Renovating the 100 year old farm house my mom grew up in – making it a place for us to grow old in.

Yup, I’ve got a remodeling plan and I’m going to stick to it! Stop laughing – the house will laugh enough at me this summer when I show it my carefully drawn out plans. The house will be getting a complete gut. Here is the date plan on when each step needs to be completed, note some things get one month – some things get two months. There is a certain Beloved in my life whose lease will be up this fall…

  • May 1st – Full gutting complete.
  • June 1st – All framing finished. (New windows and staircase etc.)
  • August 1st – HVAC, plumbing and electric done.
  • September 1st – Insulation, sheet rock, trim and floors done.
  • October 1st – Appliance and fixture installation and painting done.
  • October 2nd – Move in!

The interior walls will be sheet rock. The interior ceilings will look like bead board but will actually be plywood that’s been grooved to look like bead board – it’s called ply-bead. I like the look of bead board a lot but I also really like that I won’t have to tape and mud the ceilings. I am banking on the main and second floors of the house to have wood that I can sand down, stain, finish and call a floor. The screened-in porch is going to need another layer of flooring as the sub floor out there now is the only thing between the interior and the outside. I plan on buying oak plywood and ripping it into four inch slats and using that as a wood floor. I plan on using extra wide square trim, there will be no miter cuts in my house, everything will be simple and square. The ply-bead ceilings will be white along with all of the trim. The floors will be stained dark and finished very shiny. The paint colors will be light and in the gray and blue families. All of the interior and exterior doors I am keeping, refinishing and painting black.

The main house is basically a 500 sqft box (with a staircase in the middle) with a second floor and a basement in its foot print. Wrapped around two sides of the main house is a screened-in porch that has no basement beneath it. Part of the screened in porch has already been enclosed to create a front entry, a stairwell to get to the basement and a main floor bedroom. So, I will be enclosing the rest of it. It is not a choice I made lightly and it still tugs at my heart strings a bit. Screened-in porches are just too cool and I would have loved to have kept it. My aunt and mom still talk about sleeping out there all summer long. However the screened-in porch faces a dirt road (not 100 yards between them) and the utter filth created every summer from dust and the fact that we live in Minnesota and would only use it in the summer, practicality forces me to enclose it. Including the screened-in porch the main floor of the home is around 1,000 sqft. So with that, the entire house bumps up to 2,000 sqft.There are two bedrooms upstairs – the smaller of the two will become a spacious master bathroom and the other a master bedroom. On the main floor, using the screened-in porch I will be creating two decent sized bedrooms and a bathroom. The basement will be finished for the first time in its lifetime and I will be adding a bathroom down there too. I will be adding a kitchenette and laundry down there as well so we have the option of getting some supplemental rental income, a quite fantastic man-cave, or, god forbid, a place for a relative if they need care.

Besides the house there is a garage that is leaning into its own grave (cool as heck, big, old, sliding doors on it that I will be keeping and finding a purpose for). It will have to go and be replaced by a much larger, two car garage with room in the back for my work shop. This is something I want done ASAP that, as you might have noticed, is not in the upper timeline. It needs to be done YESTERDAY. The sooner I have the workshop/garage done the better in my eyes while I’m working on the house. (I DO NOT want to have to refinish all of my kitchen cabinets in the middle of the house while it’s being worked on. Possible? Yes. Ideal? Hell no.)

Oh yeah and then there is the enormous fifty foot tall (if not taller…) barn in the background. I cannot tell you how badly I wish that we could somehow save it or something. It is a work of absolute art and the fact that its been here for over a hundred years (not to mention the labor that went into building something like this back then!) makes me feel like a piece of shit to even suggest that we should take it down. However, it is dangerous and I need a place to keep my horses. It will be the last thing that I do and we are all going to cry when we watch it go. *sighs* In its place I will be building a little, two stall stable with a spot for the horses to get in out of the weather and a place for hay storage. Where the barn is there is already an enormous slab and water.

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