November 6, 2019

A Before and After: My Own House

After I posted on Monday about the before and after of our client’s living room, the girls in my office asked if I had pictures of my house before we renovated. And when I pulled them up and we went through them, we realized I never did a full post on my own home’s transformation! And it is PRETTY dramatic! So I thought I’d do just that today, which was such a fun exercise for me! We have been in this house six years now, and as we start looking for something a little bigger in the next year or so, it’s nice to reflect on just how far we’ve come with this house!

Below is our living room when we bought the house- covered in a metallic wallpaper that reeked of smoke! But there were good bones- we kept the fireplace mantel and eventually (during phase three) opened up where that door is to create our family room.

We still have not replaced out windows- our heating bill is actually not bad at all believe it or not.

This was the dining room looking into (sort of) the kitchen. This wall came down and created our open kitchen/dining area.

This change makes me laugh- it’s so crazy! I barely remember living with that kitchen above for the 6 months we did!

This was the sun room off the family room… which we lived with for three years as is, believe it or not, but then tore down to build our family room.

It’s now one of my favorite spaces in the house! We only bumped the footprint out 5 feet in depth but left the width. It’s not a big room, but it works just fine for us- and the vaulted ceiling really makes it feel so much bigger than it is.

The fireplace became pass through so we can use it on both sides of the living spaces.

It’s just a happy, bright room we spend SO much time in.

This was the oddest spot in the house- the office/ third bedroom, only accessed through a half-height hobbit size door! WHAT!? This was one of those spaces I think that made me so nervous when we bought the house- like, HOW are we gonna fix this?

But we did- thanks to my Dad’s architecture firm, who did all the plans for the big renovation/addition we did that created our master suite above our new garage. This room is now the master hallway/Andrew’s closets and our master bathroom, if you can believe it!

Our small but mighty master bathroom.

This was the creepy-ish tiny bedroom through the hobbit door…

Which is now our master bedroom- another room I absolutely adore in our house.

This room was our original master bedroom, but it’s now Henry’s new kick ass big boy room :)

And this room was our guest room, then Henry’s nursery, and now a guest room again! :)

The basement was half finished- we actually ended up taking out the fireplace (which we’d never use down there) to make more room for a playroom for Henry.  We also had to dig an egress window (not shown) since we took out the bulkhead staircase when we did earlier renovations. Now the basement gets decent light and Henry loves to be down there.

I don’t have a great exterior shot of the after- I need to take one!  But I hope this gives encouragement to people looking to buy a home- you can buy something old that REALLY needs work and is NOT what you thought you wanted (in fact, I cried through our whole closing…) and make it into something perfect for you. :)

 

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