8 Years Ago Today

We bought our house 8 years ago today.  If you've gotten the chance to read my first post, you can see how we happened upon this old 1955 house.  We are totally in love with it and have dreams to be here forever, if we can add on to the house (unless we can afford to live on the water, then I will be willing to sacrifice).  So today, I will be showing you all the lovely before pictures of the main living areas of our house. Later this week I'll do the rest.  Get ready, it's scary.

Here's our living room.  This was the view when you first walked in the front door to the right.

This was the view to the left.  You can see our hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom.

During the remodeling.  We took off all the slate and tile.

We added a niche wall.

As you walked through our rather small living room you entered the kitchen.  A lovely collection of slate and rust colored Formica were there to greet you.  This was the view from our front door.  This area is now our dining room.

This is what it looked like when we bought it, missing cabinets and all.

Here is the area mid-construction.  This half wall that divided up the living room and kitchen was eliminated.

As you walked through the original kitchen, to the right was this den.  We knocked down walls and closets and moved our kitchen to the den.  It seemed like a better flow and we weren't too sure about having our kitchen be the first thing people saw when they walked in the front door.

This is the view to the old kitchen, now dining room, from the den.

The next room that is entered through our now dining room and kitchen is our family room.

That is the wall we knocked down to get into our current kitchen.

What do you think?  The house went through a major remodel in 1977 when the previous owners bought the house and it stopped there.  The house was disgusting. When we removed the tile, there was years of dog hair accumulating under it, the linoleum had moldy cat pee, there was a rats nest in the family room, and I can keep going.  I still occasionally find a can of Old Milwaukee lost in the bushes in the yard and it makes me smile.  If you are thinking of buying a fixer upper, GO FOR IT! Just expect a lot of work, money spending, and some fights, but when you look around and you know every inch of your house was touched by you, it makes it all worth it.  I would think about doing it all over again...well, as long as it's on the water.

Our Kitchen

When we bought the house, our now dining room, was the kitchen.  This space below was termed a "den".  I say, it's where the previous owner's cats spent most of their time.  You see those black/brown stains on the linoleum, yea, when we lifted that, there was mold from cat pee.  I can't even think about it without getting sick.  There was a closet to the right, an off centered window, and a crazy bookshelf to the left. 

The door to the left is an entrance to a guest bathroom and the door to the right is the entrance to the hallway leading to our office.

This is the view of the kitchen or our now dining room.  The entrance was the width of a door.

And here is our kitchen now.  We widened the entrance quite a bit.  Got rid of the closet and centered the window.  We also moved the entrance to the guest bathroom to the hallway. These are Ikea Abstrakt doors and Akurum bases.  We built these all ourselves.  I actually did the initial build, and my husband tightened and installed them with his dad.

To the right is the bookshelf wall that we tore down from the first picture above.  That is our family room.

Here is the view from our family room of the kitchen.  Here you can see the hallway to our office and the entrance to our guest bathroom.  I finally ordered my rug.  I LOVE it! It goes great with our black speckled granite counter tops.

Here's the sink area.  The sun is beaming in.  It's a West facing window, so we get tons of light in the afternoons.

This Nespresso machine is what I gave my husband for Christmas. He loves it.

This is another angle where you can see my living room.  Our house is completely open.  We really love having this open concept feel through out the main living areas of our house.  We knocked down walls and opened things up as much as possible. It makes the house feel much bigger than it actually is.

Here you can see our dining room to the left and our family room to the right.

A view of the ceilings, which is probably the main reason we originally bought this hideous house.

We spent our first year of marriage without a kitchen. I am not kidding. We ate lots of pizza, take out, and in-laws cooking.  I think I gained like 10 pounds that year.  We had a foldout table with a microwave, toaster oven, and a refrigerator. We ran out of money after all the work to the house so it took us a while to get the kitchen together.  At the time, there was no Ikea in the area, so we actually had to have it shipped.  The cost of the kitchen wasn't bad, but the shipping alone was something like $1,000.  Oh, and we changed our mind about the layout when we started installing.  We had the refrigerator and wine refrigerator swapped, but it SO did not work.  I'm so glad we were willing to reorder some cabinets.  Have you done a major kitchen remodel?

70's Living Room Today

I will be continuing my house tour today. First, I have to apologize for these poor quality pictures. It's before I went digital, and my scanner decided to go out on me. So, it's a picture of a picture, I know-terrible.  I just want you to have an idea of what we were working with before.  When you walk in our front door, this is the wall to the right.  There were slate rocks concreted on to the wall.  It was a bear to remove.  I'm so glad my husband was encouraged and excited to do home projects back then.

Here is the wall with the slate removed.

This is what you saw to the left of the living room when you walked in the front  door. That half wall there attached to the ceiling is dividing the living room from the kitchen.  That is also a giant concrete slate slab going from floor to ceiling.

One of the {many} negatives of our house, was that you could see into the bathroom and bedrooms from the front door. My father (architect), hated that.  He came up with a drawing for a way to remedy that.  We would lose a linen closet because of it and some square footage from our living room, but we LOVED the idea.  We did a niche wall.  You can see the layout below.

Here we are 6-7 years later.  We have not done much to it since our initial remodel. I find my style has evolved a bit and there are things that I want to change, but it will stay as is for now. I don't want to spend money right now.  My first Christmas gift was Barcelona Chairs from my husband. I love them.  (In retrospect, I would probably want less of them, but they are gorgeous chairs).  This view is the one to the right of our front door where the slate used to be.  

Our layout is very open.  Here is the living and dining room.  The entrance to the left is into the family room and the one to the right is to the kitchen.

This is the wall to the left of our front door.  This is the niche wall that my dad came up with. 

Here is an angle of the room from the entrance of our family room.  It seems larger than it is, but our door is kind of in the way. My dad wants us to convert our front porch into a glass enclosed foyer.  Maybe, one day. 

This is one of the things I plan to change in the near future. We bought this coffee table from Ikea because it was super cheap.  We thought we would keep it for a couple of years until we found what we really wanted...um, yeah, it's been 6 years.  I want either a mid century medium toned coffee table or something ultra rustic to break up so much modern in the room.  I'm on the hunt.  

What do you think?

The 70's Attacked our Dining Room

I know the picture below is a kitchen, actually, you can't really tell what it is, huh? That my friends was the view from our front door when we bought our house.  Yes, that is a kitchen hiding behind the slate and Formica rust counter tops.  How we saw past this, I'm not sure.

This is the bar area. Pour me a drink, please.

This is the kitchen, and yes there is a counter top floating in the air.  

We were so young and naive when we bought the house.  We actually considered living with the kitchen until we could afford to fix it. I bleached the heck out of everything and even put a frame on the counter top.  Figuring, why not decorate while we fix the house.   I think this plan lasted about two days, until my sister-in-law suggested that we move the kitchen to the existing den. My then boyfriend/now husband was in Denver on business and I called him right away with our new plan. He, thankfully agreed. 

So we removed the slab of slate and concrete, ripped out the counter tops, copper vent hood, and cabinets.

We removed this half wall that was dividing the room in half.  This was quite the project. I'm talking metal beam across our ceiling.  We ripped out the 1970's octagonal tiles that was partially lifted in certain areas. Only to find years' worth of dog hair collecting under the tile.  The exposed concrete block is what we ended up tearing down to widen the entryway into our future kitchen.

We had our handyman blow out the kitchen door and widen the space for a window.

Here is the space before we moved in.  The floors are freshly polished.  I think what drew us to this crazy house, was the wood beam ceilings. They are just so beautiful. 

Here it is today.

We love the way this room feels. It's bright and open. It's not a large dining room, but with the space in the room we are able to add tables on to ours when we need to. We once sat about 30 people for dinner in this space.  I am thinking my $1.00 mirror will go on the empty wall by the table.  The room you see through the opening is my family room.