This new bathroom.....

So it was settled, the new bathroom would now be in the room that was the old kitchen.    

As you can see,  it really was a very tiny room, way too tiny for a kitchen but perfect for a bathroom/laundry room.  So tiny that I had to stand on the cupboards to get a good picture of the whole room.  

First thing we had to do was cover up that door leading to the dining room.. no sense of having two doors in the room.

My son and I had come to spend a Sunday afternoon helping out a week ago or so and since the bathroom had an outer wall, the plaster had to come off so that it could be insulated. That meant we had to tear out the cupboards.  While doing that we ran into one minor problem. See that block of wall?  That's actually the headroom for the stairs to the basement on the other side of the wall. It can't be removed.  That's okay though, See that open spot to the right of it?  That's where the sink is going and so there will be a counter top covering that entire wall. The rest of the counter top will be perfect for folding laundry on.

Here is the space with all the cupboards out and the plaster cleaned up. At this point, my son and I had to leave at this point to get him home to bed so Dad has done a lot more to it since then and has been taking pictures regularly..











So since it's close to Christmas and it's a busy season, I haven't been able to go over and actually help in over a week although I have popped in to see progress whenever I see his truck in the yard.  I've asked him to make sure he is taking pictures of the progress and last night he brought his camera over so here are the pictures of what he has accomplished so far.

Insulation needed to be put into this wall because there was such a draft coming up from probably the basement door that leads to outside.  

The entire bathroom/laundry room needed to be drywalled.  It looks so clean in there! That little indentation in the wall is under the back stairs and is where the refridgerator had been.  It's now going to be a linen closet of some type. 

This will be where the toilet and sink will be in this corner. 

The washer and dryer will go along the same wall as this window.  Basically in front of the door that we closed over. 

 

Dad also put the trim up around the door to the kitchen as well.  He's planning on putting up crown molding by the ceiling in the kitchen as well.

When my son and I arrived that sunday we found that the hole that lead to living room #2 had been dry walled over.  We stood looking at the flue and wondered what it looked like. It was covered in plaster and we weren't if the brick was in good enough shape.  So we picked at a part that would be covered by cabinets anyway and discovered that with a little cleaning, the brick would look great.  So we set to work carefully prying the plaster off.  Between my boy and I, we made good time getting all that plaster off.  The exposed flue is going to look amazing in that room surrounded by cupboards.

  It was also decided that since one side of the flue had drywall on it, we would remove the plaster from the other side and dry wall that side as well.

Dad also did a bunch of crack filling as well and now the kitchen is paint ready and ready for the cabinets to be built and installed.  Exciting times!

That's it for now!  Thanks for reading!!

That old bathroom.....

One thing that I hated about this house is that the previous owners had installed a bathroom under the stairs in what should have been the hallway from the front door.  I understand the need.  The woman living in the house was an older woman and she certainly needed a bathroom on the ground floor so it served it's purpose.  

It was a full bathroom complete  with bathtub... under the stairs.  There was a wall installed to create a door to the hallway.  There was also a door leading to the den/new kitchen.

     

One of the first things I said to Dad was that we needed to figure out a way to move that bathroom out of there yet still keep the second bathroom.  For a house this large, a second bathroom is a must!  So after Dad decided that he wanted to create a laundry room/bathroom in the old kitchen, we started tearing things out.  I should say he and his friend started tearing things out.. I was only there for the tearing out of the sink.  

So the tub, toilet and sink all got the boot.  In the process we also discovered that behind the toilet was a door opening into the dining room that had been covered over at one point.  That sealed the deal for putting the bathroom into the old kitchen because now we had an access point to the dining room.   With all the extra doors and frames that we had pulled out, we certainly could just add that one.  So Dad did. 

                                                                             

The next time I came in, he had torn out the wall that divded the space from the front hallway.  As you can see from this picture, the staircase has also been opened up quite a bit.

Doesn't that look so much better?  The air will flow through and it looks so much more like it would have looked originally.

And look at how open everything looks from the new kitchen!  This will really improve the heat flow. Now that the bathtub is out of there, Dad is thinking of building a closet under the stairs there but that may change as all plans usually do. haha.

I am so happy with how this part is coming together.

Next step

The room that will be the new kitchen has 5 doors in it.

 That's a lot of doors and not a whole lot of empty wall space for the important things a kitchen needs like say counter tops and cupboards.

 Lets take a look at that room again shall we?  There is one door that leads to the hallway, one door that leads to living room #1, one door that is the door to the second stair case, one door that leads to the old kitchen/new laundry room and one door that leads to the back porch plus a window.  So as we mulled how to put a functional kitchen into this room, we kept coming up with dead ends.  Until we came up with the idea of blocking off the door to the living room and opening up the staircase and the door to the hallway.                                           So this is what we set about doing.  This meant taking all that old paneling off, scraping away the plaster and pulling off the wooden lats.  That makes for a lot of mess.  Dad started pulling all the door jams off and I set to work chiseling away at the plaster.  Plaster amazes me.  It must have taken so long for someone to build a house in the early 1900's and it amazes me that they built such big ones at that.  The wooden lats would have taken forever to nail on for sure but the plaster... to get it so smooth and perfect.  Just amazing.

Plaster is pretty dusty so we had to make sure we were prepared with dust masks to protect our lungs.

Tearing down walls is actually quite fun!

That's it for now.. My computer is dying.. 

The first bit of progress....

Where to start...   when looking through the house it's easy to feel overwhelmed.  Not knowing where to start.  Well for starters, that big parlour/den?  It should definitely be a kitchen.  That teeny tiny kitchen?  That should not be a kitchen!  Especially not in this big house.  So that's where we start.

Dad and I sat down and mapped out the kitchen plans on grid paper.  This is our first draft and it has certainly changed since we came up with it but I thought I would share it anyway.

Since making this plan, we realized that the bathroom under the stairs wouldn't work and that the laundry room also wouldn't work because of some structural things.  So we decided to make that small kitchen into a bathroom/laundry room.  

First of all we had to pull the plaster off the one exterior wall in the new kitchen so that we could add insulation and gyproc before putting up cabinets.   Can you believe there was absolutely no insulation in that wall?  Amazing they didn't freeze to death in this house.  This picture is my dad and my 10 year old tearing the plaster and the lats off the wall.  What a messy job and my boy loved it!  

Insulation

And drywall

That's it for now!

History

Here's some history on this house.  The house was built in 1907 so that makes it 118-119 years old. It was built on land that was in the Milligan family for over 150 years.  That land still belongs to a Robert Milligan.  The house however had been willed to Robert and his siblings.  Robert since passed his portion down to his daughter.  His siblings and daughter decided to sell and so they separated the house from the land and so Robert still owns the land surrounding the house.  As we looked through the house my Dad came across this picture dated in the 1950's.   The barns are all gone but the house still stands.

The beginning....

This is an American Foursquare style house.  My absolutely favorite style of house.  I don't know why I just love these houses. This house is on the highway in my town on the six minute drive from my house to my father's house.  I've driven by this house probably a million times in my lifetime.  There was always an older man sitting by his garage selling tires but other than that I've never really taken notice of it.  Until last winter....

Last winter was a horrific winter full of 16 foot snowbanks.  During that winter I noticed something, the drive way was never plowed.  Full snow banks covered the yard and although there was always a light in one window, there didn't seem to be anyone living there.  Because my father knows practically everyone in town, I asked him about it.  He told me that this house was the old Milligan homestead and that the gentleman that owned it was getting older and wasn't living there.  

For some reason, the house drew my attention every time I drove past it.  As the snow melted into spring I noticed how many shrubs and bushes had grown up around the house making it look slightly haunted.  Still it drew me in and I wondered what it looked like inside.  Then one day as I drove by I noticed a for sale sign on it's front lawn.  This was my chance!  As soon as I got home I called up my dad who is an accomplished carpenter and who had just recently sold a house that he had bought and fixed up.  

Maybe I should explain some about my dad and our relationship.  I love working with wood and love doing little projects.  My dad is an amazing handyman who has built countless houses and cottages.  This is how we love to spend time together.  Building stuff, fixing stuff, pretty much anything that has to do with tools.  

Anyway back to the house.  I called up my dad and told him that I had seen a for sale sign.  A few days later we were out for a drive when we pulled in to the house to take a look.  We decided that evening to call the realtor to see if we could take a look.  A couple days later we were in the house looking around.  Oh my, I loved the layout of this house but as we walked through it was clear that the house had not been lived in in a very long time.  The walls were cracked everywhere and it needed quite a bit of updating.  I went away a little disappointed that my house was in such a bad state.  It had so much potential but it looked like so much work. 

My dad however was still mulling it over.  A couple days later he went in to see it again with his friend who is a contractor.   Some days later he called and told me that he had put an offer in and it was accepted.

 I was so excited.  I started dreaming of ways we could fix up this house... Dad and I spent countless nights chatting about things we could do and ways that we could change things.  It took over 2 months to finally close on the house so we had lots of time to dream and scheme.  

And so the adventures begin and I've decided to blog about our experiences so that we have a record of our progress.  Seeing as I am also a wife and mother to 4 kids, I don't get to go in and help him as much as I would like, I go in as much as I possibly can and my 10 year old son loves going and helping his Pepe.  He especially likes the demolition part.   

I took some before pictures of the interior of the house that I will share for now and tomorrow I hope to write a little bit about the history of the house and some of our progress so far.  

Even before the house closed, Dad started cleaning up the yard. He cut the grass, tore out some of the 2 story high bushes in front of the house and really made it not look so haunted anymore.








The back of the house had so many bushes and trees.  Dad probably spent a week just clearing away the brush back there.  This picture was taken probably half way through.

And now for some pictures of the interior.  There were still a lot of the previous owners furniture and belongings in it.  I merged all the angles of each room into one picture so that they are easy to see.  

So there are the before pictures.  As we progress, I will post new pictures.