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The first time I drove by our new house, it looked huge. Way too big for our family to handle and probably requiring too much work to restore. But the yard… oh, the yard! I could see lots of space for a garden, chickens and maybe even apple trees! All the things I really wanted in a yard. And there is a garage. And… the more I looked at the house, the more I started to like. Plus it would cut my hour-long commute to about 10 minutes. I called the realtor the next morning.

The House

The house was build in 1895, or thereabouts. It’s always hard to be absolutely sure with houses this old. In 1895, this was still the “wild, wild west!”  The style is National Folk. If you can tell me what that little niche by the back door is, please comment! We have a pool going on what it would be used for. On the inside, the house an interesting mixture of old and new. One previous owner had updated some areas, another had updated others. Some decorating choices were a positive interesting and others not so much… one word, “wallpaper.” *Shudder*  The owners we purchased the house from had grand plans but stopped halfway for some reason. Their work was my gain!

There’s a fully updated kitchen, with tons of glass-front cabinets in all sorts of sizes. In the dining room, however, there are bare walls and floors in the dining room. No drywall! Instead, it’s milled 12″ planks.

I’m pretty sure the planks are original to the house. Traditionally, the planks were covered with a heavy rag wallpaper. Remnants of that can be seen along the top. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with this wall. Someone suggested leaving it as is, but no. Interesting, but ugly. I’ve thought about putting up multi-colored stained planks on the wall, but I’m not sure at this point.

The dining room floors also need something. They are wood, but worn out, stained and devoid of any type of finish. I’ve looked at having them refinished, painting the floors, covering them with vinyl planks, linoleum and just about every type of flooring there is available. Stil haven’t made a choice.

The view from the living room shows the other side of the town on the river bend. Typical of a 100-year-old house, there are not huge windows taking advantage of this panorama. My 10-year plan includes a remedy for that and the addition of a deck, larger windows in the front and a sliding glass door. I can already see it in my mind.

Reclaiming and Rehabilitating

We moved in last June and my first priority was to make sure the house was ready for winter. It hadn’t been lived it for several years, which the deer and other critters really enjoyed. They mostly moved on when the lawn was finally mowed and I tackled the blackberry bushes. We also had contractors repairing areas of rot and a porch that threatened to collapse. They also finished the siding project that hadn’t been completed by a previous owner. Once all the outside work was completed, the painters started. As far as I am aware, the house had not been painted in a decade. The new siding done by a previous owner had never been painted at all. They had, however, painted part of the garage. Picture in your mind a mixture of faded pinks, peeling old yellow and various shades of blues. It was not a pretty look.

House painting is one of the things that seems easy, but it really a painstaking exhausting job. With 30 foot ladders! I’m afraid of heights. And paint sprayers (seriously, I had have problems using spray paint cans). After several recommendations, I hired a professional. It took them a little over a week to paint the entire house and garage. It probably would have taken me three months. Some things really are worth paying someone else to do. This is one of them.

The end result looks great! What a huge difference; not only for the house, but the whole neighborhood!

This spring, I’ll be working a lot on the yard. I need to remove the bushes that had nearly blocked the front entrance and there is a lot of broken concrete to be removed or repaired. I need to come up with a layout for gardens, chickens, a fire pit and possibly fruit trees. I’ll be posting the adventure in rehabbing everything!

This is the list of everything I plan on doing.