So what are we in for?!?

Our new house is a one-and-a-half story bungalow built in 1920. It has been owned by two people before us, but lived in by only one family. The last time that anyone lived in the house year-round was in late 1960s! But, for all that, it is still in very good shape, partly because of a fairly recent roof replacement.

The house has a great porch running along the front of the house and a side porch facing east. They both need some work; a few floorboards are rotten. The outside of the house is in pretty good shape. Just a few pieces of siding have holes (the raccoons have been using these as doors for years).

The first floor of the house consists of a living room, dining room, kitchen, mud porch, bathroom, and two bedrooms. The floors throughout this level are small boards of oak, in very beautiful condition, at least in most of the rooms. The kitchen and bathroom have the original linoleum, but after working on it a little bit, I think that we will be able to save the wood floors in these rooms.

The living and dining rooms are divided by a large open entryway. There is also a French door that opens from the living room to the hallway. All of the woodwork in these rooms is in very good condition. The woodwork throughout the entire house is pine, varnished a rich red tone. It is not fancy, but it is beautiful.

The only rooms where the wood will need a lot of work are the kitchen and the bathroom. Both rooms' woodwork was painted with milk paint, white with black on the baseboard. This is going to take a long time to clean up, but it will be worth it in the end.

Speaking of bathrooms, I use that term pretty loosely. The room that is technically the bath was never modernized. There is no toilet (not even the plumbing for one!). As far as I can tell, there was not much plumbing coming into this room at all. We do still have the original sink and a hulking cast iron tub, if we want to reuse them:)

The staircase is in beautiful condition. The steps look like they have barely been walked up, even after almost 90 years. I think that the upstairs of the house was only used for storage. It consists of two large bedrooms, one to the east and one to the west, and a small room that opens to an open porch on the front of the house. Each room has a large closet, something highly unusual in a house of that age and style. The closets each have a small window, so they get natural light. One closet that opens into the main hallway is going to be turned into a full bath.

The house also has a full basement, unfinished, of course. It was completely full of junk; Josh hauled away several dump truck loads to the landfill. The house still had the original coal furnace. Josh worked one long night in November breaking it up with a sledgehammer. When he took it to be scrapped, it weighed 3000 pounds!

All in all, this house will present a lot of challenges, but also lots of reward.

Finally, We Did It

This is it. We have finally found the house of our dreams. And, as of last Friday, we officially became the owners. Now we just have to make it livable!!!

My husband, Josh, and I have spent many years arguing over what our dream home really was. For him, the vision was not necessarily the house itself but the location. He grew up in the country and has always wanted to get back out of town. For me, dream home meant an old house in the country, one that had not been destroyed with paneling, carpet, and modern woodwork. So imagine how happy we were to find a place that satisfies both of our dreams.

About a year and a half ago, I was driving home from work when I saw a For Sale sign. I had some time, so I turned off the highway and went to investigate. The house that was for sale was not worth looking at, but I passed a property on my back to the highway that made me stop the car. I saw a run down one and a half story bungalow sitting on a small acreage. It was in pretty rough shape from the outside and things were very grown up around it. It was obvious that no one had lived there for awhile. I took Josh and our daughters back by it later that evening. Josh said that he would try to find out who owned it.

We found out the owner's name, but Josh was hesitant to talk to him at first because he had heard from others in town that he would not sell the place. This was confirmed the first time that Josh actually called and talked to the owner. So I spent a year driving past the place and dreaming. Then this fall, a friend of Josh's talked to the owner on our behalf to tell him that we were really interested and would do our best to make the acreage an asset to the neighborhood. He reluctantly agreed to show us the house. So we got our first look inside in October, and I fell even more in love with this house. Have you ever walked into a house and you could see your own furniture, knew exactly what colors the walls should be painted? I wanted this house.

Not that it didn't have problems. It was full to the brim with junk, left there by the elderly woman whose family originally built the house in 1920. Plaster was falling off the walls and there was no insulation, plumbing, or heating. But I still knew that I wanted that house.

We began the process of buying this dream (or nightmare, if you ask Josh) in November, and on January 23, 2009, we finally became the owners.