The Grand Tour

As a caution: this post is picture heavy.

So of course, everyone wants to know what the house looks like on the inside, right? Well...it's not pretty. The bones of it are pretty, but the layers above are not in the most pristine of conditions. The great thing about the internet is that you can't smell things. Daisy fresh, our house is not. I guess that's to be expected, as it's been sealed up for about two years, and by sealed I mean SEALED. We've got an impressive set of storm windows (the finest around, or so I've heard...)

Apologies for the picture quality, most were taken with a sketchy and ridiculously cheap fish eye lens from Japan, and the others were taken on a cell phone. My photography skills are also pretty lacking...

So this is what you'll see coming down the street

The balcony - looks kind of scary, but it just needs new paint!

View from the back garden - sections have been labelled to help you visualize how everything is laid out!

Excuse the mess! This is what you see when you enter through the back porch door. Hopefully it will become our laundry room.

If you turn to your right, you'll see the back hall. The door on the left leads down to the basement (no pictures at this time, I'm still having issues going down there. It's too creepy!) Hopefully building a coat closet in here at some point.

Coming around the corner you can start to see some of the kitchen. The red sink area was put there as the lady who owned the house before us was a potter and she did a lot of her work on the back porch areas. We'll be taking it out.

Right beside the red sink is a pantry area - nice and big! Needs some new shelving though.

Right across from the pantry is a step which goes down into another back porch. We're calling this one the reading room. We have plans for floor to ceiling book shelves and nice comfy chairs!

The kitchen! There's a serious lack of cupboards in here, but hopefully the design team from Prestige will be helping us out. New flooring, cupboards, countertops, etc etc have all been prescribed!

A funny little bathroom right off of the kitchen! I was standing in this doorway when I took the photo of the kitchen. Maybe making this into a full bath, not sure just yet.

Right beside the doorway to the bathroom is another doorway to the dining room. New flooring and paint should fix this up!

This is a picture of before all the belongings were moved out, but you can see the view of the main hallway looking out from the second dining room door, as well as a part of the living room.

This is what you would see if you opened the door TJ is standing in front of in the previous picture. This entryway was originally open, but has been closed in by the windows on either side of the door.

I didn't get a very good "before" picture of the living room with the belongings cleared out and the carpet still down, this is the closest I have! TJ has just rolled back the carpet foam to find the original hardwood in great condition. The doors behind him lead out to the sunporch.

The sunporch! Currently filled with some of the items we were allowed to keep from the house, including an antique fainting sofa, a gorgeous hall table, and boxes upon boxes of pottery, both glazed and greenware.  

The upstairs hallway, first looking from the staircase then turned around and looking back from the bathroom doorway.

The first bedroom, which is the first doorway on the right. There's a closet around the corner.

The little bedroom, which is the second door on the right. It will soon be even smaller when we move the bathroom wall!

The upstairs bathroom...the window actually looks out onto the balcony, there's no way out! To fix this, we're moving the shower wall over into the small bedroom, which will let us move the tub over enough to cut out a door frame where the window is.

And the master bedroom! Missing from these two views are the cupboards that have been built onto one of the walls where the headboard would go...only they've been built for a double bed, so they're going out! We'll also be taking out the cupboard between the closet doors.

So there it is! There's definitely a lot of work to be done, and I have no idea how to do any of it, so I'm relying on TJ, my dad, and my brother in law Shane to explain it all. Hopefully I'll get through this with minimal damage.