oil-base, as you can see, it goes right on.
And after a few coats of this,
it will blend in with the rest of it.
Wood countertops, I think, are a great addition to a kitchen,
and when they look like they're all gummed up and they're a mess,
sand them down and refinish them.
A couple good coats of polyurethane
means that this surface is a little bit more stronger,
and the other thing is, it's water-resistant.
These countertops have been in here since 1929.
Had these been laminate or some man-made material,
they wouldn't have lasted this long,
and I certainly wouldn't have been able
to refinish them in just a few short hours
with some sanding and a new coat of polyurethane.
This bank of cabinets alone, if I were to go new,
is easily, on a cheap day, $500, $600.
All in all, refinishing this bank of cabinets
runs about $20, $30.
All these cabinets were custom-made on-site.
They fit the wall. They fit the kitchen.
They fit the time period.
This is another true testament
that original is always the best.
I think this might be the first house that I walked into
and the original 1923 kitchen was still here.
Where most people see a soggy, wet mess,
I saw well beyond the hole in the roof,
the soggy plaster, the ugly linoleum.
All I saw was cabinets and sink.
Besides humans, water does the most damage
and poses the biggest threat to old houses,
and this one, the water did a number.
Anytime you have a huge hole in a roof
and it just sits there, after you repair the roof,
it's not as easy as just put some paint back in here.
You have to let the walls dry out.
Once all of the moisture was gone,
it was a matter of rebuilding this wall,
doing some patching, skimcoating,
and, most importantly, putting a good primer sealing on
before we put our final paint color...
which was white, 'cause I love white kitchens.
In this kitchen, the water did me a favor,
because the linoleum never quite sealed to the floors,
so when I went to remove it, it was a pretty easy process.
And what did it reveal?
Beautiful maple hardwood floors.
The cabinets -- They were dirty.
Years of caked-on food and grease
and just overall household dirt.
But you can take it all away with a little sanding.
Now the kitchen looks like a 1923 kitchen
with some modern amenities.
I added a much-needed dishwasher.
I just simply disguised it
by taking some old salvaged doors and paneling it in.
Now what we're left with
is this beautiful, fresh, clean, inviting kitchen.
This kitchen is completely functional for modern day
but has the appeal of yesterday.
Next time on "Rehab Addict"...
This house is loaded in quartersawn oak from 1923.
This is where granny did her drinking.
Okay, one door down. Half-dozen to go.
This wall sink is every problem you could ever think of.