Whole House Progress Report
The other day I was browsing Trulia and came across the old listing for my house. Wow. I was amazed to be reminded of the state the house was in when I first purchased it. So I figured it was about time that I put together some before and afters to really illustrate how much the house has evolved over the past (almost) two years.
The front really hasn’t changed all that much. The railings and all trim have been painted, as has the front door (which you actually can’t see in this pic). The windows have been replaced and wrapped. Soon, I hope to replace that screen/storm door with something that shows off the beautiful front door, hang a porch swing, and remove those black railings.
Speaking of that front door...
In this shot, you can see that we’ve installed a wooden fence (still needs to be stained/protected) and brought in some gravel. The plan is to bring in even more gravel and to put down mulch between the gravel/parking area and the fence, separated by timberscapes, most likely. Landscaping the front yard will come at some point but it gets very little sunlight so that will be tricky.
Moving inside, here you can see that the lovely mirrored wall (to the left, before) is gone, replaced by a giant leaning bookshelf loaded with books and vinyl. All of the interior walls and ceilings have been stripped down to the plaster and painted. You can also see here that the original heart pine floors have been restored.
It turned out that the fireplace area most likely housed one of those wood stove things at one point, so it just had a chimney stack with a circular opening for a vented pipe leading to the roof. I don’t know any of the technical names for that setup so you’ll have to use your imagination or click here for an example of what I’m kind of referring to. Again, the walls and ceiling were stripped, repaired and painted. I installed a ceiling fan and you can’t see but in the area to the right (and below the two front windows) there was a large radiator that was removed and “replaced” with central heat (gas furnace). I also tore out the old red spanish style tiles in the hearth and replaced those with the same tiles I used in the back bathroom. I haven’t gotten around to actually hanging ANYthing in the house, so, admittedly, it looks a bit sparse in some places. I also painted the fireplace bricks white (for now) and put some shelves in the inset area to house more books.
Here’s a view from the living room into the foyer area. The before pic is actually an in-between but it gives you a good indication of how the wallpaper stripping process went. There was an awful lot of this going on for a good, long while.
Here’s another shot of a similar angle. There was a radiator behind the front door where you can see that the baseboard was never painted.
If you walk straight into the house from the foyer, you’ll enter the dining room. It’s currently not set up as such but that will be changing shortly. This is the only room that still had the original picture rail still in place. You could tell during the stripping process that the bedrooms also had one at some point. Who knows why someone would have removed those. Sad face.
Here’s the super wide hallway - it’s about 6′ wide? - leading to the hall bath and the bedrooms. From this angle you can see into the kitchen through a little pantry-type area. You also get a glimpse of the entry to the attic above.
Here’s the hall bathroom. It was basically demo’d from top to bottom. All of the old tile came out and it was turned into a standing shower (with a tempered glass window for safety).
Here’s a nice view of the newly tiled floor - and a not so nice view of the bathroom before. The opposite side has a porcelain pedestal sink and the original inset medicine cabinet - I couldn’t find a good picture.
This is the main bedroom. In the after shot you can see the closet door to the left and the door to the hallway to the right. I love how these original stained doors really pop against this color (black pepper).
Here’s an angle looking into the bedroom from the doorway. There are three large windows in here. The front porch provides plenty of shade via the front set of double windows. Everything in here was stripped, repaired and repainted and a ceiling fan was installed.
This bedroom is across the hall from the main bedroom. Here you can see the hall bathroom door is open. There’s a closet in this room to the left (not pictured). That small door is an access panel to the plumbing in the hall bathroom shower/tub.
The other side of the second bedroom leads to the back bathroom. It’s significantly larger than the hall bathroom (which was originally the only bathroom in the house). I believe at some point that this room was actually a covered porch of some sort. There’s actually a window between this room and the second bedroom (not pictured). This room was a bathroom when I bought it, and you can see in the left-most picture that the previous owners had installed a wall directly to the right of the toilet (which sits to the right of that sink you can see pictured in the middle image). Today, the sink has been moved to the opposite side of the room right in front of the back window. I still need to purchase a mirror to hang there in front of the window and just below the vanity lights.
OK, let’s be honest, that’s a really ugly before, right? Ew. Both of these pics say -ish because they’re not true before and afters. The room before had a wall right between where the toilet was and where that little UNC bucket is sitting. It also had some pretty gnarly linoleum that looked like someone had cut to fit another room and just laid down like a rug. Pretty awesome. The grey paint is actually porch paint that we put down just to have a “nicer” surface. All of those water damaged areas we filled in with liquid leveler, then came the backer, etc. The after on the right is the finished floor that was done long before got around to finishing off the shower and setting up the sink.
Here we have the laundry room. The floor was replaced with laminate and the board and batten style treatment was used on the walls. The washer and dryer are positioned on the left-hand wall here, opposite the windows.
This room was also a porch area at some point, because there’s another set of windows here that lead to the dining room. Another interesting feature in here is the clapboard siding that’s still visible but was hidden behind that lovely fake wood wall paneling (pictured above). At some point, the back side of the house was closed up and the whole house was wrapped in brick. The siding you see here on the left was the original exterior. Just to the right here out of frame is the back door.
The laundry room leads you back around toward the front of the house and into the kitchen, completing the loop of the home. I guess you could say this room has changed the most dramatically.
In the before pics above, those two areas used to be separated by a wall. So the fridge now sits to the left of that radiator in the above left picture. Basically, where that wine rack that’s to the right of the stove/microwave area is where the wall used to sit.
This is the right side of the kitchen. You can see it from the hallway picture. In here, we had to tear out the old base cabinets since they were too short and too shallow to house such a modern-day appliance. I did manage to keep the upper cabinets with the glass fronts. All of the remaining cabinets were custom built. This bar area has inset lights above. The plan is to install glass shelving here, and to have the light shine down through them to the bar-top area. None of the backsplash tile has actually been grouted yet. I’ve been debating whether to go with a white grout or to go with something darker. The grout lines are very narrow so I’m leaning towards dark. Think something like this.
Not much has changed back here. The next big project will be to build a floating deck spanning from the back steps to the right side of the house. It will extend at least far enough from the house to cover up the old well and will have to skirt around the crawl space access door and the heat pump. I also need to replace that old storm door and repaint the back door.
Here’s a mockup of what I have in mind.
This part of the property has changed the least, that’s for sure. I replaced one of the boarded off doorways into the garage with an actual, functioning door (top left). Ideally, I would love to replace all of the doors - the left hand and side door (in the two left side images) - and just cover the rest. I want to repair the roof and cover the exterior in vinyl. It would also be pretty awesome to find the money in the budget to replace the sliding doors (bottom right) with a large, electronic garage door. One can dream!
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