Before Gallery - Renovation I - Foyer

Above left is the Foyer seen from the front door - this is what it looked like when we bought our home. The Foyer was walled off from the rest of the house, because it served as the entrance to the second floor apartment. The day after our upstairs tenant moved out we set to work. Above right is a view of the Foyer under construction.

I was searching Ebay for months, looking for a new newel post - this one came from Pennsylvania. It was missing the finial on top - perhaps it had a light fixture there in its previous life. I found it a new finial on Ebay also, which came all the way from France.We restored the oak treads and installed a new guardrail and banister.

The curved wall between the Foyer and Den opens up to the Kitchen. We kept the original front door, and replaced the hardware.

Before Gallery - First Renovation - 1st Floor

Below is a view of the Dining Room & Kitchen from the Living Room. The back wall of the house - with the sliding doors and kitchen windows - will move 13 feet to enlarge the kitchen and create a new Family Room. We plan to reuse the sliding door and kitchen windows, as we installed these during the first renovation.

A view through the Kitchen to the side entrance from the Dining Room.

We did a lot of the work ourselves on the first renovation. My husband, Tim, and our friend, Jeff, did all of the rough framing. We sub-contracted the plumbing, electrical, and drywall.  I put together the Ikea kitchen cabinets, and we installed them and the Fireslate counter tops ourselves. I designed the brackets for the bar top and had a local metal shop fabricate them. We did some of the finish carpentry ourselves, and hired others to do the rest. We did all of the painting, and it felt like we painted every weekend for months!

Dining Room

Looking back at the Living Room from the Kitchen.

The arched doorway to the Foyer had been covered up when we bought the house. We restored the opening, and the archway worked perfectly with the rest of the design.

Living Room

Before Gallery - More Photos From Renovation #1

We installed two large pieces of floor to ceiling insulated glass in the Living/Dining Rooms (above). We made our own window frames from cedar (actually our friend, Jeff, did) and then had a glass company make and install the glass.

First day of construction on Renovation #2! I ran out and snapped a picture as they started to remove the deck, because I realized I had never taken a good shot of the rear of the house after we completed our first renovation. It's sad to see it go, but I'm excited for the next phase to begin...

Before Gallery - Outside Views of Our First Renovation

I set the deck three steps down from the first floor level, so that from the inside the deck furniture and guardrail are below eye level. This allows you to see more of the view from inside the house.

The guardrail is made of galvanized steel cables threaded through 4x4 support posts, allowing more transparency than a typical guardrail with 2x2 pickets.

The steps extend the entire length of the deck, providing extra seating for big gatherings.

We've spent so much time on this deck with family and friends, but unfortunately it's got to go to make room for the addition. We also plan to add a screened porch, which hopefully will serve us as well as this simple deck.

I kept the front of the house traditional, replacing the 6x6 posts with Doric columns. The overhang on the front porch already had a flared detail at the base of the siding, which was pretty cool. People visiting for the first time are surprised at the open, modern interior hidden behind this traditional facade.

Before Gallery - Our First Renovation

These photos show the house when we bought it and our first renovation project:

This is the front of the house not long after we bought it.

It's still hard to take a photo of the front of the house- there are so many trees.

The back of the house - before

One of the first things we did was build a deck. We were living in the basement (tenants occupied the 2nd floor) and needed a place to hang out.

We installed 8' wide sliding doors for access to the back yard, and new casement windows where we planned to relocate the kitchen.

We removed a wall that separated the living room from a bedroom and framed out the new beam as an elongated archway. The adjoining spaces became living and dining areas.













New floor to ceiling openings (to be filled with panes of insulated glass) frame views of the trees.

Drywall!

Installing the Ikea kitchen cabinets

Demolition portrait