The Hinckley House

House Tour

by Anna Posted on October 24, 2012

I haven’t been posting here very often, but I finally straightened out the house to take a comprehensive set of photos, like I’d been meaning to do for some time. I’ll go through this in the same order I usually give tours when people come to visit — upstairs, from one side of the house, down the hall, to the other, and then the same downstairs. Here we go!

I love how open the main living area of the house is. It couldn’t be any better! It’s wonderful to have a vaulted ceiling (strangely, it doesn’t match the profile of the roof above), and the wood paneling makes it even better. I had worried at first that it would make picking out furniture difficult (too many wood tones), but the ceiling sort of disappears until you decide to admire it — perfect. The living room is completely open to the dining area, which turns into the kitchen. The patio doors open onto the newly rebuilt deck on the back of the house.

This is another view from the same corner. You can see the hallway that leads down to the other rooms (behind the lamp at the rear). And some lazy cats. The frames in the living room contain plat maps that I got for $1 each at the antique store. People always wonder if our house is on them, but they’re of north-western Minnesota (we’re east-central). We think they’re great pieces of art, though.

And this is the living room as seen from the near end of the hallway. All four pets are in this photo, although it’s difficult to see the cats.

This is the kitchen and a bit of the dining room. As I usually tell visitors, the cabinets are the only things that were here when we bought the house. All the other things — the counters, appliances, floors, light fixtures, and even the door pulls — were added or replaced by us. Thank goodness for excellent contractors.

The backsplash was one of my projects, though. There had been a (broken) microwave here before, which we replaced with the hood (I did up the screws on the hood, but I think Rob should get most of the credit for holding it very awkwardly in place for longer than was comfortable). That left some chewed-up wall exposed, and it’s nice to have something more durable behind the stove, anyway. We put larger slate tiles by the doors out to the deck, so the backsplash ties in nicely with those.

And another view of the kitchen. I had originally wanted to remove this island, but I’m glad I was talked out of it. There’s a ton of cupboard space in this kitchen, but we’ve used every bit of it, including what’s inside the island, and it’s also just a handy place to set things that are coming out of the fridge. It’s got an outlet on it, so I occasionally plug in my electric beaters there when I’m baking.

I think this is never-before-seen! This is the hall/guest bath. I’ve mentioned before that none of the bathrooms have windows, which is one of the only things I don’t like about this house. Mainly because I like taking baths in natural light, but also because it’s really difficult to take a good photo! Our contractor replaced the old brown/mauve toilet and bath/shower with shiny new white ones, and someday I’d like to paint the (cheap, slightly worse-for-wear) vanity white, too. But wait, what’s that you can see reflected in the mirror?

Oh, it’s just a giant cut out of Minnesota! I used a jigsaw to cut this out of MDF (first I used the grid technique to blow up an 8.5×11″ image of MN to the large scale I wanted), and I found 3/4″ metal tubes to use as spacers, so it’s mounted away from the wall. I love the shape of MN, and I really love this huge version.

I thought I’d posted photos of the guest room before, but I hadn’t! This is it, always ready for a guest. I’m curious to see how this room will evolve over the years — right now it feel straight out of a Target bag. (But I do like it.)

This is the other side of the guest room. It has a big window with probably the best view in the house. Since the room on the other side of the wall (Rob’s office) doesn’t have a closet, the guest room has this little nook that we’ve put a dresser in.

Rob’s office is in the funny L-shaped room at the back of the house. He also has a great view of the pond from here. I should put a disclaimer before these photos of Rob’s office, bedroom, and bathroom. He’s in the UK right now, so it’s not like he had a chance to get things just right before I took photos. I think the rooms look fine, but FYI, etc.

Around the corner of the office. Lots of storage space!

Rob has the master bedroom, which has an en suite and walk-in closet. And the fanciest furniture — isn’t it nice?

The master bathroom was a mess when we closed on the house, so Rob and I worked out what he wanted and asked our contractor to get going. Nearly everything is new in here. There’s a big soaker tub (with a great tile surround) and a neo-angle shower stall on the other side of the vanity. Still no windows, though.

And now we’re downstairs. Which reminds me that I forgot to take a photo of the entryway! The house is a split level (you have to go up or down immediately after entering), so there’s not much to see. But we had leftover maple flooring from the kitchen, so we used it to replace the crumbling entryway tile.

Anyway, this is the family room, which is pretty big — it’s basically the same size as the living room + dining area + kitchen above it. We aren’t putting the room to its best use at the moment, but we have several ideas for what should go down here. I think both Rob and I would like to have a treadmill eventually, and I’ll someday get my piano up to Hinckley. Right now there’s just this (very nice) futon (in case a ton of guests show up, needing lodging) and my turntable.

And there’s this little corner, near the patio doors. My cookbooks are the book shelf, and I made a mini gallery wall with several bits and pieces that didn’t have a home before. You can also see the stairs in this photo, and the door next to them is a closet. (For as big as this house is, the closet under the stairs is the only real storage space. Bah!)

You’ve seen my bathroom before, and it hasn’t changed much at all. I think the only real difference is the striped rug on the floor.

And the triangle room, which I still love a lot! I’ve been doing some sewing in here, and I brought up my iMac for work projects. I keep meaning to take a photo of the triangle wall straight on and use it to create a desktop image for the iMac that matches up with the wall behind it.

I don’t think I’ve shown you the map in the triangle room before. It came from the thrift store, and I glued a piece of trim wood to the top and bottom and attached a chain to hang it. It was a very cheap project, but I like how school-room-y it looks.

My bedroom has mostly stayed the same, too. I’ve added objects to the shelves, and I mounted the headboard to the wall (it was resting on wobbly legs before).

This is the opposite corner of the room. The mirror came from the ‘in-town fleamarket’ in Hinckley — I’d been looking for a mirror similar to this for quite a while, and I snagged this one for $30 (the guy estimated it to be about a hundred years old). This and the framed Minneapolis poster are the only things I have on the walls. Sometimes I think about hanging more stuff, but I like the starkness of all that white.

And, at the end of the hall, the mudroom. Still the same as when I originally posted about it (plus a couple new painted splatters). I haven’t shown you the utility room, but that’s because it’s dark and messy and only houses the utilities, anyway.

And that’s the tour!

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

The Mudroom

by Anna Posted on August 9, 2012

Hey, what’s in this interesting-looking room at the end of the basement hallway? It’s the mudroom! Previously known as ‘Oh-that’s-the-mudroom-don’t-look-in-there-it’s-a-disaster.’ It’s where we’ve kept the tools and other workroom-type supplies, and since there was SO much work going on during the HH’s first few months, the mudroom was always a wreck, with things haphazardly placed wherever they were least likely to topple a pile. Here’s a (tight) shot of the room when we closed:

Our neighbors have informed us that this was previously the ‘puppy room’, since the old owners bred dogs and — apparently — kept them in here. I hadn’t really noticed any signs of that until I started to scrub down the walls pre-painting. Not only were they filthy, the soapy water unlocked a special dirty-puppy smell. You can see the filth on the before photo. There were also areas where the drywall had been (poorly) patched, presumably because a puppy at one point tried to make a break for freedom.

Anyway, I got my mind set to transforming the room one weekend, got a gallon of paint mixed, and never looked back.

So, let me go on about the workbenches for a while — I’m very proud of them. When we got the counters replaced, I asked our contractor to save the old pieces, knowing that we’d want to use them for something else, eventually. They seemed like obvious tops for workbenches, but I spent a lot of time figuring out what the bases should be like. I was tempted to hit up the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, where they usually have cheap, used base cabinets, but I wasn’t sure how I’d move those and wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of painting them so they’d all match.

In the end, I decided to BUILD my own workbenches. I sketched out a very basic plan and then had most of the pieces cut to size at Home Depot. I can’t recommend that strongly enough. Not only is it SO much faster to have them zip through your pieces with their huge panel saw, but you don’t have to figure out how to transport/carry a 4′x8′ sheet of plywood or hardboard. The workbenches are just three pieces of plywood with a hardboard back and two 1×4′s at the top and bottom of the front. The bases (like what the plastic tote is sitting on in the top photo of this post) have 1×4 ‘feet’ and were dropped in after the rest was finished. They’re nice and sturdy!

You can barely see it in this photo, but if you again look at the top one, you’ll see the drawer that I BUILT FROM SCRATCH. It deserves caps like that. I routed the grooves for the drawer bottom to slide into and everything. This is when having put together a LOT of flatpack furniture really came in handy — I knew how drawers were made without having to look up any patterns or directions. I’ve got the materials to make a second drawer for that bench, but… the first one was very messy (MDF, which I used for the sides and back, is extremely dust-producing when cut or routed).

(I’m feeling very inadequate about how messy the pegboard looks. I’ll remedy that!)

You’ve probably noticed that the counters don’t have that HEY-GUYS-I’M-BLUE-ness that they used to possess. When I was buying supplies for this project, I saw RustOleum’s countertop paint, and I thought, ‘Hey, why not?’ It covers nicely, and now that it’s dry, it seems to be pretty tough stuff — great, right? Yes, the finished product is really nice, but the SMELL! It’s gone now, but even with an open window and door (out to the garage), the quite poisonous paint odor still spread throughout the house and didn’t go away for days and days. If I’d known it was going to try to gas me out of my own home, I would have painted the countertops out in the barn-garage. So let that be a warning.

What is equally as awesome but much less smelly is RustOleum’s white, but these black ones were 50% off as a ‘last chance’ item. I bought up the last two sets at my Ikea, and I think they’re great. Perfect for pencils and chalk and small items that won’t go on a pegboard and don’t make sense to store in a drawer (like wood glue).

The reason I was at Ikea in the first place was to get this shelving unit. I just wanted something simple and inexpensive (but didn’t want to build it myself), and this looks great with the unfinished pine plywood of the workbenches. There’s still many more things to put on those shelves — in fact, I haven’t ‘deeply’ organized most of the mudroom, yet. The babygate goes into the utility room, by the way. That’s where the cats sleep/eat, so it keeps Henny out and away from their food.

Lastly, I replaced the bare bulb on the ceiling with this fixture. It’s not fancy, but I’ve got the halogen bulbs aimed at the work surfaces, so it’s very practical. The posters, by the way, came from the Poster Offensive show I went to a couple of years ago — I love how bright and bold they are in this room.

The true test of the mudroom will come when we actually want to build something in here, of course. Right now, it looks so nice that I don’t want to get it messy!

Posted in After, Mudroom | 1 Comment

New Counters!

by Anna Posted on June 22, 2012

Our Corian countertops were installed today! I’ve been very excited to see what the kitchen would look like with them, and I think Rob was excited for me to stop asking him whether or not he was excited. So today was a big day for the both of us. Yesterday morning, we took everything off the counters, and I took one last photo of the old, blue formica.

The stained cabinets are a medium oak that is right on the verge of looking too red. The best way to bring out that undesirable redness was with brilliantly blue counters. Ugh. The island had large hang-overs on two sides, perfect for sitting at with a stool — in a completely different kitchen. We actually had to saw off one long end (you can see the fancy ‘repair’ job I did with blue painters’ tape to cover the rough edge) once the fridge arrived, because we couldn’t open the door more than about 12″ without it slamming into the counter. Super sweet design, old owners.

Anyway, our contractor showed up yesterday to begin work on Rob’s bathroom (the master bath), and he took off the old counters and disconnected the sink for us (things that aren’t included in the Corian installation). And we were left with this:

Doesn’t it look different already? Color-wise, I mean. Obviously the cupboards are slightly more open-plan than they ought to be. I was reminded of the first couple of weeks I was here at the HH, using my makeshift kitchenette. With no sink, we had to use the hallway bathroom to wash dishes or get water for cooking. And I propped up a board for chopping and food prep (on the island). I actually made an excellent green curry last night, so the set up wasn’t so bad.

It was funny to see the kitchen without the corner unit, which was taken out for the counter removal. We (or maybe just I) had originally considered removing the funny little ‘garage’ section that goes all the way to the countertop, because I couldn’t see a use for it. But we now use it to store the kettle and our pot lids (on a little lid rack). I think the moral of that story is to never get rid of something until you see if it can hold an electric kettle. I think.

The worst surprise came when we ran the dishwasher, which sounded a little funny and completely failed to get the dishes clean — because the water wasn’t hooked up! Our awesome contractor forgot to mention he’d done that (although we should have known, in retrospect), so we now had a washer full of dirty dishes and no full-sized sink for hand washing. What my dad would term a ‘dishes disaster’ was rapidly evolving.

But! The Corian installers came forty minutes earlier than expected this morning, and they were pretty quick in getting everything in place.

New counters! I think it took not quite an hour and a half, start to finish. I took this photo as soon as the guys left. They put the sink in place, to make sure it would fit, but they didn’t hook it up or caulk around it — our contractor did that shortly afterwards, and we pressed the Start button on the dishwasher as soon as he finished. Rob asked if the counters mean that the kitchen is officially finished, and I think they do. It’s gone through a lot!

Here it is when we closed:

So, we replaced the (water-damaged) wood laminate with solid maple and painted the walls. Got rid of the two remaining — and broken — appliances and set up the kitchen with new stainless ones. We decided to replace the wall-mounted microwave with a range hood, which Rob and I installed, and then I tiled the backsplash with 1″ slate tiles. I hung new ceiling lights. And now we’ve got new counters! Here’s the current photo again:

Now if only I could do something about the insanely excessive number of outlets…

Posted in After, Kitchen | 5 Comments

Downstairs Bedroom

by Anna Posted on June 3, 2012

I haven’t shown you the finished triangle wall! This is in the downstairs bedroom (the one that isn’t mine) — I wanted to try something fun and bold, and I fell in love with this image when I came across it on Apartment Therapy. It took a lot of time and a LOT of tape, but I couldn’t be any happier with the results. I’ve got an old teacher’s desk that I refinished during the three weeks that closing on the HH was delayed, and it will go in this room if I ever get it hauled up from Minneapolis.

This was the previous paint job:

You can sort of see the residue that was left from a wallpaper border where the two colors met. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the room belonged to the youngest of the children of the previous owners — a son who recently graduated from high school. And the walls were probably in the roughest shape of any in the house; it was as though he’d repeatedly hit a screwdriver against them. So there was a lot of spackling to be done before painting. I already posted this photo a while back, but here’s an in-progress shot:

My triangles are 20″ on each side, so I figured out what height that would make them (thanks, middle-school geometry!), drew a grid on the wall, and then connected diagonals to make the triangles. I think the trickiest part was getting a clean line when I removed the tape after painting. I found a kind of painter’s tape with ‘Edge Lock’, which I thought was completely useless at first, but I figured out that if I really, really pressed it down well, it did a fairly good job. I still had to go back with a foam brush and touch up a lot of the edges, though.

The paint colors were all either samples or leftovers from elsewhere in the house — and from my Minneapolis house. The aqua is the same color as my Minneapolis kitchen, and the yellow is two samples mixed together from when I was choosing the exterior color last year. The persimmon/red paint was the only one I bought specifically for this project, and that was only a $2.50 tester pot from Home Depot.

For all the painting I’ve done at the HH (a LOT!), this was the only project that really took a while to complete, since I had to wait for triangles to dry before taping and painting others. But it was SO satisfying, and now I’m wondering if there’s something fun I can do elsewhere. The room left to paint is the mudroom — stripes, maybe? We’ll have to see if Rob has an opinion!

Posted in Bedrooms, In Progress | 1 Comment

Anna’s Bathroom

by Anna Posted on May 21, 2012

The downstairs bathroom is the one that I (Anna) use most of the time, so it’s actually been in an acceptable state for a while now. But I finally got around to putting a few things on the walls — a cabinet above the toilet and shelves by the mirror — and charged up my point-and-shoot camera to get some wide-angled shots. The bathroom is big compared to the one I have in Minneapolis (twice the size, I’d guess), but it’s also long and narrow — and windowless — so all the shots I took with my SLR don’t really do anything to give you an idea of how the room looks as a whole. So here’s an ‘after’ shot, although I still have some decorative stuff to do:

Lest you forget its previous tragic state, here’s the ‘before’:

Bright yellow walls, rubber ducky wallpaper border, water damage to the walls, a dingy ceiling… We’ve actually done so much work on this one room (my mom helped out in the early days) that it’s easy to forget everything we’ve tackled. The tub — which is opposite the vanity and not really worth photographing — was in decent condition, so that’s stayed (it’s an off-white, shallow tub, which is a shame, but I can’t really justify replacing it at this time), but the old shower surround had to be torn down and replaced, and my mom patched up some of the surrounding sheetrock that had been eaten away by water (just from kids splashing around or not pulling the shower curtain 100% closed). Then we painted the ceiling, walls, and wood trim. And I replaced the tub’s plug, which wasn’t watertight, as well as the shower head — the chrome bath tap required a lot of elbow grease, but I eventually got it shining again.

When we got the house, the downstairs bathroom had a small, framed mirror above the vanity, instead of a traditional bathroom mirror. Annoyingly, both this bathroom and the upstairs hall bath have outlets above the vanities, just off center — you can see it in the photo above. So I couldn’t hang a mirror the way it should be hung; I had to place it off to the side (a 30″ x 36″ mirror fit perfectly when placed vertically). That left a lot of ‘dead’ space to the right, where the outlet was, so I bought a couple of cheap wall ledges and a clock and recently put those up. I still haven’t decided what I put on them (I’ll go ‘shopping’ through my tchotchkes in Minneapolis), but the room already looks better, having balanced out the mirror a bit.

If you look at the first photo in the post, you’ll notice that there’s a light switch near the door that wasn’t there in the ‘before’ shot. That door leads to a closet that’s currently unfinished (it’s open to the utility room to the left and the basement closet to the right), but it’ll be great for linens, someday. The main problem with it was that the light switch was inside the closet — and behind the door! So you had to get into the closet and close the door behind you to turn on the light. Clever, right? Yeah, I fixed that. Since the walls are open behind there (you can see where the switch was before here, it was an easy task to just pry it off the stud it was nailed to, cut a hole in the sheet rock, and then twist it around. Why it wasn’t done that way in the first place is a mystery, but this house has a lot of those!

Posted in After, Bathrooms | 2 Comments

Lights and Anti-Lights

by Anna Posted on May 20, 2012

New kitchen lights! I usually shop at Home Depot or Menards when I’m in the cities (we’ve got smaller hardware stores up in Hinckley/Sandstone, including a Hardware Hank, Ace, and Lampert’s, which also has a lumberyard), but I found myself near a Lowe’s on Friday. I had been keeping an eye out for light fixtures to replace the old ones in the kitchen. You can see them in these photos:

Pretty small and boring, and they weren’t hung very well. There are two recessed lights above the kitchen sink, which you can just about see in the photo above; they’re nothing special, either, but I primed and sprayed them white a while ago, so they just blend nicely into the ceiling (they also provide the most functional light in the kitchen). So my goal was to find two coordinating lights — a mid-sized pendant to hang over the dining table and either a mini-pendant or something flush mounted for the kitchen area.

This is the light I found for the dining area at Lowe’s (it’s in the first photo in this post), and this is the small pendant in the kitchen:

Ignore the Dyson Air Multiplier that’s sitting on a board over the sink. I’m loath to turn the air conditioning on, but it gets warrrrm upstairs when it’s sunny out! Hanging these lights was my first experience playing with wiring, and it went surprisingly well. I did the mini-pendant first, and the most difficult part was figuring out which pieces the wiring had to be threaded through — for some reason, that was never mentioned in either the assembly or wiring instructions. Once I knew what I was doing, though, the larger pendant over the table went up in a snap. Mostly. And I sustained zero electrocutions and have started no fires. Success! Oh, and they also make light and stuff.

The table and chairs, by the way, are from the Kona Collection at Slumberland. It was a featured sale item in their newspaper ad a couple of weeks ago, and Rob gave it the thumbs up, so I picked up a table and four chairs from the Slumberland warehouse. And then I moved it all upstairs on my own, since Rob is in the UK right now. It could have gone terribly, terribly wrong (solid-wood dining table are HEAVY), but somehow it didn’t. And I love the set and having a real (not folding) table to eat at.

Lastly, I want to mention a temporary solution to keeping out the sun that keeps warming up the house:

The windows in this house are all odd sizes, and there are SO MANY of them that getting blinds made is a really daunting (and expensive) task. But I found these Redi Shades when I had almost given up looking for a creative solution at Lowe’s, and they’re perfect for the time being. They’re basically just accordion-folded paper that you cut to size yourself and hang with a sticky strip. You use the clips provided to adjust the height. I’m not sure how long they’ll hold up, especially with frequent opening and closing, but they were $5 each, keep the sun out, and look pretty good to boot.

Posted in In Progress, Kitchen | 4 Comments

More pond life

by Rob Posted on May 7, 2012

We’ve had a Canada Goose patrolling the pond for the last couple of weeks, chasing off any other geese – or at least driving them to the opposite side of the water. In the last few days the patrolling goose was joined by its mate and suddenly there were goslings. Here’s the family group – the dad (maybe?) was just off to the side, out of shot.

And here’s the little goslings at maximum zoom on my camera.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Pond Life

by Rob Posted on May 7, 2012

From the Hinckley House, if you open a window – or even if you don’t – you can hear the frogs warbling in and around the pond. But if you look, what you often see is turtles. Today was bright, and the turtles were sunning themselves. They won’t let you get closer than about forty feet without plopping into the water, but that’s just about close enough to take their picture.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Making Progress!

by Anna Posted on April 20, 2012

We’ve been so busy! Rob has been in town for just over a week, and we (and just I, before he got here) have been making progress. That’s good, since it means I have a lot to share (and because the house is getting homier), but it’s bad, since I hardly have any time to write about it! Here are some in-progress photos I took after dinner today.

My bedroom was the first thing I tackled after we closed, since I was going to need somewhere nice to sleep after long days of painting and cleaning. I spent two nights sleeping in one of the upstairs rooms before I’d finished painting mine. The walls and trim are now white — we’re not painting all the trim in the house, but it’s nothing special, so I didn’t feel bad about slapping on a coat of paint to brighten up this room. Because this is what it looked like before:

I built the shelves that sit above the ledge, and I like how they turned out (and they’re super solid). I’m still looking for the perfect stuff to fill them!

Almost everything but the family room / downstairs hallway has been painted, and this other bedroom downstairs has been my project for the past week. My inspiration came from this. Taping has been a bear, but in the photo above you can see that I’ve taped off the last of the triangles to be painted. I haven’t bought any paint for this project; all the colors have come from other rooms in the house and from my house in Minneapolis. I can’t wait to be finished! This is what the room looked like before.

The kitchen is so close to being done. We finally have all our appliances — everything was delivered last Friday, except for the fridge, which arrived today. The new maple floors are great, and the little slate threshold (in front of the door that walks out onto the deck) was grouted just today.

An improvement on this, right?

And lastly, we caught a critter today:

We’ve heard mice running along the ceilings before, but there’s been no sign of them out in the open (just inside the walls). Well, I was painting downstairs today when I looked out into the hall to see Beany calmly following a mouse as it walked next to the baseboards. I have no idea where she found it or why it was moseying along so calmly (it didn’t seem injured and ate/drank/bathed as normal when it was in a plastic box before I let it go, several miles away). It wound up going under some appliances in the utility room, but later I noticed Birdy in the corner of my bedroom, and there was the mouse again. It was really easy to capture it under a clear paint pail, and we transferred it to a see-through plastic tote for watching until I had a reason to run errands and drop it off at its new home (ie, the wilderness by the Munger Trail). It really didn’t seem injured, but it was not at all as speedy as the housemice I’m used to. At any rate, I think the cats earned their keep today.

Posted in Bedrooms, In Progress, Kitchen, Wildlife | 8 Comments

Kitchenette

by Anna Posted on April 11, 2012

In the almost-two-weeks that I’ve been here at the Hinckley House, I’ve been cooking in a cobbled-together kitchenette downstairs (with my chihuahua salt and pepper shakers, of course). The real kitchen had water damage when we bought the house, damage that necessitated ripping out a few panels of subfloor and then laying new hardwood (or having our contractor do that, rather).

This is (was) my little make-shift kitchen. The good version. For the first week, I think, before I bought that cart, my counter (and ‘cupboard space’ — there was nowhere else to put food) was a large piece of pegboard balanced on several empty Rubbermaid totes. Super fancy. The kitchen cart will find a new use in the future, but it’s already earned its keep, as far as I’m concerned. Shelves! A drawer! And I was finally able to hang the pegboard and get all my tools organized, which greatly improved the quality of my life.

It’s totally safe (and stylish) to put your microwave and toaster oven on top of the boxes they came in. And that tiny dorm fridge actually is from my college days. Its tiny freezer cubby hasn’t improved with age. Anyway, the kitchenette is no more, because the workermen finished laying our beautiful maple floors today. The project still isn’t finished, but it’s far enough along that I was able to move everything upstairs and into real cupboards (appliances arrive on Friday!).

Here’s what we found during the inspection that our offer was contingent upon:

Yuck. When I saw the house the first time, it was clear that there was some water damage, as the wood laminate flooring was stained. We got the okay to rip up some of that flooring during the inspection, and the damaged area was much larger than we’d first thought. The water had come into the house for a number of reasons: the patio door has no flashing; there should be a gutter above the door but isn’t; the decking boards outside aren’t space properly, so water collected instead of running through. The damage to the subflooring is obvious, but luckily the joists underneath were fine and solid.

Here’s what the floor looked like two days ago. It was such a relief to get the rotten subflooring out of there! The pieces nearest the door are still in place because the door itself has to be removed to fix that area. And when the guys started tearing stuff out, they discovered that the door frame had begun to rot, so we’re replacing the whole shebang. The new door is currently in the garage and will be put in place tomorrow, along with that section of subfloor — and then they’ll put 6″ slate tiles in the little threshold area. I can’t wait to see the 100% finished floor and to share photos of it! The natural maple looks aMAZing. Maybe we’ll just skip the kitchen table and eat all our meals picnic-style.

Posted in Kitchen | 2 Comments