Our House

We purchased this home in June of 2006 and it has deffinatley been a "fixer upper". A lot of you haven't been able to visit and see our latest project, so here are some pictures of the progress we've made. Unfortunatley, we don't have many 'before' pictures, so you'll have to imagine what the place was like before we got started. The house was built in 1900 and, as we began working on it, we felt like nothing had been done to it over the past one hundred and six years! It seemed like everything needed replaced, right down to the electrical. Even the heater and the plumbing needed work.
Not much has been done to the outside of the house yet, though the yard is much greener than last year and we cleaned out the flower beds a few months ago. While cleaning out the flowerbeds around the house, we pulled lots of weeds and dead plants. Behind those we found several old cinder blocks. That wouldn't have been anything to write about, except that there were people's names and their birth dates and dates of death on them! I was pretty freaked out but when I asked at City Hall, I was told that back then people used the grave markers for construction after they had been replaced at the cemetary with the headstone. Whew!
This is the small entry, you can go straight into the living room or right, where this picture was taken from, into the TV room. When we bought the house, we didn't even know about the doorway into the TV room, the previous owners had it covered with a piece of furniture. The little room had a really wierd texture to it and was the UGLIEST shade of yellow/orange I have ever seen. It sort of felt like you were inside a pumpkin. Mom spent a lot of time scraping the texture off of the walls in that room so we could re-texture and paint. We still need to replace the front door, but that's a ways down our list.
So, you can either go straight from the entry into the living room, which is this room with the laminate floors. Or, you can go right, into the TV room. Basically we just painted these two rooms and tore up the dirty, old, blue carpet from both rooms.


From the living room you go straight to the kitchen or right to the guest bedroom. This was the only bedroom we had for about five months while we worked on the upstairs. It was pretty crowded trying to find a place for everything and everyone! We painted and replaced the carpet in this room.



We completley gutted the kitchen, which was a filthy job. While knocking down the ceiling, everyone and everything got covered in about three inches of black dirt! We put down the flooring, then had the cabinets hung, and the granite countertops intstalled. The entire kitchen had to be rewired and we put in recessed lighting. The floors in the house are pretty far from being level, so it was a bit of a challenge getting the cabinets and countertops level.
Straight through the kitchen is the laundry room and back door. We have a pretty big yard with a huge black walnut tree. The squirrels love it, but it's a little scary sometimes to hear them running across the roof in the middle of the night! The lawn needs some work and we haven't decided what to do with the fire pit in the north east corner. We've used it once but there's not much grass around it, mostly stickers. Both the front and back porches need replaced. Once we get motivated, that will probably be our next big undertaking. The porches are my favorite part of the house. That's the first thing I noticed when we pulled up...maybe that's why I overlooked all of the work that needed to be done!

So, back to the kitchen. To the right of it is the dining room and all we did there was paint and put down the laminate flooring. We still need to replace the windows, they're pretty old. There is a big walk-in closet on the east wall, next to the bathroom. The stairs are also off of the dining room.

The bathroom was another big project. The water heater was in the corner in a wierd closet that took up about a third of the entire room. We had the water heater moved into the walk-in closet just next to the bathroom and took out the shower that looked like it had been around almost as long as the house. We replaced the shower with a tub/shower and put down vinyl flooring and a pedastal sink. Nothing could be salvaged except the toilet!

There are three bedrooms upstairs but the previous owners only used two because the master bedroom and bath were down to the rafters. There is also a loft when you get upstairs that we haven't decided what to use it for. We're still waiting to get the railing put up so the boys don't fall off the stairs, so we're using the space for storage right now. We sheetrocked the entire upstairs, minus one bedroom, and had it all textured, replaced every window, and we rented a paint sprayer. It was pretty funny seeing Jeff covered in paint! There weren't any closets upstairs so we also had those framed before hanging sheetrock.


The room that is Kamden's was painted white with all different colors of shapes painted on the walls, floor, and ceiling. We called it the 'Clown Room' because it looked like a circus threw up in it. We carpeted the entire upstairs and had vinyl flooring put in the master bathroom in March but we've had the trim purchased for a few months. We just haven't found the motivation to get it painted and put up yet.


Ethan's room had an old chimney in it and when Jeff knocked it down he found an old, white vase with green flowers on it. It was broken a little on one side but we have it on a shelf with a frame holding different kinds of wallpaper that we found throughout the house and an old cough syrup bottle Jeff found in the wall from 1906.



After the sheetrock had been hung in the master bedroom, we had to blow insullation in most of the upstairs. There was also an old door and two broken windows on the east wall, so we took those out and put in a sliding glass door. Right now it just goes out to the roof, but eventually we're planning on putting some kind of balcony out there. Another thing to add to the never ending list!

The master bathroom took a lot of work, there was an old cast iron tub and sink that were HEAVY! We replaced the tub with a shower and put in a pedastal sink and also replaced the toilet after having the plumbing updated.
Jeff put up all of the doors upstairs but is still trying to find time to get that finished before the doorknobs and trim can be put up. He also crawled underneath the entire house and put up insullation and we had air conditioning put in this summer. We're kind of burnt out with working on the house, and, as you can see, we have a lot to finish (and start) before we put it on the market next year. It's been an interesting, and stressful, process but we've learned a lot...mostly that it's an experience we know we don't want to have again! At least we can look at this page and really see what we've accomplished over the last year...