House Tour: Downstairs "Before"

Hi guys! Welcome to our house. Come on in and look around.

Before I show you all the work that we've done on the house, I thought it would be a good idea to let you have a look at the raw material. This is what the house looked like when we bought it back in February 2009.

You should know, that I loved this house from the moment I saw it. It was not even for sale when we first started looking for houses. It was in some sort of foreclosure-red tape-limbo, but we waited it out and came to visit the house every day. We would go get coffee on our way home from work and sit on the porch and swing. We freaked the neighbors out and when they stared, we would just wave at them like we lived here. They were confused. We were delusional.

We made an offer the first day the house went on the market. I looked at the MLS listing approximately 5,324 times while we waited to hear from the bank. I tried to hide the "For Sale" sign in the bushes so no one else would make an offer. David said that was wrong, so I tried to change the "6" to an "8" in the realtor's phone number on the sign to protect my house from other, less suitable, buyers. David had to hide all of our Sharpies and sedate me. I knew that no one could love this house like I do. No one.

After months of waiting and negotiating (foreclosure purchases are not for the faint of heart) we finally closed on the house. We bought Chinese food on the way home from the lawyers office and went to eat on the floor of OUR house. It was a great day.

This is my dream house. We both love it so much and feel so blessed that we get to live here. When you see these pictures, you will probably think that we were smoking crack when we bought this place.

You really have to put on your "potential goggles" to appreciate it. Go ahead. Put them on. I'll wait.

Alright, come on, let's start the tour!

**These pictures were taken with my trusty little point and shoot before I got my big girl camera.**

Here's the front of the house. All those bags of trash on the sidewalk are full of yard waste that we cleaned up even before the picture was taken. Uh huh, it was BAD.

The front porch was over grown with vines and there was a big moldy rug under that swing. Yuck.

When you open the door, the first thing you see is the fireplace (and our big ladder). This ladder was one of the first things we had to buy after we got the house. The ceiling are SO high.

The stairs are to your left.

The dining room is toward the right. We had already painted this room before I took this picture. The living room looked exactly like the dining room, but without the red. Beige walls. Beige trim.

Please note that all the light fixtures looked like this:

Here's the dining room with the great bay window. This was "supply headquarters" while we worked in all the downstairs rooms.

The dining room leads to the kitchen and to the mudroom.

The kitchen. Yikes.

There was so much red toile wallpaper that it made me dizzy to be in there. This door is to the pantry.

The pantry was dis-gus-ting with really nasty outdoor carpet on the floor.

Here's the mudroom/laundry room.

The mudroom leads outside and to the bathroom.

The bathroom...

...and out the back door we had a rotten deck and an overgrown back yard.

That's it for downstairs. A dream come true, right?  I can't wait to show you what we've done with the place. This will give you a good idea of what we started out with, though.

Tomorrow we'll continue our house tour upstairs.

Melissa