Our house has been a labor of love and occaisonally hate. We put the offer on it in July 09 right after a tornado struck our town. After looking at it multipe times, we thought if a 1917 house can survive the tornado then we'll take it. Luckily Eric saw the potential, because I saw a cute outside, big yard, and horrible inside/floor plan.
After closing in September we began gutting and started with the bedroom/family room We were able to move in at the end of December and spent that winter organizing and preparing the kitchen gut andbathroom build planned for spring. Not only did we remodel, but we changed the entire layout of our house which made for way more work. We replaced electrical, plumbing, added insulation, tore down and rebuilt walls, and pretty much done everything else you could think of. It's kept us busy in rural North Dakota and we have grown to love the inside of our house as much as we loved the outside from the beginning.
We started out with two tiny 8 x 10 bedrooms with no closets. This is the best shot I could get of bedroom #1 as it is the smallest room EVER!
Just for reference, this is what the bedrooms look like from our family room (remember this picture)
We knocked down the wall in between and closed the second doorway. This is looking from one side of the now one large room to the other. It's demoed and has a partially constructed closet
This is the other side of the bedroom with the mini closet and windows
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This was the original closet from 1917. We decided to have it for extra storage
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The best shots I could get of the the completed bedroom, It's not huge so a few different angles was the best I could do.
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Here's our original family room. It was so hard to get a good shot since it too was inclosed with uneccesary walls that we ended up tearing down.
This is standing at the back wall taking a picture of the front door
This is the window next to the front door on the far right and then what the left wall looked like (this was mid demo, we forgot to take pictures before we took off trim).
Here's that picture again of the right side of the family room with the two bedroom walls.
Here's another shot too remember. This is standing at the front door taking a picture of the back wall. This wall came down, as did the bathroom on the other side of it, and the wall on the other side of the bathroom. I'll explain later.
Now that it's all opened up I can get a whole shot of the finished family room TA DA!
This was our old kitchen it was off the family room on the left side if you were standing with the back to the front door. It became a bathroom.
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The window above is the same window below
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The left side of the kitchen looked like this
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Now it looks like this
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The right side of the kitchen looked like this
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Now it is our shower
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with a built in linen closet
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We did our kitchen next. It started like this
On the other side of the wall above was this bathroom
If you sat on the toilet above you looked out the window in the picture below
We decided to rip it all out because it was a horrible floor plan and the cast iron tub in the bathroom was about ready to fall through the floor. It's not just a reference from the movie "The Money Pit," it really was a possibility. Some plumber had decided to cut through four consecutive floor joists right under the bathroom so he could run the plumbing to the sink and toilet. Let's just note also that our house inspector was an idiot as well as this wasn't listed on the report (but that's a whole other story). Good think I have a smart boyfriend. Anyhoo, once we ripped out the bathroom and hallway we were left with the pictures below that slowly evolved into....
THIS!!!
For Reference that white door is the bathroom pictured above where the old kitchen was and the computer desk nook is where the fridge used to sit in the old kitchen
Now we're onto the garage project....stay tuned.
