The Bois Bungalow

We have been having trouble getting motivated to work on the woodwork. Thomas has decided to start working on more of the electrical to avoid having to help me work on the trim... I do enjoy the results of his electrical work, but I feel like it would go so much faster to both work on the woodwork. I finished the breakfast nook a few weeks ago and it has been nice having a little table in the kitchen that we can actually use. The previous table in there had his computer on it, so it was never used for meals. Here is a picture of some of our original wiring. Isn't it beautiful? Is it odd that I enjoy seeing inside of our walls... I feel like I get to see a little bit of history. In the dining room we left a little note for a future owner to find. I'm thinking I might leave another little something in the parlor when Thomas finishes up in there. I'm hoping to get motivated to work on some more sanding tonight... It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't leave such

Because of the cooler weather, our work has shifted inside recently. We have been stripping the woodwork in the living/dining area and are hoping to finish it this winter (*hopefully!). Some of the woodwork is more difficult because the paint smears more, while other sections of paint come off in huge sheets. It's odd. This is one job I cannot wait to complete. We also planted our first tree on the property. We chose a Scarlet Oak because we wanted a decidious tree and the leaves turn a gorgeous red in the fall. It is going to be a gorgeous tree when it grows up... This past week the hubby was away so I picked up a banquette for our kitchen and an old round table to go with it. I decided to prime it and paint it white to match our kitchen cabinets. It will be great to eat breakfast in our bright little breakfast nook. I will have to post some after pictures once it is all set up. Post sanding After priming

Our bathroom is by far the most embarassing room in our house. It has horrible wood beadboard, ripped linoleum, an 80's vanity/sink, gross tub/shower surround and (used to have) a peeling window. A couple of weeks ago, we decided we were tired of the gross window, so we stripped the paint. We found decades worth of paint underneath the white paint. There was pea soup green, mustard yellow and pink. We then painted it with primer, and we are waiting on a paint sale so we can paint the beadboard, window and original medicine cabinet white. Here it is before primer:

I know I haven't posted in a while... We have been busy working, doing yardwork and recently I have started working on stripping woodwork again! I am going to be be playing catch up on here :D Last month, we found some furniture on Craigslist that matched a dresser we had purchased from a lady that painted it. I got the paint matched at Sherwin Williams, and we were able to paint the new dresser and nightstands and now have a matching set! They are far from antique, but have a lot of character. Before: They were pretty scratched up, but were beautiful! After: Now it matches the rest!(Please ignore the missing drawer, I didn't notice when I took the picture) Now we have two matching dressers and two nightstands. We also chose to take down a closet that the previous owner added to add more space to our room. It was a messy job, but it made our 'master' bedroom feel a little more spacious. Before: The closet protruded into the room and took up a lot of squa

We finished up the front fence this past week, and I couldn't be happier. We just have to build an arbor and gate to complete it. We have also been doing a bit of yardwork. We have added a lot to our yard this year (daisies, several types of echinacea, trumpet vines, honeysuckle, clematis, and several other colorful perennials. It will be great to watch everything grow over the years and have the opportunity to continue adding more every year. We were cleaning our closet, and found an old photograph. I sent it to the second owner's children (the two that we met), and they said they did not recognize the people in the photograph, but were able to tell me that they were wearing was an Army Air Corps WW2 uniform, which was when their parents owned the house and that the man could have been a son of friends. Very cool! Our next goal is to work on the woodwork. We have almost completed three windows, and want to stain them back to how they were originally. Windows now:

I feel like we haven't stopped working on the house all summer. I work a full-time job along with my husband, and we come home every night to work on something. The past couple of months, the work has been mostly outside. We have been gardening, weeding, building a picket fence, and maintenance (mowing, edging etc). We built and stained our wine rain barrels. We absolutely love them. We picked up some water hyacinths and goldfish and created a fountain out of a large wine bottle. They are the perfect small water feature! We have been working on our white picket fence out front for a couple weeks. We decided to reuse a lot of the wood from our old fence. This was a LOT of work, but saved us a bit of money. I scraped all the old paint off of the boards, and we had to cut and angle the boards and then paint. As of now, we have both sides completed, and just need to finish the front of the fence. The front of the fence will have new boards simply because we ran out of old bo

The most recent addition to our home: rain barrels and copper rain chains. A couple months ago, we had new seamless gutters installed to replace the plastic do-it-yourself gutters the previous owner had installed. We asked the installers to adapt them to fit rain chains, and installed our copper rain chains a couple weeks later. Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked! After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :) The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot. Here are the rain chains befo

I had the chance several months ago to meet up with the second owner's children. Their parents purchased the home in 1928, and lived in it until the late 60's. They were great and were able to find several pictures of the house when they lived in it. These pictures are my motivation to bring this house back to what it used to be. This is a picture of the parlor. It is to the right immediately when you walk in the front door. This picture is in the dining room during Thanksgiving. You can see a lot of the woodwork that we have spent hours stripping paint from. The windows behind the man at the end of the table have not been stripped yet. This is a photo of the backyard during winter. The fence that is in this picture was (mostly) still standing when we purchased the house. We put up a new fence this winter for more privacy and security. This is a picture of the owner's daughter reading on the screened in front porch. They used to sleep out there in the summer. The