First Adventure

My work on repainting the bathroom {it is going slooooow} and our anniversary this weekend has me thinking back to the years before our wedding. Having kids has been and is a great adventure, but our first adventure was our first house.

Moving back to Portland {yikes, that was 16 years ago - how can time go by so fast?}for G to go to graduate school, we ended up buying a 1906 house. It made our hearts beat fast the moment we walked in, there was so much potential. It is laughable how little we knew about buying a house/real estate - we were just lucky. The house couldn't be mortgaged or even insured due to its condition, we had to pay cash. {That same year, a family member bought a used car for a little bit more than we paid, although it was a REALLY NICE used car.}I quit the job I disliked and worked full time on the house, G had classes as well as so much to accomplish on the house.

Home Sweet Home

{more after the jump}

Our amenities included:

Dry rot foundation
The original 1906 cedar shake roof was still on there, covered over with layer upon layer of asphalt shingles {G found 10 in some of the valleys}
If it rained hard enough it made it's way into the kitchen
A false wall in the stairwell meant you had to duck or hit your head - the wall ended up to be constructed out of bits of used picket fence and drywall
A hole had been cut in the wall to fit a new bathtub {instead of moving the plumbing} and the extension was framed out, so while bathing most of you was in the bathroom but your feet were in a bedroom
Ugh, I don't have the energy to list it all.

All in all, we hired exterior painters, a floor re finisher, a roofer that we promptly fired, traded with a friend who was a licensed electrician and had some of the worst plumbing done professionally. We had the upstairs walls sheet rocked and a new slab for the garage {we rebuilt} poured. Everything else we did - friends and family who pitied us helped.

some pics:

Kitchen before

 
The linoleum adhesive on the walls was brutal, on the far left is where G knocked out a wall. We had discussed it, but I didn't think we had reached a final decision - the next day I walked in the front door to see that G's sledgehammer had. Me plastering the new wall.

{hi mom!} The floor was lino tiles, I inserted small squares of brush aluminum at cropped corners. G built all the cabinets.


The plaster was crumbling in all of the bedrooms. The previous owner told us that the heat didn't work very well upstairs. All of the heating registers were covered up by linoleum. We heat gun stripped the paint off the floors before having them finished.


As a testament to my insanity, I decided that I wanted to have/or repair real lathe and plaster in the living room and dining room. {doing the plaster and dry wall ended up to be something I was pretty good at, who knew?}
So I went to the library to get a book and ended up mixing bag after bag in a garbage can on the front porch.

We say that working on this house together was our premarital therapy { our wedding was a few months after the sofa's feet finally touched the living room floor} and it seriously was. We had to learn to work together - communicate, negotiate and compromise. We had to trust in each other's abilities. We had to be willing to learn new things and maybe not be good at them at first {I hate that}, we also discovered talents we didn't know we had. Most importantly, we learned how perfectly matched we are - the guy who can love the girl insane enough to trowel out over a ton of plaster is the guy crazy enough to hand-cut patterns into the shingle edging on the roof.

After our wedding, we enjoyed a few years in the mostly done house as we finished up some of the smaller projects.

Then we bought a new house {also expecting our first} with a kitchen that looked like this: indoor/outdoor carpeting and Contact shelf liner wallpaper and all.