Naughty Pine...

Ok so the next thing up was the floors in the main part of the house... It kind of happened in stages, yet now looking back it felt like it all happened at the same time.

This is what the dining room, living room, and hallway looked like prior to fixing 'em up:


Josh went to the local salvage shop, ReNew, and looked around for some re-claimed flooring. He found some beautiful knotty pine, and enough to do all three parts of the house so that it would seem seamless.

We started with the dining room and Josh opened up the doorway from the kitchen more which made the house seem so much bigger. Of course, because of the paneling in the dining room, we had to put in new drywall in most of the room. We got the floors in up to the living room first and then dry-walled and trimmed and painted. Ha ha, the paint was atrocious at first, an "institution" green. Made us feel like we were in prison, so we repainted with a greyer version of the green which was so much better.


Next we moved on to the living room and hallway. First we scraped and scraped and scraped wall paper. That sucked soooo bad. Really, the problem here was that the walls are not dry wall. They are something that the house inspector had referred to as "beaver board," it looks like a really cheap version of homasote. Half the time when peeling the paper off, it would rip off layers of this material with it. So, we resolved to skim coat the walls with plaster prior to painting. That seemed to work ok, although it was a very long and tedious process, and let's face it, neither Josh nor I are known for our patience. Eventually, though, it was finished.


After that we took a very long break.

Garage to Barn

Josh and I have always wanted to own a barn. So we decided to make our garage look like one....

This is what it looked like when we bought the house...


Josh and I started to scrape it... but it defeated us. We brought in the big guns. That's right our friend Chris John to the rescue. He was so great, he scraped, painted and trimmed the whole garage. It looks so great now! And the inside has morphed as well into Vintage Steele motorcycle shop.



This was done the end of last summer (2010). Some of the photos represent a number of different stages of the barn-garage.

The Addition

The first room we tackled in the house was a small room off the side of the kitchen that had been added at a later date to the house. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the process, but I do have befores and afters.

Yes, that's fake wood paneling, and yes, someone did a two-tone yellow sponging effect over it... also the fake brick vinyl flooring. Nice, huh?

In the above image, you can see the opening over the sink and the doorway into the addition room.

So, we started by tearing everything out of it, the granny rails, the paneling, we took out the small pantry, checked that the brace between the door to the kitchen and the opening over the sink wasn't load-bearing with our friend Saturn, removed the brace, tore out the floors and discovered we had carpenter ants destroying the flooring, and lastly tore out the ceiling and discovered chipmunk nests (pee, poop and all).

This is what it looks like now. With help from Saturn in pulling down the beam, Sarah's brother, Tim, helped finish the tiling when it became clear that Josh and Sarah work well together, just not side-by-side, the room was finished. Most everything came from ReNew (our local building salvage store). The tiles, the bamboo, even the grout. Although some things you just have to get new, such as drywall (walls and ceiling) and presure-treated plywood (to replace the sub-flooring). You can see the back part of the kitchen sink in currently open. Once we get to the kitchen, this will all change.

The light and shelf above the white trashcan were additions this fall (2011).

**NOTE: As I write these catch-up posts, I'm realizing that these are not really in chronological order. Stormy wasn't around when we were eating chickens or fixing lots of the house. This post about our addition room, represents mid-summer 2010.