that wall has to go!!!

Carpet out. Next step that wall between the kitchen and living room has to go!!!

So of course on Boxing Day we decide to take that wall down.  Most people shop, not us, we renovate!! :)  Nothing like waking up on a holiday and thinking "hmmm what can we do at the new house today?"

Here is the before shot:

this is the view from the corner of the kitchen.  I am standing next to the wall that needs to be removed

Standing in the dining room by the window

I know, not amazing before shots.  But when I took them I had not anticipated how quickly this area would change.  My Husband is super fast.  He said part of that wall is coming down and by the time I got there to take pictures he was already at this point!!!

Before the dust even settled I took this photo... so sorry it's not very clear!

This was a quick project.  We knew we wanted to open up the house some more but before we ripped out all of the walls we needed more of a plan.  So this was our temporary solution.  What a difference taking down this section made!! :)

Messy? Very! But also very exciting! I see endless possibilities with this wall down :) 
So up next.... well, you will just have to come back to my blog to find out!

Kim

ONE TIP FOR RENOVATING!

I would not normally suggest to someone that renovating during the holidays is the best thing to do, however this house was empty and all my decorations and such were not affected by the demolition! We also had a plan, short term, but still a plan.  So arm yourself with a plan and time and then when you get a minute go for it!!  Just don't start knocking down walls willy nilly ;)

Let the games begin!!! Demo time...day 1

So, now we own 2 houses :/  This is exactly what we said we would never do.  Lesson learned, never say never! lol

I certainly had moments of oh no, what if this house floods in the spring when the river rises?! But then i thought, well at least we will know the reason for it :) and we will deal with that when it comes.

Now this house has a few issues, the biggest being that half of it is sinking.  So when you walk on that half you tend to feel like you are going to fall over.  However winter is not the time to deal with that, so we will deal with that later.

Where to start with demoing?  well that was easy for us, the carpets!!!!  We went in as a family and ripped those suckers out in about an hour!! the kids were awesome! Everyone ripping up sections, pulling out the underlay and then using pliers, hammers and screwdrivers to pull up the nail strips!!  It was dirty and soooo gross! Especially the carpet in the bathroom! EW!!! My Husband did that one really fast ;)

Here are a few pictures of our family outing:

love how the all worked so quickly!

NEXT is the main floor and anywhere the green carpet was:

AND NOW THE BATHROOM!!!

I realize that was a lot of pictures, but we were so fired up to get started because I knew we were going to be making drastic changes and I just had to try to capture every moment.  It was amazing to discover all the hardwood floors underneath the carpet and it was all in decent condition. :)  Hard to believe that someone wanted to cover up hardwood floors!

Working together as a family helped us to all get excited about this new house (kids haven't been super on board because they will be leaving some good friends that live across the road at our old house) and I am so glad that my kids can learn some life skills along the way.

Day one of demo down, many many many more to go :)

Kim

ONE TIP FOR RENOVATING!

Some jobs require a dust mask! This probably could have been one of them.  So I suggest you use a dust mask for removing old gross carpets.

Our reno story

So here I am writing a blog in my spare time between 12am and 6am..just kidding.  

Actually after months of thinking about it, I thought I would take the plunge and share our renovation story.  Thanks to a friend who asked, how do you live through this mess and remain so peaceful???

What a great question!  I have since been thinking about that question and what my response would be, because I am pretty sure at the time I mumbled some unintelligible answer lol.

So my friend, I thought I would take you through the process....here's how it started:

The long and short before we came to this home...setting the scene.

We built a house. ..we finally finished it and sold it to move closer to town. ..then through a series of moves we ended up completely gutting and renovating a house to the point we couldn't do any more because of resale value.  

There were a few issues at that place that made me crazy! ! So we put it on the market and spent just over a year hemming and hawing about what to do. ..then I reached my breaking point on the day we came to see our current house... I had just spent hours cleaning up a crazy mess with the help of my 4 kids.   So the state I was in when I came to see the new house was completely exhausted, absolutely frustrated and ready to move immediately into anything that did not  have the issues I was dealing with.

 It was dark rainy November day and all the snow we had was turning into about a foot of slush.  Utterly Defeated I entered the house and was assaulted with this!!

Dining Room and Kitchen...i just can't find the words to describe these rooms

Yeah, it's pretty ugly!! Yet somewhat comforting...reminds me of my childhood I guess lol.  As we continued the house tour we came across more cosmetic issues....

Notice the pink carpet in the bathroom!! GAG!

this doesn't quite show the depth of the shag

But then we came to this....

A DRY BASEMENT!!

Perhaps this won't mean a lot to you, but to me it was huge!! Just seeing a dry basement on such a horrible day was enough to make me want to move immediately!!

So within a month we took possession of this beauty, but had yet to sell our own.  Big risk buying another house without knowing for sure your current house is sold, but here is where we saw God's hand control the whole situation.  You see our house had a conditional offer on it and those people had a conditional offer on their house and then those people had a conditional offer on it  and so the cycle continued about 5 houses back.  Everyone's sale was depending on the one before going through.  There was nothing we could do but wait and watch how only God could orchestrate all these conditions to work out.

Love how during this time there was this song that kept playing to remind me that we won't be able to move unless it was with God. :)

 click here to see the song by Kristian Stanfill

There you have it, the beginning in a nut shell.  There is obviously much more to the story and more to share, so I hope that you will join me for our messy life journey.

Kim

ONE TIP FOR RENOVATING!

Truly though, we spent hours praying and we're reassured that even though this new place would be a huge reno project and would probably extremely overwhelm us, we were not panicked. ... so my first tip would be to choose a house that needs work...but won't send you into panic mode!