Renovating our 200-year-old house, one decision at a time
Upstairs Update
We promised we would be back with an update on our guest bathroom and here we are! We are excited because the bathroom is actually almost completely done! In this renovation process, while the end result is to make this house as beautiful as we assume it once was, there is a lottttt of making things messier and less beautiful first before we can restore or renovate them. It can be pretty discouraging at times, but then a room or a project gets completed and it provides us with enough motivation to dive headfirst into our next project. Thank goodness because we still have a lot of work left to do.
If you have an amazing ability to remember useless details, you might remember that we had to change up the second story floorplan completely in order to make room for two new bathrooms. The second floor of the house had very little original detail. In fact, we had a friend who is an architectural historian come by a while ago and he believes the upstairs wasn’t actually original to the house at all. He believes the house started out as two rooms (now the living room and dining room) and everything else was added on in stages over many years. In addition to the upstairs being a later addition to the house, the rooms have been pretty chopped up over the years, so we don’t feel too guilty about changing them up further to better suit the needs of a 21st-century family (in our opinion.)
The “Original” Floorplan and The New Floorplan
Ok, so if you didn’t get the hint from the title of this post then here is your warning- this post is not going to be pretty. There are going to be pictures that are even uglier than usual because if we are being honest, this part of the renovation is not even a little bit beautiful. It’s kind of fun and it’s super exciting, but it is kind of terrible not nice to look at.
This morning, Ronan asked me why I was in a bad mood and I told him that I had been on Pinterest again. He needed no further explanation. Instagram and Pinterest and all the other beautiful social media outlets are awesome, but they can be daunting too. Right now, I am feeling like the day when I can take a picture of a room in this house and not wince is a longgggg way off. I can assure you that no one is going to be pinning the pictures I am about to post. However, we need your help with a decision and this is the best way to show you what we are working with. So, brace yourself because it’s about to get ugly.
Things are getting super messy over here.
It has been a few months since the last time our entire house was covered in a thin layer of demo dust and we were really enjoying the lack of sneezing, so we put some inevitable demo off for a couple of weeks. Last week, we finally decided it was time to awaken the dust beast again, this time via our son’s bedroom (along with his bedroom closet, the hall closet, and the “linen” closet.)
We would love to be able to do jobs like these without making our entire house a gigantic, dusty mess. We would also like to do these jobs while our son naps so that Ronan and I can work together. It seems like both of these goals are totally unattainable…such is life.
Anyway, after waking our son up from his very short nap to the familiar sound of crashing plaster, we let him help us quite a bit (once the dust cleared out of the room.) He was so happy and told me that “a day of work is way more fun than a day of vacation.” At first, I thought that was the cutest thing ever, but then I started thinking about places that we had vacationed (because I like to punish myself like that) and asked him if working was more fun than being at each and every one of those places. He replied yes to each item on my list and now we will never be going on a vacation with our child again.
