Reminiscing complete!

As the current bathroom remodeling project is coming along so slowly, it's a good thing I started this little reminiscing series. Since I've been showing old photos of our first house remodel, I had better show the finished product before you think we lived in a wreck. We were so happy in our little bungalow by the end, it was really hard to leave. We felt that first house could have met all our needs for the future, so I'm glad we never saw it as a "starter home". It was just home!

This was no overnight transformation, like they portray on the design shows. The saying in the construction world is "fast, cheap, good; pick two!". I think we only ever got one of those qualities on any single project. It took four years and more thousands than I initially expected to get to the point of the "after" pictures below, but we wouldn't have traded those experiences for anything. 

Exterior before

After

After

After

Living room before

After

After

Dining room before

After

Kitchen before

After

After

Study before

After

Downstairs bath before

After

Master bedroom before

After

After

South bedroom before

After

Gable bedroom before

After

Upstairs bath before

After

No before shots, but carriage house/garage after

Carriage house loft after

Fish pond we added

Front yard in spring

Reminiscing II

As I mentioned in the last post, we really did not know what we were getting into with our first home. I had always dreamed of owning an old house, and Jeff was willing to learn some manual labor skills, but neither of us had ANY experience working on houses or decorating. I had never even painted anything! We had no tools and a very small budget. But we were eager and innocent (and much younger, as you can see in the photos)!

Reminiscing

Several conversations and events lately have me reminiscing about our very first house. We started our journey as homeowners and DIYers almost exactly ten years ago. In hindsight, we really had no clue what we were doing! But we had been house hunting for over a year, looking for a historic, affordable little first home that we could put our stamp on. We found our fixer-upper in a quiet, central location with a large yard and beautiful (though overgrown) landscaping.

After the home inspection, we almost didn't buy that first house! But the seller lowered the price to accommodate some big repair expenses, and we jumped right in. It needed a new roof (decking and shingles), a new water heater and new venting due to dangerous carbon monoxide issues, significant kitchen and bath updates, and a very thorough cosmetic overhaul.

We bought the house in December and had to immediately get the roof replaced before it got too cold. I don't think I even have exterior photos before the new roof went on because it was already dark on the evening we closed on the purchase, and the roofing crew arrived first thing the next morning!

Lots of potential, and lots of peeling paint

The mess of old shingles covered up the mess that was the old steps and porch

Front entrance and living room

Dining room

Blue, blue kitchen; and more dated ceiling fans!

Looking past the patched walls into the study

Dirty bathroom

Peeling paint and filthy carpet

What's with the mint green fascination? Our current house was covered in it, too!

Little country ducks border and heart stencils everywhere

Blank Slate

After all our bathroom remodeling woes over the past few days, we are thankfully down to a blank slate. We got the self-leveling concrete underlayment poured this weekend to take out the worst of the floor dip (more than inch drop from the edge of the floor to the middle, and that's only a distance of about three feet)! The patch looks a bit awkward right now, but it will all be covered by new flooring, so appearance hardly matters. We'll just be glad not to get dizzy and off balance on the walk to the commode anymore!



While picking up the deep soaker tub at Home Depot Sunday, I started chatting with a very friendly lady who was contemplating a bathroom remodel herself. After discussing the merits of different tubs and surrounds, she insisted on checking us out with her military ID so she could gift us with her service member discount. Since I used credit card points for a store gift card, our tub worked out to be free. I even have a few dollars left on the card! It's nice to save a little money here and there, since budget creep always happens during these projects.

Living Dangerously

What does one do with sharp, prickly, potentially dangerous small objects that have outlived their usefulness? Why, drop them into the nearest available wall cavity, of course!

Innocent hole in the wall, right?

This is what I found after removing the old recessed medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. A large pile of rusty old razor blades, bent sewing pins, and broken needles!

There were probably more that went down between the bricks!

I think I was aware of the little slot in the back of a medicine cabinet being used for that purpose many years ago, but I guess I wasn't prepared to find decades worth of old sharps in my bathroom wall!

But that was only the first brush with danger. As Jeff was tearing out the tub surround later the same evening, he happened upon an electrical outlet in the wall. A live outlet with plugs in it buried right behind the flimsy fiberglass surround, just under all the plumbing. You don't have to be an experienced remodeler to know that water and electricity DO NOT mix! We still have no idea what it goes to, or which breaker it's on, so we have been gingerly working around it for the time being.

See that orange outline around the electrical box? This is exactly where Jeff found the outlet, just inches from the tub spout and all that insulation!

So, you would think that would be our excitement for the week. But no. When you start messing with an old house, that's when problems pop up. In order for us to tear out the old wall-mounted sink (on which the shut off valve had broken), the plumbers came out and capped off the old galvanized pipes in the basement that run to the bathroom. All was well for about 24 hours, until I noticed a strange noise suddenly. It turns out that the cap on the cold water line split and water was pouring out in the basement. This was just as we were sitting down to dinner, so Jeff had to get in the car and drive down to the corner where our water main is located (on the cross street about 500-600 feet as the crow flies, but he wasn't about to walk the bumpy pasture in the dark) and shut off our water. The plumber can't make it until the morning, so I filled a few jugs and pails in the time it took Jeff to get the water off. Sponge bath it is tonight, then!

The blue arrow is pointing to the broken cap on the end of a very rusty galvanized pipe. You don't need an arrow to point out the growing pool of water underneath!

Going Bare

A friend's recent blog post about stripping paint reminded me I could use a heat gun on my chippy old mantel. This is the third mantel we're planning to add to the house, making a total of four fireplaces (some fully functional, some more decorative).

Stripping paint is such a relaxing, meditative task. At least, it is for me. I'm a bit of a "picker"; you know, someone who always has to pick that scab or squeeze that pimple or pull that hangnail. So carefully peeling and scrapping away bubbly, gooey layers of paint feeds right into that obsession. I didn't quite get it all done in one afternoon, and it was so hard to stop and lay down the heat gun. I kept needing to get just one more spot!

Jeff checked in and documented my progress from time to time. There is a weird reddish "stain" impregnating the raw wood, but since I'm planning to repaint, it won't matter.

Going...

Going...

Almost gone!

New Acquisition

As is Evans, Inc. style, we never wait to finish a project before beginning (or at least planning) another! So while I wait for the plumbers to get to us and our small bath reno, I'm strategizing about the future master bedroom.

You might remember this room:



I shan't even apologize for the mess. This is a big step up from what it looked like when we bought the house!



It was a big, scary, uncomfortable, unfinished attic space (remind me to tell the freaky "Chucky-esque" story sometime). Now at least it's comfy-cozy temperature wise, thanks to the foam insulation. Very expensive, but very necessary if we were actually going to live upstairs. But it consumed a decent (or perhaps indecent) chunk of our budget, so finishing the room has had to wait.

We are finally ready to continue work up there, and since I'm a bit stymied by some difficult framing and electrical decisions at the moment, it's much more fun to think about decor. So I needed a jumping off point, something to inspire the whole room. And I think I've found it in this vintage Turkish rug we just purchased:



It's rather different from my usual style, but I'm thinking of something warm and colorful and eclectic, along these lines:



It will likely be several months before I get to the fun part, but for now I have the rug laid out in the attic and I open the door every now and then and mull over my options. Who knows? We may change our minds by then, but it's fun to plan. Jeff calls it my "Fantasy Decorating" game!