I love fixing up our little-old-farmhouse. It was built in 1904 and there was a small expansion done in the late 60's so there's a lot to do. But, things are going well with the house. We still have some things to do to the interior but I'm excited because we've started to improve the exterior this summer. We are doing some landscaping, painting, building a french drain around the back of the house, and building a deck/patio for the sliding door that we installed in the back room last summer.
There used to be a small window that looked onto the back yard and no easy access to the back yard. You had to walk out of the side door and around the fence to the gate in order to get into the back yard. And the room was tiny and had a tiny window. We knocked out the wall between that room and the laundry room and made a large laundry/office room and took out the tiny window and replaced it with a 6-ft wide sliding door which adds a ton of natural light and makes the whole house flow much better with the outside.
The new sliding door opens straight onto the grass as of right now so we're installing a wood deck at the ground level. We have to install a french drain to keep the water out because the back room was originally built on the house's original patio, so the room is right at ground level. Our whole house has a fenced yard surrounding it, and we are going to install a fence to separate the front yard from the back yard this summer too.
We have plans to paint a lot of the wood on the exterior of the house because the paint has chipped badly and we are afraid if we don't do something that the wood will rot. We are going to refinish our front porch because the ceiling is starting to collapse in one part. I think when we get to that repair we are going to install a porch swing.
We have plans to build some planting boxes to do some gardening in the backyard as well as build a sand box under one of the trees in the yard. We put down grass seed last fall, but the grass hasn't grown very well so we're going to re-seed the lawn again.
Our bathroom (the house only has one) was partially remodeled when we bought the house but when we painted the whole house, we somehow didn't get the bathroom painted so we still need to paint it. We are going to make some little built-in shelves above the toilet to give ourselves a little more storage. We want to replace the mirror with something more decorative and we want to make a small set of drawers to extend the counters.
We have a small entry hall in the back of the house that I want to convert into a mud room with a little bench with shoe storage, shelves, and lockers. We have a good-sized detached garage but it has manual garage doors.
Next year (hopefully) we will install new automatic garage doors, or at least get new mechanisms for the old garage doors.
We want to install some beadboard or wainscoting in the living room and kitchen. We also want to put in crown molding in the bedrooms.
Our bedroom has a window seat that I want to make a cushion for. I've bought the fabric and want to make a cushion for the window seat, some throw pillows for our living room and then a cushion for the bench that we plan on making for the mud room. We're kind of attempting to have the same color scheme in every room for a more polished look to the home.
We've done a lot to make the home nice, but I feel like there's so much more to do before it's the home that I have envisioned in my mind. We've been lucky. The house was a foreclosure in disrepair so we got a good deal in it. We paid $76,000 for the home but before any repairs the home was valued at $95,000. We've invested about $12,000 into the home since we bought it (replacing the furnace was the most expensive thing we've done so far) the home has been estimated to be worth about $110,000 to $120,000. So, it's been worth all of the work because of the return we will get on the house when we sell it.
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