Home, Sweet Home ... Part I

Five years ago this summer, Bard and I were excitedly searching for a house to buy ... our first house!! The market was crazy high and we had our hopes set on at least half an acre, not exactly the easiest thing to find in this area. Most houses that we were interested in had a contract signed before we even looked at them. So when we came across a house that had an acre of land, had been reduced to within our budget, and was in the neighborhood we'd been hoping for we were so excited. Then we saw it:



This was a lovely little a-frame shack thing filled with, yup, junk :) Oh yeah, there was also a little refrigerator and a stove with it's own chimney ... can you see it. A cozy little escape for Bard??


Oh, and then there was the inside, well, what we could see of the inside.





... and that's just half of the house! The pictures above were taken AFTER they'd cleared out a bunch of stuff :)

I must say that we were really taken by the prospect of an acre of land in this location, and we decided the house had potential ... so, we bought it :)

Then the real fun began! First we had to clean out the house as the former occupants left a majority of the stuff you saw in the pictures above. It was September and still really hot and of course, there was no air. Unless you count the window unit in the enclosed front porch. I was four months pregnant with Mathis which made things a little more interesting :)

For months our house got worse and worse and worse! Pretty much every room but the kitchen and part of the bathroom was gutted and then gutted again. The previous owners had done their own renovations, simply building new walls on top of the others and adding new floors on top of the existing ones. Oh yes, every week was a new discovery!

Like this one ... oh yeah, electrical work held together with scotch tape, I mean who wouldn't trust that kind of work?


And then there was the ginormous furnace in the basement. This was all that we could fit in one picture. It had to be dissasembled in the basement and carried out ... some pieces took two men to lift they were so heavy.





The refrigerator behind Bard ... we found that in the shed ... with food in it ... unplugged :)
And the dumpsters ... I think there were four, maybe five of them. Not counting numerous truckloads driven to the dump. There was also an old fashioned icebox in the basement that the house had been built around. That took a couple of guys to tear up and haul out, also.

What better way to make an impression on the neighbors than leaving your toilet out in the front yard for a few weeks?

Master bedroom...


Bard tearing down a chimney that had been enclosed inside the house. Maybe if we paint the brick blue, no one will notice it's there? Umm ... no!



After about 3 months, things started to look up. They had to, because we were running short on money, we had to be out of the house we were renting by the end of December and Mathis was due to be born mid-January.


On Dec. 20, we moved into the new house, well, mostly new ... the living/dining area was completely new as was the Master bedroom and walk in closet and a new bathroom. The master bath and kitchen were spruced up a bit, but the brown cabinets and Cheerio yellow counter tops remained (you can see them in the photo above). The upstairs was just two bedrooms so we cleaned and repainted them and their mismatched windows.

All moved in ..... ugh! No, the room was not bright orange, just in this picture.


So passed the next four and a half years. We did projects here and there, mostly tearing things down and out, including that darling a-frame. Two more dumpsters full. We added windows to our bedroom, turned the front enclosed porch into a makeshift study,and painted Kate's room pink. We got rid of two portable toilets the former owners used as changing rooms for the pool. Bard tore down a shed and a shack thing and the wooden and wire fences that surrounded most of the yard. He dug a pond and countless large grass plants that were threatening to overtake us and cut down several trees. We dug up the garden when we found remnants of some pretty scary chemicals that were used. 'Mostly we were biding our time until we could do a full blown addition, something to cover up the one story additions added to three sides of the house ... all with different roof heights!

Up next, demolition begins ...