From Hovel to Home

We have another house under contract.I should be excited but the best I can muster is "Meh". The truth is, like the 1st house we had under contract, we selected this one because it was a sensible decision.  It's not where we want to live, it's not a style or era that we like, but the price was right.  We'll do our thing, fix it up, build a garage, etc but it just doesn't have the midcentury charm of our current house (below). I haven't seen this house in person.  Luke looked at it and took some pictures so I could see what we bought.  But I wasn't in town and since I'm doing all the packing by myself I don't have time to go look at it.  So I'll do my best to give a little tour based on what I know. It's ugly.  Perhaps that's not fair.  It's plain and lack the mid-century charm I have grown to love.  It was built in 1978, measures in at 1920 sq ft on a fifth of an acre.  It's not a large lot but compared to our y...

With all these recent posts about the rest of the house it might seem like I have forgotten about the kitchen.  In reality the kitchen has been on the back burner, but not forgotten.  We've been chipping away at it and all those little finishing touches are finally done.  So we're finally ready for a little before and after.  Kitchen Before  Kitchen After (The oven is in the same spot, everything else changed)  Dining Room Before Dining Room After  The old kitchen had a closet on the north wall and also housed the washer and dryer.  We eliminated the closet and moved the laundry appliances to the basement to enlarge the kitchen.  The old kitchen was open into the hall.   We moved the doorway into the living room and changed the kitchen layout to an L shape.  We found the granite tile on clearance.  Because it was very similar in color to the cabinets we decided to use a backsplash til...

The living room has been almost finished for quite a while now.  But the last few details like the crown molding and window frames just haven't seemed important compared to all the other unfinished projects.  But as we make our mad rush to get the house on the market we're finally taking care of these last few details.  So after just a few extra hours of work we finally have a room that looks nothing like what we started with two years ago. The old living room seemed very isolated from the rest of the house.  It was connected to the dining room through the arched doorway. We opened up the doorway to 9' wide and removed the side door. The 70's remodel walled up a doorway into the hall and put this weird screen in it's place.  I guess the strategy was to get all the noise of the hallway without allowing convenient access.  Because of the poor patch job you could see the outline of the old doorway. We reopened this doorway which not only...

Now that we're trying to sell the house and move away it occured to me that I never posted finished photos of several rooms including the master suite.  I kept putting it off because we had a little trim and paint work to do, but everything is finished now and I had better post some pictures before it's too late. When we first moved in to this house we named each of the four bedrooms to eliminate confusion.  We had the disco room, the pee room, the redrum (red room) and the spiderman room.  As you can probably see from the wallpaper border and paint colors the master bedroom was the spiderman room. Old Bedroom New Bedroom Soft gray walls and a bigger window make the room much brighter, but because the room faces North is does not get a lot of sun.  To make the room seem brighter (and bigger) we splurged on mirrored closet doors.  Luke is enjoying having a mirror he doesn't have to duck to see himself in. Old Closet     New Clos...