Do You Need to Use the Facilities?

Here I show you the "quick" project in the house, the little powder room off the kitchen.  It was in pretty good shape, and was mostly cosmetic fixes.  My husband put in a new faucet and had to lie inside the tiny vanity to do the plumbing--that was when you would have heard bad words echoing through the house.  He also replaced the toilet with the Titan super flusher from Menards.  When we bought it, the clerk helping us load it into the car told us "You folks are really going to enjoy this."  Indeed we have.

Here we are in the time machine to look at the bathroom before, plain white with a very strange shell light cover which hung with a wire over a bare utility bulb.  This light is one of the many WTF? things that were in the house, especially the recently "remodeled" rooms.

It also smelled like mold, thus the Christmas soaps on the sink I was using to drown out the scent before we could fix it.

Back to the future, we are now beachy blue green.

I chose a nautical theme for this room, as you do.

This antique brass gaslight converted to electricity makes a big difference from sad shell light. The mirror is ship portal looking, because Why not?

Oh, and the mold smell is long gone, hoorah!

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Shall We Have a Peek Inside the Cupboards?

I have always loved blue and white, and have been purchasing bits of chipped china and old cracked crocks and just anything pretty for years in my role as Antique Dealer (note the capitals, it is my job title).   It turns out, I seem to be the only person in Iowa who likes odd pieces of blue china and cracked crocks, and I end up never being able to sell it.  Well, at last I have a place to put it.  The built-in cupboards in the living room are a dream come true for me.  It took hours of arranging and rearranging, but now I just sit and gaze at the cupboards when I need a break from the dust clouds of remodeling that still puff around me, it makes me happy.

just next to the cupboards is my antique garden statue, too pretty to let sit out in the rain and snow

Step In To The Great Room

I do refer to this room as my living room, but I just looked back at the old realtor's brochure when we bought the house and they called it the great room--fancy, schmancy.  They did that a lot in the brochure, such good marketers.

Restoring the living room was going to be a snap after the nightmare of removing dusty grass cloth from the music room.  Yes, I truly believed that.  After all, it only needed a new coat of paint.  Three months of working every day is what that "new coat of paint" took.  First, there were cracks in the wall--funny how we just didn't see them until we started the painting.  James got out the plaster and spent days fixing cracks and caulking the woodwork seams.  I cleaned up the dust mess and got out the paint.  All that gorgeous woodwork took two coats of paint and a coat of sealer at the end.  I thought I would NEVER finish.  At last I did, and very pretty it is.  Observe the before and afters:

This is when the former owners lived there, they liked modern stuff mixed with traditional.

Now, this is an Elaine room!  My husband replaced the tile around the fireplace and put in all new outlets, I painted and painted and painted...  Most favorite thing?  The blue ceiling, of course.  This is just half the room, turn around, we will look at the other side.

Once again, we have travelled back in time to the before.  The weird bird thing I just have no words for.

Here we are back in the present in my world.  I just love this room so much.  The minute I walked into it one year ago, I fell in love with the house, but truly thought there was not once chance in hell that I would ever actually own it, but everything just fell into place and I do!

Here is one more view of the room.  I've been collecting old oil paintings for years.  I used to be able to find them every where in antique shops and they were never very expensive.  I am so glad I took advantage at the time, they are much scarcer these days.  

We Start in the Music Room

I can't believe it was almost one year ago that we started the remodeling of this house.  First order of business--we had to finish the music room before we moved out of the ranch house because the one item that we hired movers for was the baby grand piano.  That room had to be finished because we aren't moving that thing ourselves.

Here is the room before, when the former owners lived there--very out of Africa with the grass cloth wall paper and brass bamboo light switch covers.

My daughters and I spent one week of 8 hour days scraping off the grass:

We spent another week painting, the last day I think we worked until midnight, as the piano arrived the next day.  Here is the finished room, all Cinderella blue and white:

Turn the other way, and you look into the living room, which is a rather wonderful room, we'll see it next time.

Welcome to My Mess

My husband and I started our adventures in remodeling way back in 1980 just after we got married.  We bought an old farmhouse in the Middle of Nowhere, Iowa and started fixing the house with more enthusiasm than sense.  We made SO many mistakes, not all were our fault, but still...  The first problem was the one I have continued to face during the restoration of 3 more houses.  The problem  has always been that the materials readily available are all brown or gray or black or beige and I want BLUE!  Praise God for the invention of online shopping, I finally can buy what I want as we begin to restore Home Number 5  (so if you are counting, home 1 was the farmhouse, home 2 a little Victorian cottage, home 3 a Queen Anne Victorian, home 4 a brand new ranch house that still needed work and now this one).  Here she is from the outside:

The history of the house is that we are only the 4th family to live here since it was built in 1870.  The second family added on and remodeled in the late 1930s, the next family remodeled again in the 1970s and now here we are, doing it all over again.   The house is huge and not at all open concept--lots of little rooms.  I officially have 8 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, and even a wine cellar and a maid's room.  It sounds so grand, doesn't it?  The reality is 8 little rooms upstairs with bad carpet, hideous paint, cracked window panes and lots of cobwebs.   As for the 5 bathrooms, well, we currently just have the door shut on 3 of them.  They are from the 1970s remodel and are just horrifyingly ugly.  The one we use is from the 1930s remodel and it actually is okay, just pretty worn out.   The one bathroom that I like is only a half bath downstairs--it is so small, it is one of the first things we fixed. The wine cellar is a little room with ugly wood shelves in the basement and the maid's room is an eensy room off the kitchen that I use for my craft room.

So far, we have finished the music room and living room and are in the middle of redoing the kitchen, back soon with posts on our progress.