It's officially DONE!

After over six years of labor, sweat and tears, we passed our final inspection last week! We can now legally inhabit our house.

To celebrate, I wanted to share with you a few pics.  And, just for completeness, here's the back stories too.

Here's an interior tour when we bought it. (It's okay to laugh and know that we were nuts to buy it. )

Here's some pics of the gutting.

And putting in the new foundation.

The exterior wall repair

Repairing fire damage

This post has pics of painting the walls.

And here's how it looks now:

Exterior front (beige and gray, with a dark red door). The front porch has a "bridge" over the lowered front yard, creating a sort-of moat. The main floor is wheel-chair accessible.

Exterior back (I had a hard time getting a good pic of this). There's a walk-out basement, and a huge deck off the main floor. We'll eventually put a second stove out on this deck so that I can do summer canning outdoors.

Gutting the house removed a lot of old character (it was originally built in the 1890s), so my hubby custom-built molding to re-instate some of the character. 

More of the custom molding work. Main floor walls are gray, trim is white. 

Exterior doors are dark gray.

Hickory flooring on the main floor. It's stained a grey-ish mid-tone that is a bit lighter than I thought I wanted, but I ended up loving.

Chester poured in place concrete countertops.

Kitchen has cream cabinets with dark hardware, concrete countertops, stone-look linoleum flooring, and a stainless steel backsplash behind the stove. Same gray walls and white trim as the rest of the main floor. 

Another view of the kitchen, with the custom stainless backsplash behind the stove. Eventually we'll pop a panel over those holes under the sink....

Second story (there's 3 bedrooms and a big bathroom up there) has very pale greyed out blue-green walls (that I'm mentally thinking of as "Russian sage", because it's nearly the color of their leaves), with light maple floors.

I love the teal doors.

The second story bathroom has dark wood, and eventually will have some color other-than-white walls, but right now they're still just primed. It also boasts a jacuzzi. (Main floor bathroom didn't make my pics - it's a very greyed-out lavendar color, with white trim and all white fixtures).

The basement stairs have bright carpet to visually signal that we're entering the kid zone. Basement walls are where the bright and fun painting is, and where the kids play area will be. It's officially unfinished territory (we're not adding a ceiling or floor other than the concrete), but I suspect we'll be down there an awful lot. You can see pictures of most of the fun wall murals here.

The basic themes that we went for in decorating is muted and calm main floor (it ended up with light and mid-tone neutrals, with dark hardware and dark gray doors. The main colors are cream, white and gray - floors add in a mid-tone brown.) Upper story theme is light and airy - it's mostly blue-green - very light on the walls and teal doors, white trim and light floors. The basement theme is fun and kid-friendly - there's murals on the walls, and wild crazy carpet going down the stairs.

We're so excited to have the official "okay" to move in!  Moving date is set for August 29th.

A Painting Party

I suppose that one of my favorite things about redoing an old house is the wide variety of how things get accomplished.


A while back we had a "Painting Party", where Chester fixes up a bunch of reasonably nice food (which in our world seems to mean lots of meat), and we invite everyone we know to come join the fun (and by fun, we mean hard work). We generally have 15-40 people show up to "join in the fun". This time we had 25-30, plus the seven of us.


We worked for about 8 hours (people came and went through out the day - only Chester was there for all of it), and managed to prime or paint (sometimes both) everything but two of the three bathrooms in the house (one we needed to keep functional, while in the other we stored all the stuff that couldn't be in the rooms getting painted).

It won't surprise you that we're overly frugal with paint, so instead of buying the shades we wanted, we bought lots and lots of mistints, and Mr. "can do everything" Chester custom mixed shades to my request. The main floor is a sedate gray, the upper story is a light greyed-out blue-green that I've dubbed "russian sage" after the plant. There's a bright orange room (why he bought that mistint, I must admit I wonder, but it'll be canning and freezer storage, so much of the wall won't be seen), and about half of the lowest level (a walk-out basement) is in murals.

Here's way more pictures than you want:

Amy's Office - a light greyed-out green-blue that we're calling "Russian Sage" after the plant.

The "Sun Room".  Not because it has windows (it doesn't), but because it makes your eyes hurt to look at it.  Our freezer and canning storage will be in here.

Some terrific help painting the tall stairwell to the second story.

Main floor walls are gray with white trim.

The library has a red reading nook (aka closet)

Help painting flowers and butterflies in the girls room.

There may have been more painted than just the walls....

The blue tape denotes bed height.  She's having big flowers below and purple mountains majesty above.  She was singing as she painted.

Painting the flowers and butterflies wall.

Painting a tree

A solar system for a bedroom wall

Beware of the little boy with the green roller

More trees

Big flowers

A city-scape by the laundry room wall

A panorama of the kids area in the basement.