The House — How We Found It.

I’ll be blunt with you here, this post is going to have A L O T of pictures, and not a lot of actual writing, as it’s only the before of the house. 

I’ve contemplated several times if I should start with all of the ‘before’ pictures, or if I should do a room by room. After much thought, I think it will be easier to go in the order of how we did the remodel. So, here goes. 

The first pictures of the inside of the house I’m going to show you come from when we saw the house the second time, when we were looking at the house to get an idea of the state of the structure itself before we made an official offer. 

Brace yourselves. 

First stop on the tour is the “teal room.” You will notice there is nothing teal about it, but I needed a way to tell you all which room is which all the way through the process. 

The teal room.

The next room that we see is the purple room. It was used as an office.

The purple room. 

The last bedroom on the main floor was the room they used as their bedroom.

The yellow room.

Another view of their bedroom.

The yellow room 2.

The bedroom we called the teal room again.

The teal room 2.

The hallway.

The end of the hallway. The purple room is on the left, yellow room is on the right. 

Again.

More of the hallway, from the “T”.
Left side closest door is the teal room, furthest is purple.
Right side closest is the bathroom, the linen closet in the middle, and at the end of the hallway is the yellow room. 

The bathroom is where the work that needed to be done for us to be able to get the house began.

Bathroom upstairs. 

And here, you can see why. The bathroom floor was coming apart, down to a rotten subfloor.

The floor damage in the bathroom upstairs. 

Just another view of the bathtub.

Bathtub in the upstairs bathroom. 

The “T” in the hallway, which shows you the back door, laundry nook, and kitchen. If you were to turn to your left, you’d be looking down the main hallway at the bedroom doors, and if you were to to turn right, you would be looking into the sitting room.

View of the back door from the hallway “T”.

A closer look at the laundry nook.

The laundry nook.

The kitchen was in need of a facelift, and definitely a tad bit of opening up. We knew we wouldn’t be able to take any walls out because they are supporting walls, but also knew immediately the soffit above the cabinets needed to GO.

The kitchen. 

Also, with us having three kids and my plans to do daycare (spoiler alert?!) that we needed at least a half wall around the stairs so we didn’t have to worry about spindles.

The stairway railing and the sitting room. 

Not only did they have carpeted stairs, they also opted to have the entire wall carpeted as well???

The stairwell. 

The basement outer walls are just the foundation itself, and the ceiling was sheets of plywood nailed up.

Living room in the basement. 

There were only two working lights in the basement, one shown here, and the other in the next photo.

Living room in the basement. 

An Old Milwaukee light for the second working fixture.

Living room in the basement. 

The view from the bottom of the stairs into the bedroom in the basement.

View of the bedroom in the basement from the bottom of the stairs. 

There were two cutouts to get to underneath the stairs, one in the living room, and the other in the bedroom.

Bookcase blocking the hole to get under the stairs. 

The bedrooms had extra furniture strung out.

Inside of the bedroom in the basement.

They “finished” the walls in certain areas of the basement by gluing carpet samples of all colors all over the walls.

Bedroom basement 2.

Basement bedroom 3.

Basement bedroom 4 - under stair access. 

You can begin to see the mold on the bottom of the drywall tot the bathroom.

More of the living room downstairs. 

View of the bottom of the stairs. 

Living room/Bathroom in basement. 

The inside of the basement bathroom was the worst, and what the appraiser initially said needed torn out.

Basement bathroom. 

The cement wall was covered with vinyl flooring that was glued up.

Basement bathroom 2. 

There was a water leak that the owners were both completely unaware of due to health issues prohibiting both of them from going downstairs.

Basement bathroom mold. 

A buffet table which also happens to be one of the only things that was salvaged out of the house. (When I make that post, I’ll link to it here.)

Dresser left in livingroom. 

The back room is technically a nonconforming bedroom but it was the only room in the basement with no carpet or flooring on the floor.

Basement office. 

Basement office 2.

Basement office 3. 

Basement office 4. 

Our work was certainly cut out for us, which worked in our favor. We knew going into this that we wanted to try to do as much of the work as we could ourselves, and with the amount of work that needed to be done to the house we got an amazing deal!

I cannot wait to post the entire finished product, but I will be working on it so it will be out hopefully soon!