Our smelly house has come a long way baby!
We
bought the house in late 2005 outirght for little money from a typical slum-lord who had rented out two units
that the house had been converted into. It was immediately obvious he had
never reinvested a dime into fixing the place except when the City was called by
a renter who demanded something decent.
Had we waited for
the bottom to fall out of the housing market in late 2008 we probably could have
gotten it for half of what we paid. However, the house is the biggest on
the block (over 2400 sq.ft.), and loaded with character, and underneath all of it's crusty ugliness was a heart of gold
that only I could see at the time.
I began my foray into DIY home improvement by tearing out plaster
from each room because as it turns out, the house is not sitting on
it's original build site. I wondered how at it's age it
managed to have an updated cinderblock basement. The house was
moved in 1957, but along the way an axle broke, which in turn,
ruined the plaster walls by creating enormous cracks. I didn't know this because all of the walls
were covered in horrendous paneling. It wasn't until I started
to tear off the paneling that I realized what I was up against.
Replacing the walls/ceilings was much more major than anything I had
imagined because once those were out, the wiring would have to be
brought up to code. It was a typical domino effect and each
time I looked at something and thought about fixing it, there were
five other things that needed to be done first and none of them were
small. In
the end, I sought out help from the city by way of a low interest
loan, thank god for this loan. Our major overhaul that began in March 2006
and was finally completed in July 2006, by a contractor from hell; I
was never so glad to have something I wanted so bad to be over.
There is still much to be done, but the big,
huge, enormous, headache-style
updates have been completed and yes, 2.5 years later, a couple of the rooms
still need paint!
Below are links to photo galleries of the different rooms of the house. It's fun to go through and watch the slideshows. I sometimes wonder what was wrong with me that I bought a house that needed so much TLC, but looking at the house today, I wouldn't have had it any other way. I love our home.
The Plans
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Blueprints
Professional? Heck no, but I did the best I could with my own tape measure and graph paper.
First Floor
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Entry (foyer)
Part of what sold me on the house. It still needs lots of work, someday it'll get it. Even though it's rough, I still love it. -
Front Room (parlor)
Back in the day this might have been a business office or a parlor. Currently it's my study and I've named it that, but will soon be returning to a front room and a place for our cat tree and who knows what else. -
Living Room
It took me 1.5 years to finally paint the walls. I've done so much painting over the past 2.5 years I can't see straight. -
Study (was the family room once)
This room is what would have originally been a 1st floor bedroom. When we moved in it initially housed our big chest freezer and a thousand moving boxes until we got some strong backs to move the freezer into the basement. Then we slept in it for about six months, then it was a family room. Now, it's a study with lots and lots of shelves. -
Dining Room
Finally! A house with a separate room for a table and chairs, now we eat in the living room off of TV trays : P -
Kitchen
Probably the most dramatic change of all. It was a true nightmare. -
Lower Bathroom
It went from pukey to prissy!
Second Floor
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Bedroom #1
Rachel's room. It's been painted twice since the renovation by yours truly, although I made Rachel do the taping the 2nd time around. She has always picked the colors and honestly I miss the dusted plum. It was such a soft, mellow color. -
Bedroom #2
The spare bedroom, it has a set of bunk beds in it along with boxes of my tools and a box of sheets and blankets. Someday I'll tackle it, perhaps when I get done with this doggone web page. I had to learn MS Expression Web 4 in order to produce this! -
Bedroom #3
My bedroom. It's not finished, of course, and my side tables are really end tables, they don't work, I'm still looking for a solution. -
Attic Room
The contractor pulled a fast one on this. This room initially had a radiator, which meant it was habitable. When they did the reno they put no heat source in it and the room is decent sized and it is surrounded by the great outdoors on all walls except one. That was a dirty move on their part. The plan is to fill the walls with blow-in insulation and use it for a nice big mommy-sized closet. -
Upper Bathroom
The house has a rear stairway from the kitchen up to the bathroom. I closed it off at the top and made the bathroom upstairs big. Now the stairs are used as a pantry accessible from the kitchen.. -
Crafts Room
A fun room to finish and it's cheerful, hard to believe it started out as an upstairs kitchen. It's a great room in that the sewing machine and ironing board stay set up and quickly accessible. Hey, we had the room to have a 'crafts room', right?
Once a disgusting cesspit
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Basement
When I bought the house, I had to clean up dried on poop and toilet paper from a sewer back-up that had been left on the floor for who knows how long. I dumped over eight gallons of bleach onto it and then left it for a month before donning a homemade 'haz-mat' suit and tackling it. At any rate I got the basement swamped out and cleaned up. It is over 1100 square feet!
Exterior
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Outside
It's gone through some major changes. Initially I was pulling the snob card and wanted everything returned to original, but the house has been so picked-apart and abused heavily for over 25 years it would have taken an army and about $150,000 to do that, so I got off of my high horse and settled for practical.