This Old House, Part III

I'm going to have to take this in stages, because it is just so many photos to load. Today, I'll show you the before and after of the outside and the downstairs. Tomorrow I'll load the upstairs. Some of the pictures aren't from the exact same angles, so I tried to take a few more. Hopefully, it will give you a clear picture of the transformation. Also, I forgot to take a picture of the new front door, and well, it's dark now, so I'll have to put that with tomorrow's post. (I have to show you the new door, because I really like it, especially since I painted it.)

The front of the house. Before:

After. We just painted it this past spring, and I love the new color. It looked a little orange until I finished the green, and now I think it's the perfect tan. The picture is far away, but we added stone flower beds and put in all new grass this year.

While we're outside. Here is the back of the house before.

And now. We took off the porch and put in a new door. The barn in the left of the before picture is long gone, too. I also whacked away at the lilac bush that was blocking my view of the back yard.

Moving inside. Here is the living room, standing at the front door. Ta-DA! Same angle.
Looking back toward the door.

And now.
We added that French door when we moved the stairs. That room is an office/landing for both sets of stairs. It used to be the green bedroom.Now it looks like this...
The other bedroom had water damage on the plaster.The plaster is gone, but we did manage to save the floor. However, you can't see it in the picture. It's our guest bedroom now, so I haven't done much decorating. (I'm just thrilled to have another queen bed in the house. Josie and I spent more than a few nights in this room when she was a newborn.) Remember the nasty bathroom?
With the pink curtain and the window over the tub...
This shows the new floor.
But what about the shower? Well, we took out his hallway...
To make room for this... (I am no longer a tiling novice. After three floors and two showers, I think I count as experienced.) By the way, that is the same tub. I demanded that we keep it. It is cast iron, weighs about 700 lbs, and it is about fifteen inches deep. You can't buy a tub that deep anymore that will fit in a normal shower space. So, I completely understand if you need a bath instead of a shower when you come to visit.

And now for the gross old kitchen. I had to retake some of the kitchen photos so you could see the exact same angles. It has changed so much. This is the same corner now. I love these cabinets. They are knotty cherry, and the doors are one piece instead of five. We put a light cherry finish on the wood floors in the living room to match. So, you'll see above that we moved the sink. We also knocked out a wall. The next two photos are from the same spot. And now. I took a second so you can see the rest of the kitchen. By moving the basement stairs, we added three feet to the kitchen, thus moving the stove back. This is standing by the bar, looking to the back door. There's no before picture of this because there was a wall there. (I just wanted to prove that I still have a refrigerator. j/k)I had to throw this last one in. The built-in is new. I built it myself. Not too bad for a girl.


Stay tuned. Next time: the upstairs and the front door

This Old House- Part II

We didn't take that many pictures of the "during" process. This entire project is a tribute to my husband's amazing work ethic and his unwavering diligence once he starts a project. I know of people who have remodeled houses for years, sometimes never finishing. A lot of people say they've remodeled their houses when all they've done is switch out the carpet and repaint the walls, maybe replace a sink. We didn't remodel this house. We gutted it and rebuilt it completely. It was amazing how much wood and concrete we hauled out of this house. We completed the entire remodel (trim included) in fifteen months. There is nothing left undone except the unfinished basement, which Nathan is chomping at the bit to finish.

This was the living room after we took out the shag carpet. This wood floor is the only original floor left in the whole house. We managed to save it and refinish it. This is the kitchen at the beginning of the demolition.

And this is the kitchen a few weeks later. Nathan is standing in the same corner pictured above. See the log exterior walls behind him. This house is solid. I am no longer afraid of tornadoes (not that we get them here.)

Good-bye nasty bathroom.

This was the green bedroom.

This is my living room. That is the front door behind Ethan. The corner bedroom (the green one) we sacrificed to make and office and an opening for both sets of stairs. This was taken right before Lynn cut out the floor in the old hallway and put in a new set of stairs. Taking out the old basement stairs added three feet to our kitchen.

Upstairs we were already rebuilding. We removed the hidden rooms to make closets, and this storage cubby, which goes the length of the house. This was where the built-in dresser used to be.

The old kitchen gone, we moved this wall back and added three feet to our master bedroom. It does have a sloped ceiling, but I actually like it that way.

Obviously with this much destruction in the house, we had to move out. We'd originally planned to live on one level and remodel the other, but when we realized we'd have to redo all the plumbing and electrical, it meant doing it all at once. We rented the cheapest apartment we could find. It was a tiny one bedroom, and-- I'm not exaggerating about this-- our current master bedroom is bigger than the entire apartment. We put the bunk beds and our queen bed in the bedroom, and there was only about 12 inches in between them. There wasn't room for Mazie's bed, so the boys had to sleep in one bunk and she slept in the other or sometimes on the floor.

This Old House, Part I

This weekend I was thinking about our house.  I decided to take you back in time to see where we were, how far we've come and where we are now with this house.

So, imagine it's October 28, 2005. That is the day we closed on our first home and got the keys. Before doing anything else, we went to visit the house, walk through it and take pictures. Prepare yourself. It wasn't pretty. We bought the house from the estate of a 90 year old woman. Her husband had died a decade earlier, and the house had basically no maintenance since. This was the best picture I could get of the front, because the bushes were so overgrown, you couldn't see the house from the street. The front door.


This is the view standing in the front door. That little gas stove in the corner was all the heat it had on the ground level. It got well below zero that December, and we had sleeping bags piled over our kids while they slept. We also had space heaters in the bedrooms, but they didn't seem to do enough. The same room, looking back toward the front door.
Now, for the kitchen. Like many old houses, the kitchen was separated from the living/dining room by a doorway. The door had been removed. I was standing in the doorway for this first picture. Notice the mismatched cabinets, the nasty old tile flooring. There was no counter space in the cooking area. It had a single sink that was only about eight inches deep, but I loved those tall white cabinets on the side. I managed to put all my quart jars in those cabinets. It was incredible. Still, the kitchen was gross. We lived in the house for three months as is.
This is the downstairs bath. Nice floor, huh? It was tiny, too. See how the tub touches both walls. The window was nice, too. No chance of showering without flashing the neighbors. Actually, there was no shower, just a tub. The curtain was disgusting plastic, so I took it down and lined the window with the privacy film, so we could get in and out of the tub without scaring the neighbors. I took only baths for three months.
There were two bedrooms downstairs. This was one. It at least had nice wood floors, but they were really trashed. This was the other. It had 50-year-old linoleum floors, wide metal blinds that looked like they hadn't been cleaned in twenty years, and my favorite, they nasty green paint. The walls were all lath and plaster, so they were cracked and stained and uneven in places.
These were the stair to the basement. They opened to the back door and another doorway to the kitchen.
This is the back porch. Here you can see the logs. The house is log construction with stucco added over it later. They didn't stucco inside the porch.
This is the back of the house. The back porch, and what would later become my master bedroom window. At the time it was....
A kitchen, complete with a 1940's refrigerator and.... Gas cook stove.The upstairs was an apartment with a separate outside entrance. It was connected to the downstairs by a small hallway. The four rooms upstairs were a tiny bedroom, a larger room, which they would have used as a living room, the kitchen and a bathroom. This was of the "living room". That is a built-in dresser, and there was no way to save it since we moved that wall back four feet.

The builder of this house was German, and in 1935 when he built it, the Nazis were rising in power. He believed there would come a day when his neighbors would come for him because of his nationality. When he built the house, he built hidden rooms behind the walls, so there would be somewhere for him to hide. (The Hiding Place, but in reverse.) Behind the built-in dresser was a hidden room.

Here's Ethan in the crawl spaces. See the log wall behind him. That is the back of the house.

This is the small bedroom. It's now Mazie's room, and it is the only room in the house that didn't change much. After we gutted it, we put the sheet rock right back where the lath had been. It retained the sloped shape on the corner and everything.
And finally, the upstairs bathroom. Again, a window right in the shower.
The broken toilet and sink. The upstairs plumbing was turned off when we bought the house because none of it worked.
So, that was the beginning. The start of our big adventure. How's that for a first home? Next time I'll show you what we did to it.