Monday, December 12, 2011

New House


As law school is finally starting to come to a close, Colby and I are excited to finally be moving on to other happier milestones, the first of which is acquiring our first house! (Insert excited high pitch squealing from me and hmph from Colby!) But I have learned to follow my mother's personal motto, "Why do things the easy way when there's a harder way to do it?!" and the house purchasing has taken an unexpected turn. Instead of purchasing an already remodeled house we are purchasing a house, have lined up a contractor and are going to be remodeling it. By remodeling I really me we are gutting the entire thing to create an almost entire new house. I am posting the before pictures here and when the remodel is finished I will post how it turned out. I didn't get a picture of the outside, mostly because we have gotten about an inch of rain today and I didn't want to be out in it any longer than absolutely necessary.

The house was originally built in 1947, has two additions, a den with sunroom and a one car garage but judging by the kitchen it was last updated in the 1970s. This is a shot of the front door we are keeping, as opposed to the other front door we are getting rid of. The wall you see on the left (which is a half wall separating the kitchen from the living room) is going to be torn down and a center island built in its place.


The is another angle of the wall. I am sure you are all admiring the pretty sunflowers but they will be going away. The entire kitchen is going to be redone, with a gas range top and a double electric oven replacing the current unit (that doesn't work).
The doorway you can kind of see just past the sunflower wall will be turned into a small pantry (hooray for a place to store my canned food besides under the beds). The flooring in the living room, kitchen/dining room, hallway and den are getting a nice laminate flooring, the bathrooms will remain tile (the master bath the tile has to be replaced but it will be tile) carpet in the bedrooms and the sunroom will keep its current tile.
These are a shot of the den with the second front door which will be removed and replaced with a window and wall. I refuse to run between the two doors when someone knocks trying to figure out which door they are at. The den is next to the living room (you can see the fire place through the doorway) and the other door leads to the sunroom.

This is a shot of the sunroom (I didn't get a very good shot of it and only got the one, my bad) but it leads from the den (the open doorway) to the garage (the glass door) and the other door you see is to the kitchen. It has a tacky wood door (not seen in these photos) that we are having removed and a sliding glass door replacing it which leads to the backyard.
The house has three bedrooms, two of which we are only repainting and replacing the carpet. Because it is an old house it has some interesting quirks, one of which the drawers built into the closet.

The master bedroom (shown below in lavender), we are tearing out the existing closet to add more space into the bedroom and will be building a small walk-in closet with some of the space in the bathroom.

The masterbath is the room that needs the most work, we will be enclosing in part of the bathroom in to make the walk-in closet and redoing the rest of the bathroom. As you can see the roof currently has a leak (a major leak) that will be fixed (a whole new roof is going on). The house also currently has both a swamp cooler and an AC unit on the roof, the swamp cooler will be coming down when they fix the roof.

The front yard is landscaped with two mature trees and a plum tree with rosebushes but the back yard needs some work. It has a pool with a slide (hooray!) but (and you can barely see it in the photo) but the only trees in the yard are three orange trees, one of which hangs over the pool and drops fruit into it (Gross, I know!). The yard is flood irrigated so I am excited to get a garden and some other fruit trees planted. But it is a good sized lot (you can't tell that from the photos) and it has nice covered back patio, perfect for grilling!


I realize this is a long post after months of silence but various family members wanted to see the house so here it is. Like I said, when it is finished I will post more photos.