Home Sweet Home

My wife and I recently bought a house (first time home owners!) and it has been a whirlwind of busy.  We went the fixer-upper route and bought an old home from the 50s, and pretty much ripped everything out and refinished the interior, doing much of the work ourselves.  We're hitting the home stretch and will be able to move in after four months of part time renovations, in a couple weeks.

When we bought the house, it was quaint, with a tiny kitchen, wallpaper EVERYWHERE (like... 3 layers worth), linoleum flooring in the kitchen, and a family room with wood paneling.  It was... pretty old fashioned as you can see:

The bones of the house were good though, and it was a home that was taken care of in a price range we could afford.  It has a small 1 car garage and a large back yard, which is good, because we have a young, rambunctious dog, who very much enjoys running around.

So, about 3 and a half months ago, we set to tearing the place apart.  Wallpaper removal, wall removal, floor removal, etc.  Demolition took around 2 months of spending our nights and weekends at the house.  We had a massive 40 yard dumpster in our driveway for a good month and a half of that too, which ended up leaving dents in the pavement.

One of the toughest parts was this room to the left.  That wood paneling was covering up another layer of wood paneling, which was covering up.... house siding.  Yup, this room was originally just a space between a standing garage and the original ranch house.  But instead of removing the siding when they connected the two to expand the ranch house, they simply put a layer of wood veneer over it.

Here you can see the old wood siding that was under 2 layers of that wood paneling.

This was probably the toughest room to rip apart.  We also spent a ton of time renovating the kitchen as well.  The old kitchen was a tiny little kitchen with a bedroom next to it that you had to walk through to get to the rest of the house.

So we decided to remove the bedroom, extend the kitchen out another 8 feet or so, and extend the 1 bathroom to be less miniscule.  Here are some progress photos:

We took the old kitchen, bedroom and bathroom:

And ripped EVERYTHING out

And tore up the old linoleum to lay down dark slate tile (we flew my old man out to help some)

And installed a beautiful kitchen and bathroom! (I don't take nearly enough pictures to get the progress well)

With real tile, painted walls, and new doors and trim.

So that's been taking up ALL of my free time, and why I haven't blogged much lately.  Also, my PC went kaput, so I need to buy some parts and a new hard drive and get it running again.  But this has been an insanely busy first quarter and it will likely stay busy for the rest of the year.  We have landscaping to do, the rest of the baseboard painting, installing a fence, tree removal... and we'll likely do most of it ourselves.

It's a blessing though, owning a home.  It really is great to be able to partake in the American Dream, especially coming from a family where my parents have never owned a home, I'll be the first among my parents and siblings.  

Honestly, I'm mostly looking forward to finishing up all the basic work so I can start integrating IoT stuff into the house.  The Amazon Echo looks pretty nifty, it'd be nice to pick one up and see what it's capable of.  Plus there are tons of new devices that people are inventing to connect to each other, it's pretty neat what's out there already.

So that's my home sweet home.  More of a personal post, but it's really a fun adventure, despite all the bone grinding and back aching work that goes into it.  (And I'm still under 30, why do I ache so much!)

Thanks for reading and hopefully I'll have some time to do some side projects once we move in and write about them.  Cheers!