One Year of Work

And what a year it has been.

When we bought Southmore the windows were darkly tinted and there were vines growing in the roof.

Rebuilt and fully functional windows. A nice change from before.

We bought Southmore about one year ago. I wish I knew the exact date because it seems important, but I would have to go through our bank statements and that seems a bit high effort to find an anniversary. We knew that it would be a fixer upper, but we were naive in what we thought would be enough to fix years of neglect in the house. What we originally thought would just be some drywall replacement and doorway widening snowballed when we realized that the previously widened doorways had not reinforced the headers and the hastily applied drywall was covering up years of active termite damage. We found rotten floors and treasures in the ceilings, and realized soon that we would need to consult the expertise of architects at Janusz Design.

We inherited poorly designed fur downs and a mirrored mantle from the previous mantle. A cool idea in the 70's I guess, but not in keeping with the times.

This room still needs some love, but we removed the fur downs and stripped the mirrors and paint off of the mantle. Oh, and we found a bonus window behind the paneling!

Joe and Lizzie were supremely necessary to doing our renovation right, but we had to learn that everything takes time. Ideas take time, drawings take time, edits take time. Before we knew it our lease was up and we had to talk to our landlady about letting us pay by the month. We couldn’t sustain that many bills, so were grateful for the opportunity to live at a friend’s house while they were out of town for the whole summer. We thought this new deadline would give us the push we needed and, when it didn’t, we spent weeks living at our childhood homes. We finally decided that we had had enough living anywhere but our own house and moved in two months ago, but it has still been far from finished.

Bathroom still isn't finished yet, but a far improvement from how it was when we first stepped into it.

We finally have some new big events scheduled, but I no longer naively believe that our house will be finished in three months. We have scheduled painters to start on our house the second weekend in December, which means that we can finally schedule to have our floors refinished soon. I still hope to have our kitchen built before we grow old in our house, but getting the floors refinished means that we can finally bring furniture into our home.

At it's peak, our "board room" was full of harvested shiplap boards to the point where we could hardly find anything we needed. We've been chipping away at our collection for the past six months.

We have a few piles of boards in our master closet, but it has been really amazing watching our walls come together as the mess gets smaller.

We won’t have to throw down a picnic blanket when guests come over because there isn’t enough seating, we can easily get our powder room installed downstairs, and finally get a washer and dryer for our home. I’ll be happy if our house is finished within two years, because the hope of getting a few important things done soon is keeping me happy for now. It has been a long year and we have learned a lot, I wonder what we will learn in the next year.

This small area near the back door was a barely usable powder room. This was one of the first things to get demolished, and the demolition revealed extensive rot and termite damage.

Future location of a washer and dryer, but current home to our mini fridge. Much more open now, and full of light hope for the future.