Loving All Things French: Finally we have a new home! (picture intensive..)

Well, those who are following know that we have been looking for new home for over a year and a half. After all the many homes we have been considering we finally closed and moved in a little over 2 weeks ago. We decided, for many reasons, to go a different route than our initial choices. We ended up buying a foreclosed short sale home. Basically, my husband is a builder and we knew we could do work on a home for 1/3 of the cost of someone who is not a professional. We just pay for materials....its not free...but much more doable. We bought a home that needs lots, and I mean lots, of love. However, it has tons of potential. Good bones...we keep saying. We got the house for song...and we plan on paying it off very soon. So, instead of getting home where we would be paying a mortgage for quite some time we decided that we rather will enjoy the process of making this home shine like it used to. Its going to be like a whole HGTV journey and one that we can feel very proud of when we are done. It is not going to be easy or fast. We will need to be patient with one another and with ourselves. We will have to put aside any embarrassment that might come up about the home...as the city and friends and family sees our progress they will know. The thing is, this house is VERY centrally located and loved by this city...they kind of feel a sense of ownership even with it as it has such history. In a way, its kind of neat that others care about this house and want to see it made right again and made beautiful again. The previous owners really made people dislike them by painting this house purple.
So, this will be my journey now with remodeling and decorating our new home mostly. If you like "before" and "afters" and watching, what hopefully will be an amazing transformation to a home that needs love and care, than this will be a blog for you. I'll add a few other tid bits of this and that here and there...I'll try to make it as interesting as possible... but in the end, this blog is really for me to chart my journey. So that I can look back, especially on days when it seems we are going nowhere, and see progress and hope. As you are most likely a fellow blogger yourself, you know how therapeutic it can be and how it helps sort out your life. At least it is has been that way with me. Seeing pictures of my world on the screen puts a different spin and look to my world and helps me see things in a different perspective. Blogging allows you to step aside and look at your own world as others perhaps see it. Getting feedback from people from all around the country and sometimes the world, is such a gift. To me, blogging makes the world a smaller place and I get so many rewards from getting to know people that have similar interests than me that I never would have ever "met" before. Its magical.
So, the house is 2400 sq ft. It is 2 story, I guess you would call it a Victorian. It has fancy molding around the windows and all wood floors inside. It has several really awesome windows, that when made nice again, will be highlights of the home. There is a working fireplace in the living room. It has a lot of character. It needs a lot of work. We have a 16 page plan....basically, we are taking one room at a time...the roof and landscaping each have a page as well as the porch and the garage... It ended up being 16 pages. We are going to stick to the plan...and not be like chickens with our heads cut off trying to do this and that everywhere and getting nothing done. The sad thing for me is, we have to start in the basement. This is no fun! No one will even notice...in fact, I have not even taken pictures of the basement it is so GROSS. But it essential we start at the foundation. There are safety issues there...not just cosmetic. New water heater, brine water softener system...fixing of pipes..windows...stairs..foundation issues...pouring a completely new concrete floor over the whole basement, jacking up the house which is sagging badly in a few places due to a chimney issue from when the house used coal to heat the house 100 years ago. Tim has to actually take a chimney down in the center of the house as this is what is causing the problem. Next week, we are having someone come and check to see if there is asbestos issues down there which we will need to address before we start ANYTHING. As it is, we should have done this prior to my husband and others stomping around down there 2 weeks ago. Bad...we already messed up. Fingers crossed that our initial estimation that there was no asbestos was correct. If you find yourself in this kind of questioning with an older home...NEVER wait...get it checked before you live in the house and move around in the areas in question.
So, we start in the basement and that is not too fun to take pictures of and blog about. This initial blog post will give you all the "before" pics of our purple house. I will not be adding posts about remodeling till we get to the main part of the house.
In case you are wondering, we will not be leaving the house purple, but this is not our first concern. The whole city keeps asking when we are going to fix the color. Our plan is to brick the whole outside with stone accents...in antique "cream city" brick. We will also probably be putting a new roof on even though it is actually a slate roof. If we can find a way to clean the mold and moss off and change the color of the slate we will keep it but we find it so ugly that even though slate roofs are generally very nice to have and last forever....cosmetically, we feel it needs a change. Like everything else, we shall see how it goes as we go along!
The house sits on an acre lot, full of nice trees and perennials with a creek running through the lot. Its potential to be an absolutely awesome lot is huge. Tim and I both love gardening so we are very excited with the hope of creating a masterful garden with statues and hard-scaping as well as lots of landscaping. (ie...decks and walkways and paths and maybe fountains etc..)We dont have any neighbors breathing down our necks...the house, for being right in the center of town and right across from the pool and a huge park, is actually very secluded and private and will be even more so when we are all done with landscaping. We so enjoy though sitting outside on our front porch and watching all the things going on at the park. This, we can see enjoying a lot as we get older. We feel like we are in a wonderful area. The post office is on our road, the library is a block and 1/2, our new church is right across the street and over a bridge over the creek...everything is walking distance....It was a good choice for us. The other day they had live music in the park and we just held hands and walked across the street to listen. Ideal.
So, here are the pictures of the whole "before" house just so you can see where we are starting from with the whole project. We are a bit overwhelmed I must admit at this point. I dont even know where to go sometimes...every room is yucky...I cant relax. We are dealing with pet odors and other pet issues from the previous owners who were, I hate to say it, but GROSS. They did not take care of this house or clean EVER I dont think. People like this should not own homes...then again, they shoudnt rent either and wreck someone else's home!....(Not sure where people belong that trash their homes ). Id like to give them a piece of my mind I tell you that...they took their anger out on the house when they knew they were losing to foreclosure. Ripped fixtures out of the walls leaving holes, punched holes in the walls, let their pets chew on the beautiful woodwork...etc... Our realtor says alot of people do that. They should be ashamed of the condition they left this house,and probably lived in this house as. Then again, we got the home at a very good price BECAUSE of the condition....so, maybe it was a hidden silver lining. Once we start to see some progress it will feel hopefully more manageable. Thanks for checking on me from time to time and please please please feel free to comment and give advice,ideas and thoughts and prayers too! Id love to hear from you often! I wouldn't do this if I didn't want your opinions and input and I love to "meet" new blogging friends! It enriches my life very much like I said before. Here we go! :)