House Tour - Before Pictures

Did I mention my house was a foreclosure? It needed tons of work, but lucky for me my dad is a builder and was able and willing to help me out with the major work required to make the place livable. Here are the exterior before pics.

Nice huh? These are both after we had already replaced all the windows, so they're not exactly true before pics. I wish I would have taken a picture of the condition the original windows were in. They were all single pane glass and were barely held in place by ancient caulk. Whatever genius last painted the siding never bothered to protect the windows or the chimney from the overspray, so the storm windows all had what looked like fake snow all around the perimeters. 


Because of the size and location of the original windows on the back side of the house, I wouldn't have been able to have normal size kitchen cabinets. We decided to remove, resize and relocate a few of them so I wouldn't have to worry about that. Because we were planning to redo all the siding, I was also lucky that we could use stock sized windows throughout the whole house! We just chose some that were as close to the original size as we could find. My dad was able to add a little bit of trim to the interior to hide the slight gaps and the outside was going to be re-done anyway. I probably saved thousands of dollars by doing that. The only thing I had to custom order was the front living room picture window because it was such a large size. 

In these pictures of the kitchen, you can see how the layout was really choppy and oddly sized. The floor was peel and stick vinyl tiles and the cabinets were super shallow and rickety originals to the house (circa 1949). The fridge and the oven would have been jammed next to each other in the nook to the left on the bottom photo, and would have covered up a lot of the window to the driveway. 

The dining room wasn't really too bad. The paint was dirty and sloppy and the light fixture was obnoxiously hideous, but other than that, nothing too serious.

The half bath on the other hand... yikes! This room had no ceiling and was filthy dirty. The fixtures, wall tile and floor tile all had to go. 

 

The living room wasn't too much work. The windows were really the only major thing I replaced there. The paint looks much better in photos than it did in real life. 

 

 

The front entry area mainly needed lots of patching and painting. We closed up the laundry chute and the service panel to the plumbing with drywall and replaced the crappy hand rail and light fixtures. I also bought a new steel front door, but we left the cool retro hex tile in place. Had to save a little money where I could.

The upstairs full bath was a complete gut job. Between the crazy water damage and hideous vinyl wall paneling, there wasn't anything worth saving except for the pedestal sink. I moved that down to the half bath after cleaning it up.

Oh yeah, and the medicine cabinet stayed with a new shiny black coat of paint and a new knob. 

 

These are the two extra bedrooms. The top is what we now use as a guest bedroom, and the bottom is our office. The office is a really tiny, funky shaped room, but will probably function fine as a nursery in the future. Basically these both just got a new coat of paint and light fixtures.

Finally we have the master bedroom. Pretty serious damage to the plaster and wood floors was probably caused by having an air conditioning unit in the window at some point. We tore the carpet out of here and eventually replaced it about a year later. New paint and lighting in here worked wonders. Oh yeah, and patching up the plaster was definitely a must.


So that's my house before we prettied it up. I will detail out the after pics in future posts, but you can see it had potential right?