This Old House!

A few posts ago I talked about finding a bunch of our old pictures and wanting to post some of the pictures of our first house. These are all the "before" pictures. So for those of you who have seen the after will appreciate all the work we did. Those of you who have not seen the after I will try to wrangle a few after pictures and post them soon... but hopefully I will be in the hospital and won't. We will see. But for memory sake here are some before shots of our first house.
This first picture is the front of our house. Cute right.... never mind the fact that there are giant bushes that we ripped out, and it was right on Hwy 99! The second picture is just the other half that I couldn't fit in the picture. The "garage" they had started to turn into a "bed room" or storage room of some kind but was never finished and was some what falling off the house. It was torn off the first few days of us owning our new home!

This is a side shot of our house. Notice how they had put nice siding on the front of the house. Then if you look you can see this old green wood siding. We loved this pear tree that was a good 30 plus feet tall. It gave us so many pears that we usually were sharing them with our ward after we had canned and dried all we could! The grapes had grown up into the pear tree also! These grapes were ready to pick when we bought this house and I was canning grape jelly and grape juice off of it that season. I think I must have done it at our apartment the first week or so before we had moved in because the house didn't have electricity or water.
The second picture is of the "bonus room" we used it mostly as a storage/work area for the first couple of years we lived there. It had the really ugly striped carpet and black chimney in there!!! But eventually we painted it beautiful yellow, had really nice carpet put in and had a really great play room up there. I also had my elliptical up there and a tv. We loved that play room!!!

This one is of our "master bedroom." The closet thing was so awesome we ripped it out right away. Which was replaced with a walk in closet off the back of the house along with a master bath! We also sheet rocked this room due to all the construction done. We closed off the door to the right that led into the kitchen. Oh and we also updated those light fixtures you will see in many of these pictures with the shoe strings to pull them off and on! There were only 2 light switches in that house when we bought it. We had more then that in the living room alone with the remodel!
The second picture in this group was of the "nursery" we didn't do a lot to this room other then fix the closet, rewire all the lights and plugs, new windows,carpet, and paint! It was a very pretty soft green.

This is another picture of our Master bedroom. You can see these awesome shelves that they had in EVERY ROOM of the house. I am not joking they were in every room! Living room, kitchen, bonus room EVERYWHERE! They were all mismatched hangers hung with huge screws or 16 penny nails (that is a very big nail!) And they didn't have nice pretty shelves on them most of them were just old pine boards, many of them very ugly wood that they had painted weird things on one side... What were they thinking?
The second shot is of the living room showing the 2 bedroom doors from the living room. It also has a picture of our awesome heater. More on that in a minute.

The fist one is more of the living room going into the kitchen. It shows that awesome heater again. I call it awesome because it was a gas furnace that worked even with out electricity. It didn't have a fan but it would heat that living room, which is what we needed. We moved into this house the day after Thanksgiving. The great part about that is that we had torn off half of the house and many of the doors and windows that lead out to the torn off part that we were rebuilding were only covered with plywood! We lived in the living room. We set our mattress on the floor right in front of the heater. It was our only luxury. We had no lights, or running water! I was 5 months pregnant with Ethan when we moved in!!!
The second photo is of the stairway. It was right in front of the door. If you hung a coat on the post at the end you couldn't open the door all the way. We also loved these posts because one morning while we were laying in bed we noticed that they were colored peach, pink, peach, pink all the way up the stairs! This was funny to us, as well as most of their paint choices. But they were eventually removed and replaced with a beautiful oak that Larry built! He also took out the little cupboard under the stairs and built in an entertainment system there. We loved it!

This is a picture of our kitchen showing the door into the bathroom and the back door. The backdoor lead to a "mud room" that was falling off the house. The bathroom was so ridiculous I don't know how they lived with it. The plumbing was beyond ridiculous! Both were ripped off the first weekend we owned the house. In their place was a new wonderful bathroom, although the entrance was off the hall from the kitchen, a pantry for all our canning/food storage, and a laundry/ mud room.
The second shot of the kitchen shows the kitchen counter tops. For those of you who don't know those counter tops were "low." That is to most people standards. I remember standing at them one day doing dishes in the sink and realizing that I could do that with out having water run into my arm pits! (Which happens at tall kitchens because I am reaching UP to reach the sink!) But these were just the right height for me. When Larry was ready to tackle the Kitchen remodel I asked for the counters to be the same height! Because he loves me and it was "my" kitchen he did and I always loved it! Although when we did remodel we had to make the counter that went over the dishwasher bump up about 3 inches. Still looked great! We also closed in a few of the windows that looked out into the mud room but kept the low long one. I loved the light it let in and it made a great place to put plants.

This last one is of the kitchen cabinets. They were so ugly with the gross green and grey paint that was everywhere in the kitchen. But when Larry redid the kitchen and I had all oak cabinets I loved them! I also loved that they were "low" and I could reach the second shelf easily. It was like the kitchen was designed for me even before Larry redid it. We were able to just leave everything the same size just put new ones in that weren't smelly and dirty and falling apart! Larry did a wonderful job making that house beautiful, new and fresh! It was hard to let go of all we had put into it but we knew it was time to get off the Hwy, and move our kids to a quiet street. We love our quiet dead end street! What a great adventure that house was!