The ever changing house
This is how our home looked when we first bought her.
and this is her now...
As I said the ever changing house.
I will go into the projects we have already done and the projects that we will begin this year. For a 100 + year home she has seen a lot of change in the past 6 years from our family.
More to come soon.
June26, 2014
The Living room!
Well this is how the living room started as. We have changed this room a lot over the years, pulling carpets, putting in a floor. We also had put in a woodstove over where you see the flu, but this would also change.
This is a view from across the door that you just saw. The recent changes came about because the family bought my husband his reclining chair and because of the wall space we needed to change the layout of the room.
We had decided a long time ago that a second bathroom was going to be put out in the Laundry room, but we would have to change the door leading into that room, so there would be room for a bathroom, so we cut out the window to make a new door!
Changing the doorway allowed us to have new wall space for the bathroom and also move the woodstove to that side. Yes we moved a chimney to be able to do this.
Our wall now looked like this! I forgot to say that while we had started cutting the wall and pulling out the old window, we found this beautiful wood wall. My husband knew that this was going to be a project of recovering the old wall, so I did!
We had decided on putting blue slate tile down for the woodstove, so Wayne started prepping the cement board for the tiles.
It was so pretty! This was his first time dealing with tile and he did a great job.
Moving the woodstove meant that we had to move the chimney pipe, which means a new hole through my ceiling. The place that we had fixed did not lay perfect between two joists so, he had to go through one and box out the hole so it was well supported. What was supposed to be an easy job ended up being almost an all day affair!
Got the woodstove in place and made sure it was centered before we started getting the pipe together.
There she is!
Due to the fact that we had to use the old window frame for the door, we had to shave down the old door to fit. I then repainted the door to try and match the paint that we had found under the old wall.
My favorite part, getting all my old stuff out so everyone can see them!
This is our living room transformation! At least for now.
IN THE BEGINING
It's only fair to see where we began with this house,when no one really wanted her, but us. We were lucky to get this beautiful house as a foreclosed home. We were smart to get pictures of every single detail of this home when we first saw it, so I have comparisons to where we are now. I guess we will start with the first room we decided to change, the kitchen.
At first I thought if it cleaned up, we would just keep them. When we turned on the water to the house I heard something in the kitchen, it was a leak under the sink. In investigating the leak I noticed that someone had put insulation inside the lower cabinets. So I was unable to clean the cabinets so we needed cabinets quick. We were lucky because we had just purchased cabinets from craigslist, that were brand new, but my husband would not have cabinets for the garage.
So my wonderful husband started the install of our cabinets into the kitchen.
It was easy.....well to watch.
As he was installing I noticed with a friend there was enough room for a dishwasher! I was thrilled, Wayne not so much, he had to remove the cabinets again so he could run the water line.
Now the cabinets look like this, as of right now. Still a work in progress and we never put anything on credit cards, so we need to wait till we have the extra money to improve on it. There are so many things on the list( as my husband calls it ), that HAVE to be done; putting money into it looking better just doesn't make sense right now.
The front hallway
When we first bought the house it was covered in this ugly blue and brown carpet, I hated it.
So when we finally signed the papers to the house the first thing I did was pull the carpet, only to find that there was beautiful aged wood floors underneath it all.
The stairs just needed to be cleaned, so we cleaned. Oh yes forgot about every darn carpet nail I had to pull out of them with needle nose pliers, what a pain.
I scrubbed the floors and added oil to them. Over time they started to clean up very nicely.
It took a very long time. We wanted to add a fan in the hallway to help with airflow, so we started to remove the ceiling tiles and found this.....
My husband's worse nightmare. He knew we were keeping it exposed, when I said "Oh Honey." and then there was one more thing added to that dreaded list.
Look how pretty it is!
After he got the fan in we decided to keep the molding off the ceiling because I knew I was going to paint. Just didn't know when and still don't. Have to wait for cash in hand. Then one day at a friends house I saw her backsplash that she had been working on. I loved it! Now where could I put such a thing?
It was tiny pieces of thin wood tiles that I individually nailed, glued and painted, down the whole wall. Each bundle of 50 tiles only cost $1.67, how could I pass that up? This project I was told by my husband, very lovingly, was all mine!
This is where it is now.
I think it fits well. Maybe this year I'll get this hallway finished.
April 8, 2014
The Bathroom!
This was our poor little bathroom when we first bought our house. It would have worked except for one thing,
The sink had to go!
We didn't want to spend anymore money on the house if we didn't need to, but the sink was so low. You had to bend all the way over to even brush your teeth. It was an instant back ache just to do this daily chore. The sink was awesome for the kids, just not us.
We also did not have a fan to vent out the moist air from the shower. It had caused mold in the past so we decided we also needed to install one of these. Seemed like when we did one thing we had to do something else. My husband was able to get a sink and cabinet from his work for very cheap, so we put this in. We needed more light in the bathroom too, so we installed a plug in over our mirror. So much for spending a little money!
One day while sitting on the toilet, I noticed that the toilet was slanting towards the back of the wall. I let Wayne know of the issue and we then came to the conclusion that we needed to fix the toilet. He pulled the toilet up and thought it would be an easy fix, maybe a seal and tighten it down better, oh no, wouldn't be that easy!
Well first of all the toilet was attached to the very back of the wall, notice the beam on the right, next to the wall, that is only maybe 2 inches thick and is our outer wall. Our toilet was supposed to be attached to this and was falling backwards because it wasn't even attached to anything! Wayne had to add a beam to the back of the wall to attach the toilet to something sturdy! In all of this we found out our floors were rotted, so we laid down new plywood and put in a new floor.
The floor now looks like this. It is a scrap of linoleum we had left over from a project, so we used that! We have plans to turn this bathroom into a closet, so we really didn't want to spend so much money on it, but you do what you need to do to in order to live.
The bathroom had stayed like this until last year when I decided it was time to grow up. Don't get me wrong I love fish, but I had been starring at fish for almost 8 years!
I got rid of the fish curtain and then sewed a new curtain for our bathroom. I have a love for Vintage things, so I decided to decorate our bathroom with Vintage beauty items.
I have a collection of men's shavers and old medicine tins from the thirties on one side of my bathroom.
On the other side are some woman beauty items and some ads from a 1920's magazine.
A very close friend gave me the Powder box sticker and framed it for me and I bought the 1930's glass bathroom shelf at a Flea Market for $5.00! I was so happy to get it.
The same friend when she found out that I was decorating the bathroom in Vintage beauty items found these beauty powder and perfume bottles, so I framed them. This bathroom is probably the only room that looks finished, every other room is half finished!
The bathroom I believe has had it's last renovation for awhile, unless something else goes and needs to be fixed!
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