Just a girl with a hammer

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  • Before and after

    How do you even start to catalog the changes you make on an old house? Here are a few of the big ones.

    The garage door was supposedly driven through by the former owner’s daughter:

    The garage after. So grown up.

    The front yard had eleven arborvitae in the hell strip:

    We tore them out (by hand!) and planted two Bloodgood maples:
    The front was obscured by three rhododendron and an azalea, all planted too closely to the house. The house badly needed to be painted.
    We tore the shrubs out, removed the lawn, and started landscaping in the spring of 2012. We painted the house! We have an orange door!

    The basement had been drywalled, though not finished, and it was covered in mildewing carpet. It smelled bad and it gave off a vibe like someone had been tortured in there.

    The basement after:

    You can read about tearing out the carpet and vinyl tile, mudding and painting the drywall, painting the fireplace, and installing laminate flooring here.

    It still needs baseboard, window trim, and a lot of other finishing details but it’s not a bad hangout spot.

    The furnace before:

     The living room before:

    Before:

    And after:
    The kitchen before:

    Oh, and I bought appliances.

    The dining room before:

    The dining room after:

    The bathroom before:

     

    All of the posts about the bathroom live here.

    The bathroom after:

    On the back of the garage was a rotting shed.

    I have wonderful friends.
    We removed the rotting shed, tore out the concrete slab under it, and planted a rain garden in the space in front of it. 

    Little changes help. My sister almost broke her neck on this deck so we finally fixed it.

    Across from the rotting shed was a cracked cement slab and a yard full of weeds.
    We tore out the slab, built raised vegetable beds that double as seating, replaced the rotting fences, and planted, planted, planted.


    More to come!

  • It’s my house-iversary!

    On June 6, 2009 I had my reveal and the house became mine. In honor of my second house-iversary let’s take a walk down memory lane!

    Filming My First Place

    My bathroom used to look like this.

    Now it looks like this.

    My kitchen looked like this.

    Now it looks like this.

    The yard before:

    The yard after:

    The yard is still very much in process
     

    The site of the old patio slab.
    Part of this process was removing 10,000 lbs of concrete.

    The basement looked like this.
    Now it looks like this:
    The living room looked like this:

    And it looked like this after the reveal:

    And now it looks like this:

    We removed the old furnace . . .

    . . . and replaced it with an energy efficient one.

    My friend David and I (but mostly David) removed the ELEVEN arbor vitae in the front yard.

    By hand.

    And I planted two Japanese bloodgood maples.

    The dining room looked like this:

    Now it looks like this.

    I put in a new back fence, and I’m planning to put in a new side fence this summer. I painted every room in the house and have two hallways to go before I can say that I painted every paintable surface in the house. I had a lot of plumbing adventures, including putting in a new garbage disposal, changing the wax ring on the toilet, and clogging and then unclogging my basement sink.

    And I got a new roommate. He’s nice. Did I mention he mows the lawn for me? It rocks.

    Illustration by Nan Lawson

    The classic second anniversary gift is cotton. Perhaps I’ll finally buy my house some curtains for the living and dining rooms.

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