As a beginning to our story, below are some of the pictures we took of the house, many of them about a month before we actually bought it. My wife and I had already spent a couple of weeks peeking in the windows (most of them were covered, but we could catch small glimpses of some rooms through the curtains), talking about the house, and dreaming of all the things we were going to do to the house. We already knew we wanted to buy the house, and didn’t much care what the inside looked like.

However, it seemed somehow wrong/irresponsible/<insert adjective of your choice here> to buy a house without at least looking around with the current owner and taking some pictures. Make no mistake, though: we loved the town, we wanted the house, and even if we opened the front door and found something like this in the living room:

it would have made absolutely NO difference to us. I would have said, “Huh…we should probably fix the burning cauldron of fire in the living room”, and we would have bought the house anyway.

These pictures were taken fairly hurriedly, but they should give you an idea of the house in its initial condition. I’ll have more detailed pictures and descriptions in other posts:

The front of the house, including the side yard and chimney:

The backyard, if you can see it through the overgrown weeds.

The roof was missing a worrisome number of shingles (it makes a pretty checkerboard pattern, though), and the delapidated, rusty swingset frame from the 1970’s or so was somehow very sad:

The living room and the front door.

The bright red walls were first on my list of things to go, but the floor was original wood and just great…

The kitchen and downstairs bathroom.

Everything was clean and well-kept but old.

The downstairs bedroom.

The carpet is a weird deep-purple and looks like an 80’s flashback…

The laundry/utility room.

This room was added on later (we think sometime in the 1960’s) and was made of cinderblock. It didn’t fit the style of the house at all, and was built within about 30 inches of the house next door. The entire room made my mental list of things that had to go away.

This is the dining room, located next to the living room.

More of the purple carpet, and I could really do without the 70’s wood paneling:

This is a large room that was added onto the back of the house later, we are guessing in the early 1970’s.

We call it the “staging area” because we use it to store materials for our projects, cut wood in it, etc. We have to be careful, though, as it would be a shame if we damaged the purple carpet…that’s my wife in the background scraping off old wallpaper:

The upstairs large bedroom.

This bedroom is fairly large, and the original wood floors were actually in pretty good shape. The failing wallpaper and strangely short doorway will merit some attention in the future, though:

This is the small upstairs bedroom.

Technically it’s not a bedroom because it doesn’t have a closet, but my wife quickly claimed it as her office, so no problem there.

And finally the upstairs bathroom.

Functional, but that’s about all you can say for it right now:

That’s about it for now. More details and the projects to come later, and thanks for reading.