Before pictures are always a good place to start, right? In the first post, I showed you a picture of the outside of our house. While it looked great from the outside, the inside was another story. It's therapeutic for me to look back through these pictures. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in how many things there are left to do and forget how far you've come.
Back to the tour. Here's the outside of the house when Dylan bought it back in the summer of 2009. Despite the overgrown bushes and the evergreen trees that were planted too close to the house, it looked nice.
Now for the inside. Entering the house from the side door (on the right in the picture above), you enter the breakfast nook. Back then, the breakfast nook was a definite contender for the most disgusting room in the house. Old, stained carpet, tons of shutters on the windows, outdated and faded wallpaper, drop ceiling, office-building fluorescent lighting...there was so much going wrong in there. In the picture below you can see the side door on the left.
Walking straight in the side door and crossing the breakfast nook would get you into the dining room. I couldn't find any true before pictures, but this one is pretty close to a before picture, aside from the wallpaper that we had already torn off. This picture was taken from the doorway that leads to the kitchen.
This kitchen has been the bane of our existence, but we'll get into that more later. For now, let me just point out the carpet. Who puts carpet in a kitchen? I'm certainly not a clean enough cook to be able to keep a kitchen carpet nice!
Walking down the hallway from the kitchen we pass the 1/2 bath, which is small, only barely enough room for a toilet and sink.
Continuing down the hallway we arrive at the study, which faces the backyard. The study is a tiny room, only about 10x10 feet. It could have been the green-stained wood paneling or the water-damaged ceiling, but this room felt very oppressive.
Next we come to the front entryway. This picture was taken from the front door. To the right there is a door that leads to the dining room, and the door on the left leads to the hallway that passes by the study and 1/2 bath and eventually arrives in the kitchen.
If we turned left from the entryway we would enter the living room. Aside from old stained carpet, this room was the nicest room on the first floor, in part because it had been painted instead of wallpapered, so it was a quick day project to get it where we wanted to make it liveable.
And that brings us to the end of House Tour: Part 1! Next up is a tour of the upstairs rooms, then we'll check out the backyard, shed, and garage.
Looking at these pictures, I can't help but wonder why we went for it with this house in the first place! It had great bones to begin with, but I don't think either of us realized just how much work it would take to bring it back to its glory days!
