For more than six years now we have dreamt about what our house would look like once it was painted. Despite the massive changes to the inside of the house, the outside has remained, for lack of a better way to put it, an eye sore. Yes, we had made some small visual progress on…
Happy 100th blog post!!!
It’s hard to believe, but we are nearing the end of our six-year home renovation project. We finally found someone to prep and paint the exterior of the house (more on that in a later post) and that job is complete! We do still have some miscellaneous jobs to do on the exterior, like gutters. …
The Landscaping is COMPLETE (for now)
Our house sat uninhabited for 10 years before we bought it. Prior to that, an elderly gentleman lived here for 30 years. To say that the landscaping had been neglected is a bit of an understatement. When most people buy or build a house it comes with at least an outline of landscaping. For us,…
The Living Room is COMPLETE!
If you asked us what aspect of the entire renovation has been the biggest struggle, the answer would probably come as a surprise. No, it wasn’t the big projects – like sanding and refinishing the floors, repairing the plaster, wiring the house, or rehabbing the old windows. It wasn’t even the fact that we did…
The Vestibule is COMPLETE! (maybe)
The vestibule has probably received the least amount of attention on our blog. In fact, when Amy and I would think through the list of rooms we had left to work on we would always forget about the vestibule, despite the fact that the walls were still exposed plaster, the floors were unfinished and suffered…
Porch Progress and Project Paralysis
Our extra long Spring break gave us the opportunity to ramp up the renovation pace and finally build the stair case. But the pace has slowed way down once break was over and we were officially “back to school.” The reality of guiding two kids through their e-learning homework as well as figuring out how…
Finished Staircase!
I can’t believe I am typing these words. The staircase is done. Done! The stairs have been a major obstacle since day one. We made very few changes to the original floor plan of the house, but the section that did involve most changes revolved around the stairs. It was also one of the most…
Quarantined on the Stairs
Amy and I consider ourselves to be very lucky. While the coronavirus wreaks havoc on the world and upends many people’s lives, we are fortunate to be in good health, we will most likely remain relatively financially secure, and our jobs as teachers allow us to stay with our kids while working from home. We…
The Piano Room is COMPLETE!
To be honest, we aren’t really sure what to call this room. Technically maybe you could call this space a foyer, because it is an open area near the entrance to our home. It is the crossroads of our house – A room that connects the living room, play room, dining room, and vestibule. But…
The Dining Room is COMPLETE!
At first glance it might have seemed like there wasn’t much to be excited about when we got our first look at the dining room, but once we got past the initial layer of dirt, debris, and clutter, there was a lot to like about this space. For one – it is a really good…
We Never Thought This Day Would Come!
Anyone who has been following this blog for a while knows that we have done most of the work on this house ourselves because we are picky, we enjoy the creative process, and dealing with contractors can be very frustrating. Because so much of the exterior work that is needed on our house is beyond…
Tile in the Vestibule
Despite the lack of recent posts, we have been making steady progress towards finishing the house. In our last post we describe the process of scraping, sanding, staining, and finishing all of the woodwork in the dining room. Since then, we have repeated that process in the piano room and also in the living room. …
Refinishing the Dining Room Trim
It seems like nowadays all our posts are about the rooms being completed. We are zeroing in on the completion of the dining room, but (as usual) the finishing touches are taking us a while. In the meantime, I thought it would be good to put together a post showing the work we did on…
The Downstairs Bathroom is COMPLETE!
The renovation of the space that is now our downstairs bathroom is the most confusing project to try to explain, even when giving tours in person. The project involved moving a staircase, removing two old closets (sadly), constructing a couple of new walls, a doorway, and a hallway. I won’t try to explain it in…
The ACTUAL Kitchen Reveal – Part 2
The kitchen is an important room in any house. It is the nerve center, the gathering place, and where we spend most of our time. Because of this, we spent a crazy amount of time and energy planning the layout for this room. It was like a giant puzzle – trying to marry an efficient and…
The Big Kitchen REVEAL – Part 1
The kitchen is DONE! Since the kitchen renovation is the biggest single room project we have completed, we are going to split the big reveal into two parts. In this part of the reveal we will take a whirlwind history tour to show the progress from day one! If you are interested in going back to…
Chicken Village
It’s summer! We should be doing outside projects on the house, but not much is getting done because we can’t seem to find a carpenter who wants to tackle the exterior of the house. On the inside, the downstairs bathroom, kitchen, and dining room are all essentially done, but we are struggling to track down…
Master Bedroom is DONE!
Wow! It has been way too long since we have posted an update! In our defense, we have actually been making progress in three rooms on the first floor – but nothing is completely finished yet. I wrote a blog post once about how difficult it is to finish that last 10% of any project. …
Kitchen Tile
In the past few posts we showed how we installed the cabinets and then cut and installed the butcher block countertop. The next step was to finally add the subway tile. Originally we had just planned to have the tile backsplash go up 18″ on the wall to the height of the shelving and cabinets….
Butcher Block Countertops – Part 2
In our last post I described the process of cutting and fitting the butcher block countertops for our kitchen. Everything went smoothly, but one issue we had was warping with both of the 12′ boards. I am assuming this happened because we stored them in the shed during a hot and humid week. After getting…
Butcher Block Countertops – Part 1
After finishing the installation of our cabinets and it was now time to cut our countertops. I think we always envisioned our kitchen with butcher block countertops, but there was a brief moment when we did consider other options. One important element that pushed us back to butcher block was the price of other typical…
The Kitchen Renovation Begins!
Our original plan was to spend the spring and summer months working on the exterior of the house. We wanted to fix the porches, add missing trim and siding, and paint the entire house. Well, that didn’t happen. We had trouble finding someone willing to help with the porches, then it just seemed silly to…
Restoring our clawfoot bathtub
I (Amy) have always been excited that our house came with it’s original clawfoot bathtub..even though it was in pretty rough shape. The development of the downstairs bathroom has been a very long-term project. When we purchased the house (before doing any rehab work or making any messes) it looked like this. Before demolishing this…
Medicine Cabinet Restoration
Now that we are essentially done with the 2nd floor (a post on the completed master bedroom will come soon), it’s time to turn our attention back to actual rehab work. One of the pleasant aspects of working on the 2nd floor was that much of it was working from nothing, instead of undoing old work…
Common Area is FINISHED!
Just outside of Lucy’s room there are two nooks on either side of the doorway. After some deliberation in the initial brainstorming process, we decided that this was a good place to put our washer and dryer to create a small laundry area. This 2nd floor location won out because we wanted the washer and…
Upstairs Bathroom is FINISHED!
For more than 100 years the 2nd floor of our house was mostly a very large attic. The master bedroom was the only finished room upstairs and it was accessed by a narrow, steep staircase. The odd spaces and angled ceilings made it a little tricky, but we were able to devise a floor plan that…
Stuck at 90%
The upstairs bathroom has been 90% done for more than a year. 90% is a dangerous place to be. It’s just enough to be fully functional, which means the sense of urgency to finish it is extremely low, but it still lacks all the finished details. There are only a few rooms in the house…
The Loft is Complete!
We moved quickly to finish the loft project so that it could be used for guests over the Thanksgiving holiday. The actual construction projects were wrapped up a couple weeks ago, but we still had to do all the finish work. This included sanding, caulking, priming, painting, and installing carpet. In addition, since the loft…
Book shelves and a ladder for the loft
Amy and I have been moving right along on progress in the loft because we have been motivated by a rapidly approaching deadline called Thanksgiving. The most recent project consisted of building two bookshelves at the open end of the loft. The bookshelves will give us much needed storage for books (duh), board games, and…
Renovation of the loft space begins!
It’s Fall, which means it’s my busiest season as a band director. For the past three years we have come to a screeching halt on renovation progress during this time, because I am at school late every day and I’m barely home at all on many Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays. I have managed to…
The door and window switcharoo
All work on the inside of the house has stopped as we take advantage of the summer weather to focus on everything related to the exterior of the house. One of these projects is the continuation of the window restorations. Yes, that project is STILL going on. I completely restored the interior sashes more than…
How to eat an elephant
This spring we began the overwhelming task of renovating the exterior of our house. It is a massive job that we will tackle “one bite at a time.” Up to this point, our work on the exterior of the house has been pretty limited. We have removed the asbestos siding from the gables when we…
First progress in the kitchen
Most people consider the kitchen to be the most important room in the house. In the planning process, we agonized, seriously AGONIZED, over how to arrange our kitchen. If there was ever a time in the renovation when our marriage was put to the test, it was definitely the kitchen layout that caused the most…
Lucy’s room is done!
From the first moment we saw the space that was to become Lucy’s room, we had a pretty clear vision of what it could be. It has been one of our favorite projects and it couldn’t have turned out more perfect for our little girl. Of course, we couldn’t really blame people for not…
Aiden’s room is done!
For more than a year Amy and I were motivated by deadlines dictated by contractors, mother nature, school, vacation time, and the sale of our old house. But once we were able to move into our rehab house the deadlines suddenly disappeared. This is NOT to say that we haven’t been working our butts off…
Spring Break, No Break, Back Break
Joe and I are teachers, which means we have a good old fashioned spring break penciled in each year to get a jump start on warm-weather projects. This year we had a long list of projects that we wanted to do on the house, but we have learned over the past two years that there…
Lucy’s built-in bed and window trim
The kids’ rooms are slowly nearing completion. We seem to be bouncing back and forth between these two rooms, possibly just procrastinating the final decorating decisions. The first major project we completed in Lucy’s room (post-renovation) was the built-in dresser. Next, we moved on to the window trim and built-in bed for Aiden’s room. Now…
Back to built-ins
The built-in craze continues with yet another IKEA hack! Aiden’s bed is in a unique area of the upstairs which most people assumed would be an oddly shaped closet. We decided this was an ideal nook for a bed, despite the thoughts of the occasional contractor that lacked vision and creative thought. But those same…
Pretending to be a carpenter
The holiday break gave us time to make good progress with unpacking, organizing, and wrapping up some new projects. One big project that has been in the works for a long time was creating storage spaces in Lucy’s bedroom. We have known for more than a year exactly how we were going to create storage…
Book nook under the stairs
It might be small and not very significant in the big picture of our rehab project, but we have officially finished one “living” space of our house! As we mentioned in our previous post, our top priority recently has been to finish all storage spaces so that we have places to put things as we…
Storage Wars!
We’re back! We never intended for the move-in to be the end of the blog, but I’m sure it must seem like that considering how long it has been since the last post. A year ago our intention was to try to be done with the rehab project during the summer so that we would…
Big Tour after the Big Move
We have had a couple posts about the moving process, but not many pictures of the house. As promised, this blog post will have more pictures of the current state of our house. Be warned: It is not pretty. It is still cluttered with boxes and we still don’t have things like fixtures, trim, paint,…
The Big Move
As you would expect, moving day and the days leading up to it were hectic, long, and stressful, but also full of anticipation and excitement. By the time the day had actually arrived the vast majority of boxes and small items had already been relocated to the rehab house. The movers were going to take…
Sprinting to the finish line
We have finally reached the most important milestone of our rehab project. We have moved into our new home! (pause for long applause) Thank you. This past month has been one of the most brutal of our rehab year. This is evident by the fact that we haven’t even had time to post one…
Floors finally finished!
The floors are done. Finally. I started sanding the floors three weeks ago today and thought I would be able to finish in one week. We did actually finish almost all the sanding in one week, but applying the three coats of polyurethane and sanding between took some time – especially because I am now…
Adventures in floor finishing – Days 5, 6, 7 and… I’ve lost count
So much has happened since our last post that I had to go back and reread it just to figure out where I left off. On the 5th day of sanding we were finally done with the drum sander and edger, finishing up with the 80 grit. On day 6, the Saturday of my last…
Roller Coaster Adventures in Floor Sanding – Days 2, 3, and 4
Day 2 A long time ago when I was researching everything about refinishing floors I found something online that calculated how long it would take to do the project. Turns out that 2000 sq. ft. is supposed to take 105 hours. I remember thinking, “Whoah! That’s a lot. How could it possibly take that long?” …
Adventures in Floor Sanding – Day 1
Sanding and refinishing the floors was a job that had been looming at the very end of the first stage of our home renovation. It marks the end of major mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and structural jobs and also acts as a bridge to the next stage of our project. I woke up this morning relatively…
Plaster repaired, walls primed, floors are prepped… and one more treasure!
We are now at T minus 5 weeks before the big move-in deadline. The 10-12 hour days have continued, although we did sneek in a three-day trip to Michigan with the kiddos this week. I consider that the calm before the storm. Or maybe it would really be considered the eye of the hurricane. Either…
Under New Management 