So Where Do You Start?

We figured that to make the house livable, we would need to have three rooms put together; a bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. Unfortunately, each one of these rooms have some real issues.

When my FIL bought the house, the kitchen was a porch that had been tacked on to the back of the house and walled in. The main wall of the kitchen actually still had the original wood siding from the outside of the house. The worst part was the wasp nest in the corner of the ceiling that was the size of three basketballs (thank you to my brother Jake for getting rid of THAT mess!). Before we knew that we would be taking the house, Dad had a contractor take off the porch/kitchen and replace it with a real kitchen. It's just studs and plywood at this point, but it will be something much better than it was!

(If you look in the picture directly above this, you can see the old house siding on the left wall. Crazy how someone thought that it would be a great idea to wall in a porch and call it a kitchen! The contractor did a fantastic job of making the new kitchen and attaching it to the house).

 Above the new kitchen, Dad had the contractor build an entirely new bathroom. The bathroom that was originally in the house was stuffed into a tiny corner with the tub on a raised platform. Thankfully that went away as well. The new bathroom space will be about 10x15 feet - a vast improvement over the 4x6 that the other one was!

Part of our activities last weekend included taking out the old insulation (that nasty dusty stuff on the floor) and getting the old siding off of the kitchen/bathroom walls. We literally had to use a shovel to get insulation off of the floor.

We also worked on what will be the master bedroom, just adjacent to the bathroom. Most of the walls in the house are old horsehair plaster with thin wooden lath in them. Because we need to redo most of the electric, we decided that the walls need to come down. The room looked like this in the morning...

And like this after we were finished.

There is something very therapeutic about smashing walls! There was a ridiculous amount of dust, and I'm still sneezing black gunk, but we got quite a bit done.

Can't wait to see what next weekend brings!