Where do we go from here?

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.

Breaking Walls and Building Dreams

As I mentioned in my previous post, we bought Sarah in July last year. We have done a lot of remodeling to the home since it was purchased. Here is a list of all the things that we've done so far, hopefully, I will be able to put pictures in another post for your viewing pleasure.

• Took down wallpaper - ugly 1970's wallpaper.
• With the help of a contractor, we tore down a wall between the laundry room and "third bedroom". I write it with quotes because it was just a small craft room off of the laundry room that had a cabinet taken out of the laundry room and put into the small yellow room so that the realtor could call it a third bedroom. The house is actually a 2 bedroom house. We combined the craft room with the laundry room to make a larger room which we call the "command center". It's part office, laundry room, and kids play area.
• Took out a broken window in the back of the house and installed a 6' sliding-glass door in it's place. This door looks AWESOME in our command center and it makes the backyard so much easier for my children to access. Before, we would have to go in the driveway and around to fence to get to the gate to get into the backyard.
• Took the siding from off the back of the house to install glass door. then used excess siding from where the door went to patch a random door on the side of the house that went to nowhere from the previous home-owners' remodel. Took the door off and patched the siding. The door went onto our front door as a screen door.
• Painted the interior. Lots and lots of painting. Every room in the house and every closet (except for the bathroom which we will update in the future). We painted every ceiling and all the trim as well as patched holes in the walls.
• Installed fencing along the back of the house, which is against a field. In this field there is a cell tower, a gravel quarry, and an active train track line.
• Removed the old clunky, red-flagged by the gas company for being outdated and dangerous, furnace. Replaced said furnace with a brand-spanking-new 95% efficiency gas furnace. Apparently, it will pay for itself in the energy savings within 10 years of owning it. Plus, it keeps our house oh-so-warm in the cold winter months.
• Removed all the old STINKY carpet.
• Replaced said carpet with new laminate wood flooring for every room in the house (except the bathroom). It took a log time but was well worth the effort. Installing the wood flooring really helped to recapture the farmhouse feel that we were going for.
• We had to do a lot of electrical work to replace the knob and tube wiring. Plus move some light sockets to better locations, add electrical outlets to rooms that needed more than 1 socket in the room. We added a cadet heater and thermostat in the "command center" because of the remodel. It had horribly inefficient wall heaters before that needed to be replaced.
• We switched out a lot of the lighting for new and updated lighting. We installed LED lights and a ceiling fan in the command center. We changed out the light for a modern lamp in the mud room. We put in a pendant light above the sink in the kitchen, and we added flood lights in the back yard next to the sliding door.

This house has been a labor of love over the past 10 months that we've been home owners. We've done a lot of work to make it livable, but we want to do more that just live here. We want to excel here.