Home Tour | Interior: Upstairs & Basement

Up the stairs we again see our favorite brown that goes all up and through the hallway, which makes the hall feel about 37 times smaller than it is. Off of the hall is three bedrooms and a bath.

Bathroom
The bath is ugly and yellow, but it's a pretty good size and when we save the money, or win the lottery, we'll gut it and start over. Fun Fact: The black thing under the sink is actually a speaker, no joke.




Guest Room
This should get all your attention since if you ever plan to visit this is where we're tossing you. We had thought to put our bed in here because of the closet, but our Queen would barely fit with the other bedroom furniture and would have to be put against the wall. I'm sure Mike could share some stories about me in the morning, ("The sleeping monster awakes, Raa Raa, Raa!"), but let's just say neither one of us liked the idea of jumping over top of each other to get out of bed every morning.


And yes, that is not an optical illusion. The fan really is low enough to hit your head. Mike probably doesn't want this photo up here (looks really intense here while he's talking to the realtor), but they wouldn't leave so this is the only one I have!

The closet was a weird combination of a homemade cedar hanging closet and built-in drawers. Someone in the last 82 years thought it would be nice to cover the inside (and attic access) with cedar plywood and call it a cedar closet. Mike has since gutted the closet and drawers, moved the attic access to the hallway, and drywalled creating a large hanging closet. Anyone distraught over our careless destruction of the drawers needn't worry, we donated it to Habitat ReStore. You want it? Tell them Mike and Mal sent you, we're regulars.


Crafting Room
The smallest of the three bedrooms is going to be my crafting room. No boys allowed. Don't look at me like that, Mike has the whole garage and has threatened to take over the basement with a bar/game room. I deserve something. Anyways, this room hid some dirty little secrets that we didn't notice until we brought out the tools. Chipping trim paint, bulging plaster, and painted wallpaper border, oh my!



Master Bedroom
Don't worry I won't say something corny like this is where the magic happens, my grandmother's reading this, hi TwoMommy! This became the master by default, Mikes giant bed won't really fit anywhere else. Although, at first glance this room looks like it would need the least amount of work, it in fact is hiding a dirty abomination under that thin coat of cheap flat beige paint. There's no way to really prepare someone for this so I'll just say it - spatter. Not sure what I'm talking about? Imagine being 5 years old, (I'm guessing at the age because anyone older would know better), and your parents say you can paint your room however you want. What would you do? Of course, SPLATTER!
Here are the directions:
1. Take 4 of the most obnoxious colors you can think of, how about hot pink, neon green and yellow and bright sky blue.
2. Take paint brush and dip into paint to generously coat the brush.
3. Fling your little 5-year-old heart out as the paint from the brush splatters on the wall.
4. Disregard any trim, parts of the floor and ceiling.
5. Repeat until wall is thoroughly coated.
It's hard to show the detail in a picture since the previous owner threw up a quick neutral color, but we did get an okay progress shot after Mike and some friends sanded it down.



Basement
The basement is about 60% finished with a full bath. The finished part looks like a 1982 hunting lodge with dark paneling and large built-in and the unfinished part looks like, well an unfinished basement.
 


One thing that's really nice though, to the right of the stairs is a full bathroom.  While it's really rough, we only have the one other bathroom upstairs, so this one will come in handy I'm sure.



Now that I've finally made it through all the before pictures. Look for some progress photos that will be coming soon!

House Tour | Interior: Main Floor

On to the inside! These pictures were taken during one of our walk-thru's with our realtor. These are true-blue before pictures, we hadn't even made the offer yet.

Living Room
When first walking in to the living room your greeted with hardwood floors, windows, and those stripes. I'm not sure the picture does it justice, it looks a little gray here. Really they're more of a muddy brown, baby-poop green. This weekend I actually primed over them (took two coats!), look for the progress shot coming soon.


Dining Room
The dining room is directly off of the living room to the right. For the most part this room needed very little work:


Kitchen
Through the dining room is the kitchen. Not much we can say here. It's small and ugly, but after we replace the furnace and remove the chimney, we'll be able to tear down the walls to the dining room and gut it. I hope we find a money tree in the backyard soon!




Look for our next post with pictures of the basement and upstairs!

House Tour | Exterior

Now to the good stuff! We know the real reason you’re here is to see pictures, and after all the reading I’ve made you endure, we hope we won’t disappoint. We'll start off with the outdoor shots and ease you into the inside. I’ll try to keep my personal commentaries to myself…wait, who am I kidding, I’m going to share all uglies and crazies we found once we took the rose-colored glasses off.

Front Yard
Here's the house in all it's glory in a picture from the realtor's website, (we bought in February, so all our outside pictures are full of snow). We're lucky because the previous owner redid the siding, roof, and windows. When the weather gets better, we'll remove the concrete sidewalk that goes to the street, and make a brick path from the driveway along the porch. Overall, not that bad of a before picture:


Back Yard
Here we have the lonely back yard that's just begging for a deck with room for entertaining, (sigh, maybe next summer):


Garage
Or the Man Cave as I've been calling it. Mike has grand plans for his garage, including room for 2 1/2 cars, heat, refrigerator, and I'm sure some bikini clad calendars. Before all his dreams come true, we have to demolish the glorified shed that sits in it's spot right now. This picture actually makes is look somewhat decent. Don't let it fool you, the inside has a gravel base, leaning walls, and (yeah) termites!

Home (Semi) Sweet Home

Welcome to our blog! By our blog I mean I (Mallory), will be posting, photographing, tagging, and general bloggy things, while Mike contributes by nodding and pacifying me when I tell him about my ideas. Though the blogging was mainly my idea, what we both agreed on was the need for an outlet to share the progress of the renovations to our first house. Our goal is keep our family and friends up to date on our improvements, and blogging is a lot easier than making a million phone calls every week.

For those of you who’ve already heard all the details of our home shopping experience please proceed to the next paragraph. For those who haven’t logged onto Facebook, talked to either Mike or I in the last couple months, or generally been living under a rock, let me enlighten you. We started casually looking about mid-summer last year. After Mike’s job situation changed in October, we put the house hunting on hold for a while. Cue the ever-helpful mother. My mom’s friend had become the executor of her aunt’s estate and was selling a house in on the east side, coincidentally where my mother grew up. My mom probably mentioned this to me five of six times before I finally agreed to look at pictures on-line. The price was right and Mike and I were hooked. We set up an appointment to view it and instantly saw the potential. Though there were things we didn’t like, like the one car drive-way and uncomfortably small distance between us and the neighbors, we got right to the point of making an offer when we chickened out.

Although the house wasn’t for us, we did realize we were ready for a house and with the $8,000 tax credit dangling in front of us like a carrot, there wasn’t a better time to jump into the market. I decided to visit my old friend Zillow and began the tedious task of searching again. What I found was an old, and I mean old - 83 years to be exact, colonial less than 10 blocks from the original house. Now is the time that I would begin all the horror stories of purchasing, but truth be told we didn’t really have any. Yes, it was difficult and stressful, but it was pretty painless and ended up with our counter offer accepted and new homeowners! After picking up our keys, we ran inside and after the giddiness wore off (about 2 minutes later) we went to work making our mental list of the work that need to completed. Though we’re fortunate to have our apartment until the end of May we still understand we have a long road ahead of us before the big move-in.

We hope you enjoy our upcoming posts and please feel free to leave comments, being new to this blogging it'll really make our day!