Bittersweet farewell to our first home

It's official.  We have left our first house.  We still own it, we're renting it but it's not REALLY ours any longer.  Of course it took deciding to rent it out to finish off our projects.  Its stats: 1640 sq ft, 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bath.

We bought our house in July of 2005, I believe it closed on the 10th.  We decided on this house because we could renovate it and earn sweat equity, it was intended to be a starter home. 

Here is the general layout.  I didn't take the time to make it to scale.

This is the front of the house.  There were pyramedalis trees all along the front of the bedrooms and along the side of the driveway.  There were junipers in front of the walkway and a whole mess of evergreen bushes all crowded in together with a lace leaf Japanese maple.  There was also an evergreen tree between the porch and the garage, surrounded by concrete.  Of course you can't see any of this because if you took a picture of the whole house you would've only seen all those bushes. 

This is the front of the house now.  We tore out all those trees (and had great fun doing it).  The only one we kept was the maple tree you see and the Japanese maple you can KIND of see on the right.  We hauled in a ton of dirt to make these tiered gardens, we also put one on the other side of the driveway and we broke out the concrete and tore out the tree next to the porch.  That area has yet to be finished.  We also painted the house, replaced the roof and all the windows, oh and added a garage door opener.  We installed rain barrels in order to get the water away from our house.  It would come down the downspouts and create huge puddles of water along the sides of the house which are concrete.

The back yard was a mess.  The yard was pitted like crazy, there was a whole pile of black berry bushes and the trees were out of control. 

We trimmed up the rhododendrons and the lilac bush, pulled out a dying azalea, ripped out the mass of blackberry bushes (under which we found several old christmas trees, a desk chair, and some pvc for a canopy and a still living rhododendron - which has been transferred to the front yard).  Daddy even wheel barrowed in 7 yards of dirt to level it out as best as possible.  Then he reseeded the whole thing so the grass was brand new.

Front entry/living room. 

The first thing we did was tear down the lowered ceiling and raised it to the standard 8 ft, we added can lights too.  The ceiling was lowered from the front door, down the hallway and through the kitchen.  We tore out the linoleum and carpet, put down engineered hard wood, new baseboards, crown molding, a new front door and painted.  I found that I LOVE the richer colors with the white trim.  Definitely planning to do that in our next house.  HATE this fireplace still... wanted to paint it but the renters said not to worry about it because they like it.

The dining room.

We tore out the columns and took out the railings, changed the chandelier and obviously painted nad did the floor. 

The family room.

New carpet, paint, an OPENING window, added track lighting and a ceiling fan/light.  In this picture the fireplace has yet to be painted dark brown (which looks MUCH better).

Laundry area and the garage door.  Unfortunately I didn't get a new picture.  We tiled it and painted, and put in a new garage door. 

The half bath.  This thing was NASTY...

 

Tiled it, painted, new toilet, new sink, new cupboard and mirrors.

This picture is from before we painted it the final time, we decided to stick with grey.

The kitchen pass through.

We took out everything in order to raise the ceiling.  The cabinets were in the garage waiting to be painted and put back up when Grandma G discovered that they STUNK!

New cabinets, painted, new stove, microwave hood, fridge, added lights, new sink, tore out the "pass through" wall.  Tiled the floors and the counters.

Master bedroom.

 

Carpet, paint, molding, doors...

Master bathroom, isn't that little mini burn beautiful???

The tub/shower are behind us in this picture.  New cabinets, tiled, new toilet, sink, mirror, medicine cabinet, cabinet...

The hall from the master to the other bedrooms.

LOVE the crown molding.  Eventually we'll finish it in the dining room, master bedroom, kitchen and family room.

 Kids bathroom... the floor was SATURATED with urine... yuck.

Raised the ceiling where it dropped down for the light, new cabinets, sink, toilet, subfloor, tile, tub walls, medicine cabinet...

 The nursery to be

 

The nursery in step one when we were expecting Kayda.  This is the way this room stayed for Dillon too.  It got to it's final appearance in July, before Carson was born.

 The end result for the nursery.  Carpet, blinds, doors, paint...

 

 The "den to be" which ended up being Dillon's room.

 Again carpet, paint, doors, blinds...  This will be much easier to summarize at the end.

 The "guest bedroom" which ended up being Kayda's room.  One of the renters had locked their two big dogs in this room so the subfloor had to be replaced.

 

 Carpet, paint, doors, blinds...

 

We did so much work on this house.  All the doors are new, blinds in the bedrooms, ALL the floors are new, the cabinets, sinks, toilets... geez it'll be easier to list what we didn't do. 

I need to express just how nasty this house was.  The pictures don't do it justice.  The carpet that was there was unusable, it literally looked like camoflauge.  All of the bathroom floors, the kitchen and the laundry room had particle board underneath that crumbled because it had gotten so wet, with some NASTY things in the bathrooms especially.  The doors had holes punched in them, the toilets were all cracked and leaking.  When we bleached the walls prior to painting the bleach water ran down black.  Daddy scraped all the popcorn ceiling off, it was nasty brown too. 

This house was a fixer upper for sure, it just ended up being more of a project than we expected.  It took us 6.5 years and we're still not done with everything.  These are the things left to do.  Finish the front garden, put the trim up outside around the windows, someday we'll put up new siding, finish the crown molding inside. 

These are the things we didn't replace, and this is being nitpicky.  The dishwasher (it was new when we moved in), the bathroom fan/light combos, the bathtubs (redid the surround)... and that's all folks.  Even the furnace and water heater were replaced. 

We bought the house in July 2005, didn't move in until October 2005 and even then we used my parents old carpets just randomly laid around as flooring.  We lived there with just the hardy backer on the counters because we hadn't finished the tile yet.   It was insane. 

 



I'm glad we bought this house, and I think it's a beautiful home now but it's time to move on.  We're living at Grandma and Papa G's now in order to build a rental history and down payment to buy a new house that will fit our family a little better.  It's sad to leave the house, we lived there for 6 years and had 3 children while living there but I am excited to be working towards the house we want our children to FINISH growing up in.  We found a nice family to rent it, they love it and are REALLY excited about living there.  It was a great learning experience.  We know how to do SO many things now!  Thank you to all of our family who helped us.  Especially Papa G, he has put in an insane amount of time both when we bought it and these last few weeks when we were getting ready to rent it.  Other people helped a lot too but he was ALWAYS there when we needed help.