A Tour of The Old Blue House, Before.

Back in 2006 I started this blog with the purpose of showing before and after pictures of this little renovation project we were working on… an old blue house built in 1928 (or 9? I can’t remember now). It was a total mess.

Mess being the understatement of the century.

A few days ago, the new owner of the house found me on Facebook via this blog, and it’s been fun messaging back and forth about the house, and seeing her pictures of all they’ve done to it since I saw it last. I moved out in 2010, and the last time I saw the house it was full of dead roaches, dust, and cobwebs, the yard we had landscaped was dead and weedy again, and it broke my heart because it was sad and forlorn and in need of someone to love it. I prayed that someone would come along who would make it their home, and finish all the projects I never got to finish, and fill it with love and laughter and by gosh, decorate it up right at Christmas.

And that happened. The Big Blue House is someone else’s dream house now. Looking at these old pictures, it’s hard to imagine how I EVER saw potential in this house. I think maybe I just needed to rescue it. But the house now? It’s beyond amazing, better than I EVER could have imagined.

But here’s what we started with…

This front door. THIS was why I wanted this house, so I could have this cool front door unlike any other. The stained glass came from an old church that was being torn down.

The living room. We took that window out, the floor vent out, added ducts for the new a/c unit, and built-ins on either side of the fire place.

The fireplace with antique gas logs.

The dining room. I still have that light fixture… not sure what I’ll do with it, but I had something different in mind for this room. There used to be a swinging door going from this room to the former kitchen /new laundry room/butler’s pantry. We took that door out and added a doorway to the ‘new’ kitchen instead.

The original kitchen in the house. HOW anyone cooked on three feet of counter space is beyond me, but those 1920s housewives were made of sterner stuff than me, I guess. We turned this room into a laundry room, but I had visions of a ‘butler’s pantry.’

The ‘new’ kitchen. This was added by the previous owners in the 1960s. We gutted it to the studs, and I think you can see why. Notice the dishwasher sinking into the floor…

This was the north wall of the kitchen. There was a fake fireplace and a window unit air conditioner. We tore that out and put French doors out onto a deck.

Even in this condition, I could envision these stairs decorated for Christmas.

The downstairs half bath. We took that window out. Actually, we gutted the whole room…

This was the cabinet under the stairs. They had used it as a pantry and had ancient mason jars full of rotten food stacked in here floor to ceiling. There is not a big enough word to describe how GROSS this was.

And oh yeah, rodent droppings. I can’t believe we breathed this and didn’t die.

The landing at the top of the stairs.

Upstairs hallway.

More upstairs hallway. Oh, that lush shag carpet… (blech)

The master bedroom.

The master bathroom. We gutted it.

We had to replace the floor because it was spongy under that tile. That nobody fell through this floor is a miracle.

The window in the master bedroom closet. I distinctly remember cleaning this. For days. Literally, days.

The upstairs hall bath.

We had this tub re-enameled. And FYI, a cast-iron tub is dang cold in the winter.

First bedroom at the top of the stairs (Annie’s room).

Second upstairs bedroom. If you’ll look closely at that middle window, you can see ivy growing through the wall.

After tearing down some wallpaper. Rodent droppings rained down in my hair when I pulled the wallpaper down from the ceiling. This was KB’s room.

The sunroom. And yes, that’s astroturf on the floor.

That old tin ceiling was probably really cool once upon a time, but sadly, a tree had fallen on it, and it concealed lots of wet wood and carpenter ants and the tin was completely rusted and un-salvageable. We put sheetrock in its place.

This was the back of the house. You can’t see it in this pic but there was a gothic arch window over the stained glass; we had to take that out to put a big beam in the ceiling. And the stained glass was sagging and cracking. But I kept it anyway…

This was the garage. We tore down that greenhouse thing on the right, and that tree burned to the ground when our hardwood floor guy threw chemical rags in the trashcan. We were thankful the entire garage and/or house didn’t go with it.

Yeah, you might think I’m crazy for wanting this house once upon a time. But looking at how beautiful and happy the house looks now, I have to say it was all worth it.