Our House- Part 2

Thanks for all the sweet comments about our little money pit--you are all welcome to join the neighborhood anytime! Come on down!

Well, we got a lot done on the house-work today (the work on the house, that is--the housework still needs some attention! :) ) We got a wall opened up and moved and widened the opening into the kitchen. The work continues today as well, hopefully we will get the new powder room framed up.......We have been renovating our house for what seems like half my life. In reality, we bought it almost 5 years ago as what is affectionately known as a "fixer-upper" or a "handyman special". It was set up as a duplex with one unit upstairs and one downstairs with a common foyer. We moved into the downstairs and commenced to making a lot of very needed cosmetic repairs and gutting and rebuilding the bathroom--(all upstairs). We scraped off over 80 years of painted-over wallpaper down to the plaster in the two bedrooms and then painstakingly repaired all the cracks and loose areas. When it was livable again, our friend Katie lived up there for two years while we redid all the landscaping, had the exterior painted, built a large deck, and started to renovate the downstairs.......which we thought we would do one room at a time while we lived down there. Well, we got halfway done with the sun room and figured out that was *not* a good plan! We sectioned off that room with plastic and lived that way for over a year. After two nice years with Katie sharing our house, we decided it was time to kick it into gear if we ever planned on this adoption coming reality. Our plan was to get the upstairs to a point that we could move up there and get through the home study and work on the downstairs while we waited. We basically started all over again. Mind you, we are doing almost all of work ourselves...on the weekends.....We have passed up many an invitation in order to "work on the house" because in our minds, a day or a weekend without house progress was that much longer in pushing the day we could start the adoption paperwork. It had already taken longer than we would have liked. We took all the plaster down to the studs except for the two bedrooms that we had worked so hard to save. We worked with an electrician and rewired the entire upstairs (and if you have ever lived in an old house, outlets are hard to come by--I now have an outlet on almost every wall!), had central air added, added a pair of french doors & access to the attic, hung and finished all the new sheetrock, etc. Finally the day came and we moved up and we soon afterward set out to start all the adoption paperwork. Now that the ball is starting to roll along with the adoption finally.......Now the renovation begins again. The goal is to convert it back once again to a single family residence, but it must remain separated until the downstairs is almost complete. Since we have some months to wait for referral and travel, the time has come to start it all over again downstairs. We are in the demolition phase at the moment. We hope to be pretty close to finishing by the time Buttercup comes home and plan on hiring out some of the very time consuming parts that we learned the the hard way..... such as plaster removal and sheet rock (the absolute most frustrating and slow labor I have ever done!) so we are hoping it moves along much quicker than the upstairs did. It will make the wait pass very fast, I'm sure. So, now you have the low-down on another "member" of our family--the member that keeps us safe and warm....... and very busy!

I will try to update as we progress on the mess!