Redo Take Two: Our Home Project

This part of the blog will have it’s own section, and will be done in parts. You can go to all of these posts by clicking on “Redo Take Two” in the menu, enjoy!

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Part 1: Tour Our First Home

The first home that Todd and I lived in together was not your typical house. It was a town home, built in the mid-19th century, and was completely gutted. When we spoke about it we just said it was a “giant hole in the wall.”

We dove head first into it and were extremely excited that we could change anything we wanted. Unfortunately, like many old homes, we found a major problem.

Mold.

Not exactly something we wanted to deal with because that meant we had to replace every wall (something we thought we didn’t have to do when we originally looked at the place). It was not a fun project. Hours of cleaning, breaking, and ripping. Followed by hours of cutting, hanging, and nailing.

Although most of the work was done by Todd and his friends, I helped out when I could (I got really good with a hammer) and did other things that didn’t require me holding heavy drywall over my head while they nailed it to the ceiling. It was so dusty that the face masks we wore while working became gray by the end of the day!

This was all before we were married too, talk about a relationship tester!

After we were married, we had to stay in one of the smaller bedrooms because the “major project,” our master bedroom, was not finished yet.

The room was a good size, but when you put in a queen size bed, two desks, and tons of boxes with our things in them it became quite cramped. We lived in that room until the end of January, about four months.

I remember the day that we finished our master bedroom. It was a Sunday, and we had gone out with friends the night before. I was feeling a little bit “off,” but continued to put the finishing touches on our skylight. We moved all of our furniture upstairs, and happily enjoyed the rest of the day and our first night in the room that we had worked so hard on.

Until… I woke up in the middle of the night shivering and proceeded to hug the toilet for the next few hours. Yep, I had a stomach bug that lasted a few days.

I laugh at it now because what were the odds of getting incredibly sick the first night in our new bedroom? At least I had a nice room to recover in.

We finished the majority of the house over the next few months, and the master bedroom was done in October. In total, we spent about two years working on the house. I know it was an incredibly long time, but remember that we both had full-time jobs, so I think we did pretty good!

I really didn’t think we had many “before” pictures, but luckily, I found a few that Todd had taken right after the house was purchased. These don’t show every room from every angle, but you can get a good idea of how much work and love we put into the place.

Living Room

Please ignore the mess! No ceiling before and we built some walls around the fireplace to make a closet. We also built around the original window and painted it a light tan color. The floor was a mess so we put in new hardwood floors ourselves. The door has been also stained since this picture was taken.

Dining Room

As you can see, there was no ceiling again in the dining room, and the beautiful brick around the fireplace was covered up. We built new walls again, put down hardwood floors, and clean up the fireplace as best as we could.

Fireplace (in Dining Room)

Kitchen

The kitchen was probably our biggest project, we rebuilt the entire room, kept the beams in the ceiling viewable (we liked how they looked), and kept the fireplace. We use the space in the fireplace for our chest freezer and had custom blinds made to cover the fireplace area when we don’t use it. See? It works great!

Spare Bedroom (Above Kitchen)

Again, no walls or ceiling. The floors were in okay shape, so we just painted them a dark brown color. The stairs in the back of the room are still usable and go down into the kitchen. That chimney goes to the fireplace in the kitchen as well. There was work being done in the room, hence the hose coming down from the ceiling.

Office

This was the first room that we finished, and the room that we stayed in while we were working on our master bedroom.

Master Bedroom

The previous owner had built walls for a bathroom where I bed is. We didn’t want the bathroom there so we torn them down. And yes, the walls are two different colors, the tan color (on the right) is an accent color.

Master Bathroom

We built a wall in this corner for our bathroom. The window in the first picture is in the bathroom.

One of the most unique things I like though about our house was the very small landing on the side of our staircase leading up to the bedroom. At first we didn’t know what to do with it and thought it would end up being wasted space.

The white “fence” is now where our wall is for the bedroom. We thought of a few options. Extra storage? A bookshelf? Widen the staircase? And then we had an idea. We needed a place to store our kayaks.

It worked out pretty well. Although it is a pain to hang them up, it’s incredibly easy to get them out of the house. Mine’s the blue one.

That concludes the tour of our first home. I may later go into detail with each room about what we did, but I personally love the before and after pictures and just seeing what we accomplished.

Hope you are having a great Friday!