The Tour...Before

This task of remodeling a 1937 house to make it our own home has been an adventure to say the least.  Let me show you around.  All of these pictures were taking prior to the auction, before we purchased the house.  This place was a mess.

The kitchen

The front room - this is becoming a bedroom.

Front bedroom - this room is becoming Kiff's room.

Front bedroom again.  Before we began renovations, you had to go through this room to get to the front room (2nd picture).  We took about 3.5 feet from this room to make a hallway and new front door. 

Original bathroom - We were able to keep these built-ins in tact and we hope to rebuild them back in the house in the dining room.  

Double vanity in the original bathroom, shower at the end.  

Tub followed by two, yes TWO, toilets.  So weird.  We kept this  tub and moved it to the guest bathroom. 

This is the hallway behind the tub in the previous picture - it allowed you to get from  the living room, through the bathroom, to this hallway-type closet, into the master bedroom (below), into the kitchen, and back to the living room.  

The master bathroom - this room smelled like cat urine, so the carpet was the first to go, followed by the weird wallpaper paneling. Again, junk everywhere.

This was/will be the dining room (which was originally a back porch I believe.  This is the only room in the house that had drywall as the original walls and ceiling.  

Dining room again.  

Dining room again with a door to outside.  The door on the right goes to the old well room.  

I don't have any before the purchase pictures of the living room, laundry room, or the pantry.  

One of the first things we did after buying the house was pull up the carpet in both bedrooms.  Under the red carpet we found GORGEOUS hard wood floors.  So we got really excited and pulled up the green cat urine smelling carpet to find vinyl floors.  So we pulled up a corner of the vinyl and found hardwood there as well.  This turned out to be more challenging than we thought.  Alex just finished 10+ hours getting the black tar-like substance under the vinyl off the hardwood floors, but it will most definitely be worth it in the end. 

The floors under the red carpet - beautiful!

The front two bedrooms had 2 inch plank horizontal pine walls and ceilings.  We decided to pull the strange wallpaper paneling down in the master bedroom and we found studs - no pine planks.  This was a huge disappointment.  Well one day while I was home with Kiff, Alex decided to go ahead and pull down all the paneling, because we were going to replace with sheetrock.  He called me and told me to come over.  I gathered Kiff and we went to the house only to find 3/4 of the room had the same plank walls and ceiling as the other rooms.  The portion we originally pulled off had been a doorway, which was why there was no planks.  

Our very first peek into our room where we were hopeful we would have plank walls!

Part of this door frame is where we cut into and had our feelings hurt.  

Above the fireplace in our room - finding more original wood.  There are 4 fire places in the house, four mantels, and five chimneys.  

Pulling down the tile ceiling to find original plank ceilings.  

Ceiling tiles and paneling gone.  

Semi 360 view of the room - don't get dizzy.  

We assume this to be Kiff's (the first one) handwriting on the walls.  I wanted to leave some of this exposed and put a frame around it, but we got a bit paint happy and painted over it.  I'm glad we have this picture!

After removing the ceiling tiles in the living room and kitchen - the tiles that are in this picture are holding up the insulation from the attic - there was a wall there previously.  We built a faux beam to match another one in the living room.  

 So this post has become a bit longer than intended (it was just supposed to be the tour remember), so I'm going to stop myself here.  Stay tuned for one of the more exciting moments in our renovation coming up next!