The old door to the left, including the wall still in tact.

Door removed, and widened and wall gone!

Jared at work

Beautiful New Door!
New Door

What Jared's been up to

So while I have been laboring away in the bedrooms, Jared has been keeping himself busy with about a billion other projects. Last weekend his dad came over to help out, and they did a lot of discussing about how to properly remove the old studs, and replace with a header beam, so we would have a more open concept between the dining room, kitchen and the sunroom. They have so far successfully, removed one whole section of wall (beam still to come) and we have one more section to remove. It is so cool! Especially since it was getting hard for me to fit through the spaces between the 2x4's. Now I just breeze right through. : )

The Before! Looking into the dining room through to the kitchen.

What is under all that vinyl anyhow? REAL hard wood.

Same view but with less walls!

And the more open concept. The support beams will go once the header is in place. And then the studs between the sunroom and kitchen will come down too.

The job finished with two support headers in place, and all 2x4's removed!

Then today, he thought it would be good to install one of our new front doors. He started on the sun room door. Since the weather has gotten warmer we haven't been able to properly latch it, let alone dead bolt it! We replaced the old 32" nine light with a giant 36" one light, and it is so cool. I hate to put a privacy curtain on it, it look so good like it is! Pics to come!

Magic Trowel! The Story of a Satisfied Customer.

When it comes to researching how to do something that I have never done before, I almost always turn to my friend, the internet, before I do anything else. So when I was trying to figure out how best to skim coat old, pitted, plaster walls, it was no different. After much research I came across a link posted by a fellow blogger and home renovator HERE. So here is a tip for all y'all who have to refinish plaster: Buy this tool!!! The Magic Trowel
Yesterday was one of those good days that makes me realize why people renovate homes. And the Magic Trowel made it all possible. I am always a bit hesitant to try a new technique, the unknown can be scary! The directions said to add 8 oz of water to 5 gallons of joint compound. Jared and I doubled that amount. (And I may add more today.) The directions also said to prime the walls first, but we completely skipped that step. I did, however, wash the walls REALLY well with hot water and an abrasive scrubby first. We then rolled it on with a paint roller, just like they said. I got a big glop of goopy compound on the roller and then really laid into the wall, so as to get in all the little pitted places. Then I just took the Magic Trowel (which I wetted) and pulled it down the length of the wall starting from the top. At first I had little air hole-looking things, but after I adjusted the way I was holding the trowel, they cleared right up and I was left with an-almost-smooth surface. I will have to do some sanding for sure, and then applying of a second coat.

The wall looked so awesome after the first coat that I felt like dancing! And it only took me a half an hour to do one whole wall in our bedroom (about 11x8). After so much unrewarding and tedious wallpaper stripping and wall washing it was like magic!

Oh, and btw you won't find these babies on ebay. My theory why? Because once you buy one

you never want to get rid of it!

What it looked like before I ever touched it.

After much wall paper stripping, wall washing and hole filling:

And Today, after one coat of joint compound.

Yes it is...

I bought a home lead test kit today, and it turns out that all the trim and doors are undercoated with lead paint. There is a white top coat that is chipping, and under that is a yellow-ish paint that is the lead paint. Amazing thing about the lead paint though, is that it is not chipping at all. That stuff must have been strong! So I have to rethink my plan of when and how to refinish all the trim. (scraping and sanding with the littles around, just won't cut it!) Argh... Darn lead paint.

What we have been working on

So just to get y'all up to speed: We closed in January (If I am remembering correctly!) Work began right away. The first modus operandus was to figure out what exactly we wanted to do! Easier said than done. Even before we closed I threw out a fleece to the God, that if Jared and I couldn't come to agreement on what we wanted, that this wasn't going to work. It was really cool because I would have an idea about something I thought would work well on the house, and then Jared would come to me with his ideas, and they would be exactly what I was thinking! This happened MANY MANY times, and in fact, it is still happening. After we sorted out what we were doing, the demo could begin. The entire kitchen was removed. Walls came down in the kitchen, the dining room, the sun room, the back room, and the upstairs sun-less room. We replaced all the windows (except the basement and the sliding glass door). We ripped up linoleum in the dining room, kitchen, and sun room. We Ripped out carpeting from the sewing room. Stripped wall paper from the living room, stairway, master bedroom and upstairs hallway. We instaled a wood stove, which we used to supplement our heating bill this winter, by burning the old lathes from demo. We literally heated our house with our house! We have had major favor at the dump, and our dumping costs haven't been no more than $100.00 to date, even with all of that demo!
The latest improvements have been wall washing, gardening, hole patching, and we now have water running to the house and to the manifold.
OK, so that's like 5 months of work! Whew, didn't realize we had accomplished so much. Journaling is good. : )
Oh, and I just realized I should be taking pictures of all of this too!

The Dreaded Inspection...

The inspection we got was absolutely fabulous. Darryl E Chandler is the guys name, and we would highly reccommend this guy to any one who might be closing on a house in the state of Maine! The inspection set us back $300.00. The home inspection went mostly as planned. The biggest shocker was finding out that we would need to replace a section of foundation wall. Everything else we pretty much knew about. The guy flips houses for a living, and he said that he would probably not take on such a big project for one of his personal flips, because he couldn't flip it fast enough to make his money back, but he said for what we are doing, it was a good price and that the house had "good bones". So we moved on to closing. Oh yeah, while we were waiting for the inspector to show up we met our new neighbor for the first time. His name is James. Him and his wife have two young boys. We were really psyched to meet him. He told us that his wife and him and been praying hard for good neighbors, and they were really happy that we were the ones who bought the place. He was also glad that the person who bought the house was going to care for the house and make improvements on it. The house has been through several owners since they have lived next door. They even dubbed the back room "the screaming room" because the last couple that lived there would scream at each other (loudly) in that room! So needless to say, it is really cool to be the answer to someone else's prayer. Oh yeah, and the neighbor who lives behind us, we know her and her husband. I used to attend a women's group that she also attended. And the lady who does my quilts lives down the street, and she is also a believer. Just last night I met a woman who lives down at the end of the street, and she is a follower of Jesus and she told me that our neighbor two doors down is a too. Wow! Can't wait to see what God has in store for this neighborhood and this town!

We WERE Going to Build

This whole journey begins in September of 2008. At that time Jared and I had been living with his parents for about 2 1/2 years. Over those two years we had looked at houses in our price range that were for sale. Basically, anything we could afford was JUNK and would still need tons of repairs. We became pretty discouraged with the whole process, and we finally decided on building a house. I have to admit I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of building, as I have barely any experience in that mode. In fact, except for refinishing an attic while we lived in Rochester (a different story) I had never done any construction type of work at all. However, I was willing to trust my husband and father-in-law!

We were going to build a super efficient house made out of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF's). It took us for-ev-er to decide on a design we liked, but we finally settled on something we could both agree on. A little over 2000 square feet, not including a full walk out basement.

Jared's parents had given us 2 acres of their land, and we had cleared it of big trees (for a better southern exposure) and we had even bought a backhoe (which broke shortly after purchase) and a dumptruck, and had obtained a line of equity through Jared's Dad worth $80,000.

The School House

Then, in September 2008 a property caught our attention. It was an old school house and it included a small house on the property. We fell in love with the idea of the school house. It had been an antiques store for many many years, and it was still full of many old things. It was a huge space, and had never been converted or broken up into apartments. The wood trim was unpainted, the chalk rails were still there (although the old slate chalk boards were not), the stairs were worn from years of foot traffic, there was a bell tower, and so much more.

Jared had visions of a workshop and gallery on the ground floor, and a loft style apartment on the second floor.

If I remember correctly they were asking 150,000 for it. Now, Don't laugh, we offered 80,000 cash (yes, the money for building our house.) The place needed serious repairs, and we had prayed and prayed about a dollar figure to offer.

They actually counter offered at 130,000. But we just couldn't pay that much, and so after a month of our time, much debating, and major stress on my part (I was experiencing shortness of breath), we walked away.

What we walked away with was resolve. Resolve, that is, to build our house. No more looking to the left or to the right. No more cheating on the house we were going to build!

Fast forward two weeks...

It was Monday, November 10th. Jared was due back from work, but I hadn't heard anything from him and he wasn't home yet. I gave him a buzz to see where he was.

Coversation went something like this:

Jared: Hello?

Me: Hey, where are you?

J: Oh, um, I am cheating on our house.

Me: WHAT!!!!!!?????? No we are building a house, no more looking at other houses, getting distracted.

J: Well, Alicia sent me this listing, and it looked cute, so I thought I would check it out. It's really pretty nice, it's a foreclosure, and they are only asking $55,000. You should see it.

Me: No! I am not going to look at it....

The next day was Veterans Day, Jared had the day off. Jared said we would just drive by the house. He pulled in the driveway. I had all ready resolved that if it didn't have a cute backyard I wasn't going to even consider it. Guess what? Cute back yard. I told Jared, Ok, maybe I would get out and JUST look in the windows, since we were here, but that was it. I peeked in the windows. You couldn't see much, the kitchen wasn't visible from any of the windows. But, I had to admit it was pretty cute inside. It also had 2 stairways, which I thought was kind of cool for such a small house.

I then told Jared that we could maybe let Alicia show us the inside, just to get a better look, not that we were interested... Alicia got us in by the end of the day. And then there was no looking back. We had fallen in love with this little house.

Tuesday was a holiday, so there was no making offers that day, but by Wednesday morning we had submitted an offer of 53,500 cash and by Wednesday afternoon the bank had accepted the offer.

So, the rest is history, right? I guess you will have to stay tuned for the WHOLE story.

The floor plan at 21 pleasant Street:

The Journey Begins

I am beginning this blog as a way to document our journey of refinishing our house. I intend to not only show the before, and after, but the whole process. Since this is the first time we have done many of these repairs, I would like to share the information we may glean in the process with all of you. Since we are about 4 months into the project, there will be some missing links, but I will try to keep up with it from here on out. This will also be a testimony of praise to the Creator as he leads us on this journey!

Our Mottos:
Unless the LORD builds the house,
its builders labor in vain.
Psalm 127:1
&
We can make our plans,
but the Lord determines our steps.
Proverbs 16:9