New House, New Projects – Home Renovation Part 1

Hello friends!

It is time I updated you all on our life over here. As many of you know, this past summer my husband and I made the decision to sell our house and search for an old house that we could renovate.  It was a decision that was a couple years in the making. I discussed some of our reasoning in this post a few months back.

We purchased a darling little cape cod style home built in 1916. Our home belonged to the same family for 80 years before us, and as such is in excellent condition. We are living in the home as we renovate it.

The floor plan is fabulous with no hallways, and the downstairs rooms all connect with wide cased openings. Downstairs we have a living room, foyer, dining room, kitchen, full bath, mudroom, and guest bedroom (which will be our playroom). Upstairs we have 3 bedrooms and a bathroom attached to the master bedroom (in total a 4 bed, 2 bath house). We also have a cellar with a laundry room, storage, and utility closet (furnace, water heater, etc.).

Since the floor plan is great the way it is, our renovations will mostly be cosmetic. We are going to remove the wallpaper (on every single wall and ceiling. Bleh!) texture, paint, restore some of the hardwood floors. In some of the bedrooms we may lay new carpet or paint the floors white. As far as we have been able to tell, all of the hardwoods were painted red at some point. And the paint tested positive with Lead, which is not surprising, and makes the process more difficult. We will also completely update the electrical system in the spring. We are planning to add a peninsula and butler pantry to the kitchen while keeping all of the original kitchen cabinets. We will do our best to blend the new cabinets (pantry and peninsula) with the old. The master bathroom will be completely reworked, and we are planning to move a few things around in the downstairs bathroom for better functionality.

So with that long (and incomplete) list of things we are planning with our home, you are probably wondering how we are going to do all of this while living in the home, sometimes I wonder the same! The plan is one room at a time. Which kind of kills me because I can be pretty sporadic in my projects. I typically like to do a little here, a little there, and have multiple projects going on at once. But for the sanity of my family, we will work on one space at a time and try to keep the mess to that space.

Our first project is the dining room and foyer. These spaces are the first you see when you walk into our home.

Here are a few MLS (listing) pictures of the space when we bought the home.

Next week I will be posting how the room currently looks and where we are headed. If you follow me on Instagram you already have a couple inside looks into what we are up to.

Stay tuned!