The Biggest Undertaking: Before Pics

Not only has completely remodeling our house been a ridiculous undertaking, but so has the thought of blogging about it! It has been such a long, intense road, and it has taken me some time to feel like reliving it again through journaling. But, I think the time has come to start to recap our summer project.

As I stated before, this house is only 16 years old, but it was so dingy and battered that it sat on the market for 7 months before we went into escrow. There were 2 previous offers that fell through for one reason or another. When we first saw the house on the market, we were kicking ourselves that we were still a few months away from having all of our ducks in a row to make a move on purchasing a home. It is right across the street from the kids' elementary & middle schools (the backyard faces the school), is in a flat, friendly neighborhood, is close to parks and the community center and library, and is right by the freeway. Around here, everyone travels via freeways. We kinda bought the crappiest house in the neighborhood. We went trick-or-treating in this neighborhood on Halloween last year, and the owners were passing out candy and fliers for the home (two birds with one stone!). I told the owner how I wished we were ready to make a move right then, and she said, "You never know, it could still be here for you when you're ready. It waited for us to be ready when we bought it 16 years ago!" I thought it was a fat chance, and I still can't believe everything came together like it did.

Here are photos from one of our first walk-throughs. They are dark and unedited, sorry!

Front door

There are three redwoods planted right in front of the home. While they are pretty, I hated the way they hid the house from the street. 

Entry way. The tile had to go, as did every square inch of flooring throughout the house. Our goal is to replace the front door eventually with either double doors, or more likely with the door centered in the middle flanked by two smaller windows on either side.

View from entry way

View into entry way

Living Room. Many of the seals in the double window panes were broken, allowing condensation to accumulate. We replaced ALL of the windows in the house.

 Dining Room

Dining Room

Staircase. We will be painting the posts and staining the banister dark.

Garage (3 car, hallelujah!) 

The door into the garage, which we had to replace due to health and safety codes BEFORE the house was even ours. The joys of a short sale. The door needed to be fireproof, so the doggy door had to go. The same went for the broken windows. We were taking a risk in putting the money into the home, but felt at peace that it would be okay. 

 Laundry Room

 Storage area off Laundry Room

Family Room. We removed the half wall you can see at the bottom of this photo. It opened up the room a lot.

Now for the kitchen...

Everything had to go. The cabinetry was shellacked in some faux-finish that looked terrible. Most of the drawers were falling apart. They were dark and dirty. The countertops were chipped. And, I was done having tile countertops. Solid surface, thank you! All of the appliances but the dishwasher were broken.

I loved the faux-hardwood linoleum. Crazy!

Master Bedroom 

 Master Bathroom

Guest Bathroom

Now moving upstairs... 

Brady and Clark's bedroom 

Isn't the paint lovely? 

There were holes throughout the home. We had a drywall repair guy come and patch up most of the walls. 

The famous masking tape drywall repair in the hallway

Kids' bathroom. Of all the rooms, this one grossed me out the most. It was so grody.

 The bath wasn't so bad...but wait for it...

 There's sharky!

Lucy's Room 

 Random holes in the wall

Broken window 

View into Charlie's room. Yep, that is a huge Union Jack painted on the wall. It was BRIGHT!

The best thing about this house is the playroom. It sold me. 

 This photo is after we started removing baseboards and such, but I wanted you to be able to see the mural in its entirety. The Bruins are the high school mascot.

I should have gotten a better picture of the window in the play room. If you can see on the right window, there is about 2 inches of rainwater collected in between the two window panes.  

This little "stage" as we call it, is so fun. I am turning it into a reading nook. 

Out to the backyard:

The backyard was so overgrown. It included a water feature and pond, which is behind all of those rocks. That all had to go.

 The backyard is a good size, and we have a lot of space on the side yard. It was pretty funny, on the real estate listing, it said there was a fire pit. Yeah, it was a bunch of rocks forming a circle. Classy!

Are you feeling overwhelmed yet? See, reliving all of these photos makes me remember where we came from and how much work we have done since then. But it also makes me remember all of the hours upon hours we put in. In the end, the house had so much potential and we could make everything JUST the way we wanted to. That was so exciting. We had three weeks to work on the house before we moved in. 

Even though the house is far from "finished", I figure there's no harm in posting the way things are along the way.