The time has arrived. The house is finished (minus a few touch-ups and, well, I’ll get to the rest) and moving time has arrived. Before we decorated the house with chaos, I took some pictures to give you the before’s and after’s. I will say that this extent of a remodel is not for the faint of heart. There will be delays; there will be added expenses; there will be tests of patience; there will be more delays; and there will be more expenses. But! If you go into an extensive remodel and can accept, and expect, those caveats, it is worth it! Now, on to the good stuff. The before and after photos!

First, the front of the exterior before, along with an interior shot of the front door.

 

The siding has been replaced, as well as the water damaged plywood from underneath, but not yet painted (should be happening soon thanks to the man who did all the finish work on the interior).

 

Now let’s move inside. When you walk in the front door, you enter what I consider to be a small entryway and the dining room. This is what it looked like before.

As with all of the interior, it was taken down to the studs and has new electrical, insulation, plumbing, any rotten flooring was replaced and/or leveled (as best possible), and new windows. This is my dining room now..

A lot of our new light fixtures, including the dining “chandelier”, have the funky Edison bulbs installed. I think they look cool, and they’re just bulbs so if they become dated and unfashionable, I can change them easily. But this is my house, err… OUR house, so I’ll do what I like 🙂

Okay, after the dining room, you turned into the living area. It had another open doorway leading into the kitchen and an old oil furnace for heat. Here it is:

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We closed up the doorway to A) make more room in the kitchen for counters and cabinets and B) to give more room for a wood stove. This is our living room with Pat’s design on the wood stove and its tile surround.

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Next we walk to the bedrooms. The downstairs bedrooms had zero insulation when we took down the walls. This is what the main bedroom looked like before.

 

The bedroom now is warm and cozy with fresh insulation and this handy control for the ceiling fan and light. The brightness and speed of the fan can be controlled easily, AND, if you hold the button down, it will auto time the light to turn off. So you can press it, walk to bed, get in, and the light will turn off after you’re snuggled in under the covers. Brilliant.

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Now the bathroom. Before:

This gave us some headaches early on. Trying to find a way to make me, a woman, happy with her bathroom set up AND meet building codes wasn’t the easiest of tasks for our contractor. But he had a great solution. Here is the final draft with a bathtub!

Then there was the “wanna be” half bathroom. It had been roughed in some years before but never brought to completion. Not much to see,  but it was enough to show us it could be done.

The bathrooms had to be enlarged to meet new clearance codes, so it got a little bump in size like the main bathroom. Still not big, but it has a toilet and a sink, and hopefully the mirror will go up soon. Hint, hint to Mr. Wheel & Anvil.

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In the back, is a large laundry/mud room. It was a bit scary before, with some sagging in the floor.

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The bathroom changes took a little room out of the laundry space, but we went with a tankless water heater to save on some space (and cash on future utility bills). It’s a nice, bright room that lets in more sunlight than many other rooms in the house! The water heater is one of the things that still needs a little changing. We’re still determining if the heater isn’t powerful enough for the ground water temperature here, if the transformer isn’t big enough to supply electricity to us and our neighbor, or both. The plan for now is to change the water heater to the more powerful model and call the utility company to come check the transformer. The heater works to supply water to small faucets and the shower head, but not for the flow of the bathtub. It also makes the lights flicker……

Finally, the kitchen. It was….. different. And it was small. It also had what people here call a trash burner. I’d never heard of it before, but it looked a bit like a tall, rectangular wood stove.

Now… brace yourself for quite a few pictures because I really love my new kitchen. We opted for lots of light, including under cabinet lighting, quartz countertops (we plan on doing the backsplash ourselves in the somewhat near future), and an induction cooktop range. I really don’t want to deal with propane deliveries if it isn’t necessary. For our first dinner in the house, since we haven’t unpacked plates, or cooking utensils, we opted for a small frozen pizza cooked very nicely in the convection microwave. It was heavenly.

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Truthfully, I held back on the kitchen photos. There were a lot of them.

This is all I have for now. The night is late and we have much to do tomorrow; the snow is falling and my laptop battery is failing. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along on this project. If you are ever in need of a general contractor in the Ashford, WA, area, please don’t hesitate to call Hertz Electric. I know there are a lot of good people in Ashford who do great work, but I didn’t know that before we moved here. And while I won’t hesitate to give my business to local contractors, Hertz Electric came out and gave us a detailed bid when no one else would. They got to work immediately. And they communicated with us about every detail and change, even when they knew we wouldn’t be happy for the update.

This won’t be the last post you get from us, but probably one of the last on the home remodel project. Hopefully now we can settle in for good and get to work on the things we love: fiber arts and blacksmithing, friends and beer.