Our House!

Home, Sweet Home!

This house is old. It is most definitely a fixer upper but it's ours and we have some great plans in the making! We bought the house last August and have been living here since. One day soon we hope to get started on making this home fit our needs and a little nicer but until then it serves its purpose and gives us a roof over our heads. It is currently 4 bedrooms and 2 baths, 1800 sq ft. 

We bought the house for $145,000

As you will soon see the previous owners didn't take care of much of anything. The swamp cooler is broken. It's leaked and leaked for a long times we've been told. Trying to minimize the water damage someone covered the roof with what we think is sheet rock mud!

 I do love the covered front patio.

To the back of the house we had another covered patio. However, it was barely hanging on and so was the first thing to be removed! 

This is a straight shot of the back of the house. The two "brick holes" you see are built in fireplaces. The guy we bought the house from said when he lived in the house 15+ years ago this was there bbq!

A few owners ago did build a shed with an attached chicken coop. Like everything else they did, it isn't the best craftsmanship. There is no side door, the big doors at the front don't stay shut so we have a large brick leaning up against it, it was never sealed or insulated, so it gets really, really, stifling hot! Because it's not sealed and is attached to the chicken coop we get bugs and mice! 

Lets get back to the house!

Welcome to my front door!

When you walk in there is a small, door less, coat closet.

You can go to the Left where half the hallway is blocked by the front door to get to the kitchen and the hallway to the bedrooms and laundry room. 

Or you can turn yourself to the right and walk into our office/front room that drives me crazy!!! Not exactly the first impression I would want my guests to see. We are wall to wall furniture. My Kylie is standing in front of the boys lego table because there is no room for it in their bedroom. We've got a huge window followed by our fold up table, make shift desk that houses our computer, my working station. Next is a piece of furniture Kory made me for my b day a few years ago. It holds family pictures on the shelf and our family games in its cupboards. Followed by our piano!

Here I am standing in front of that big window and by our computer. The adjacent wall has another large window! We've got Kory's massage table and his huge muscle chart. The last wall in this room has a fireplace in it. Like I said, I hate our wall to wall of stuff!  

 The fireplace that we don't plan on using. 

To the right of this fireplace there is an entry way into my kitchen. When we first moved in this front room/office was nicknamed the Zebra room because of the floors. 

 Here's the entrance to my kitchen from the "zebra" room.

Must have ran out of wood flooring???

This is the view from the "Zebra" room into my kitchen.

The house is so old that all the exterior walls are brick but even the interior walls are also mostly brick too! 

Apparently one of the many owners didn't know how to place the electrical wiring inside a wall like every other home we've ever lived in. Got to love those brick walls. 

No cabinet door, no end panel, no crown. Good thing I know a good cabinet guy!

Everyone always comments on all our fridges. The silver fridge came with the house. The white side by side is a fridge we bought for our house in Prescott and has moved with us for several years now. I really love having a 2nd fridge. The other big white thing is our deep freezer. Not having a garage it now resides in our kitchen with us. We also have a small pantry in the kitchen which is the door you see here. 

Behind the sink in one of the above pictures you see our family room. I really hate that people have to walk through our zebra room and kitchen to get to our family room. But it is what it is for the time being. 

 The door you see by the fireplace leads you upstairs to the attic. We used that fireplace to stay warm this past winter and spring. The house has no insulation and gets quite cold. It was not uncommon to wake up in the mornings and it be in the high 50's low 60's. That was with the wood burning stove running all night long. We ate breakfast many times wearing our coats. Brrrrr!

The door you see in this pict leads to the side of the back yard. Not only is there a step up into this family room but the roof is also slanted. On the front part of the room I can't touch the ceiling. The wall by the t.v I can easily touch the ceiling. One day we will fix this too. All the wires hanging from the ceiling we have been told was for a future surround sound that the previous tenants never got around to installing.  The below picture show the slant of ceiling pretty well. 

This family room of ours at least has a full wooden floor. The base board however is much to be desired! 

From the family room this is the entryway to the master bedroom. 

Right inside the entryway however there is another door on the right. 

One that leads down to the cellar/ fruit room.

The only way down is a rickety wooden ladder nailed to the wall. Needless to say, No one likes going down there!

Shut the cellar door and move on into our bedroom. 

We've got a nice beam running the length of the room. We've got us an interior french door that leads out to the back yard. We could see day light, and lots of it around it. When it started to get cold our room quickly became infested with bugs, cock roaches, and more bugs and did I mention cock roaches? So in our red neck kind of way we sealed the doors with foam! When you stepped out of the shower you could see right out those doors and so we covered them with cardboard because the curtains were just harboring all the bugs! 

The fireplace is gas and is what kept us warm, even though it was never finished!
Our bedroom was the warmest in the house all winter long. 

On the opposite side of the wall is the entrance to the master bath, no door! 

This is why we hung card board over the french door in our room. 

The closet..... So skinny that we go in one at a time.  

This is Kory's favorite part of the house....NOT! Just what you want to see when you get out of the shower or how about when your sitting on the pot?

This is above the bathroom sink. Apparently it use to be tile. But the previous home owners didn't like it so tore it down. Another crack in the ceiling....

Meanwhile, back into the kitchen we get to the other side of the house!

Down the hall we have a bedroom on the Left.

This is the boys room.  

This room has been used as an office for a very long time. We needed it to be a bedroom. It had the space for the closet but no shelves or clothes rod. In Alton we used to hang dry our clothes in front of the fire. So we put Kory's homemade contraption for the boys to use. 

I seriously don't know what to say about this bedroom. Were they trying to re-paint? The below picture shows the zig zag white paint. It's actually covering up the brick that has shifted in the wall. 

The ceiling! 

Continuing down the hall way to our window less hole in the wall to our laundry room.

Was this once upon a time an exterior wall? Why would someone put a window into the house?

There is a window in that room on the existing exterior wall so.... it shouldn't be a fire escape.

The swamp cooler sits above our laundry room. Obviously it leaked!  

Got to love the laundry room of "many colors"!

Back out into the hallway we've got the kids bathroom on the right.  

No light fixture in the ceiling! We use whats been put above the sink.

Kory installed one of his "screw up" cabinets above the toilet for me. At least now we have somewhere to put towels and toothbrushes!

 When using our fireplace we quickly discovered that most of the heat was being sucked through the old swamp cooler ducts. Trying to keep the heat inside the house we went around and covered up all the ducts! They didn't have a cover. It was just an open box.

The biggest issue I have, really its 2 issues is the electricity or lack of in this room. This is the light switch and its hidden behind the door! And it's motion censored so the positive side is that the bathroom light is never left on for hours and hours. The bad part is that almost every time the kids are in the shower/bath the light goes out on them! So annoying. The other problem is that there is NO electrical outlet! This means no blow dryer, no curling iron, no electric toothbrush! We don't have any issues of the girls taking too long in the kids bathroom because they are all in mine!

Further down the hallway we come to Emily and Kylie's room. Each bedroom has a broken, stickered covered door. 

This room is the largest so we put both younger girls in here so that the room could fit a queen size bed and still have room to play. No closet doors but at least it has a clothes rod.

 

Another patch job of the moving brick walls.

None of our bedrooms have carpet. We are all living on the cement floor! 

Madelyns room is right across the hallway from the other 2 girls. The boxes above the closet is one big open area. The other end is in the girls room so their voices at night or during the day carry over pretty easily. 

Madelyn's room is the smallest. Lucky for her we have 3 girls and 2 boys. Having an odd number of girls allowed her to have her own room. 

Her room is a bright yellow! The picture does not to it justice!

It's definitely a crazy house! But it's ours and one day we'll get it all fixed up and will be a wonderful home for us. 

This is the story of why we don't have carpet! Before we moved in we paid a company to clean

our carpets. We knew the previous owners had several dogs and cats that lived indoors. The carpets were nasty!! When Stanley Steamer came we were warned that the carpets were in pretty bad shape. That this man knew he could clean the carpets and it would be o.k but if all the pee and feces stains were an indication it had probably soiled the padding. They can clean the carpet all day long but they really can't reach the padding. So we went ahead and crossed our fingers. We were leaving town for the weekend and had planned on moving in that next Monday. 

Coming home Sunday night I had several messages concerning our new house. Apparently the solution used to clean the carpets had a terrible reaction to the nasty's under the carpet. The house had been closed up and the smell or chemical reaction was so strong that it was setting off our smoke detectors! A neighbor couldn't take the noise anymore and came over to try to shut them off. She was able to get through the back door but realized she couldn't reach the smoke detector. She left the doors open and went back home to grab a ladder. By the time she got back the smoke detectors had stopped. Hmmmm. She thought maybe the batteries had finally died. She closed the house back up and went home. Soon after the smoke detectors went off again! This time she ran into my parents and got permission to go back inside and open all the windows. At least this way the smoke detector would stop it's beeping. Driving home Sunday we stopped at the house to see. When we opened the door the smell that hit us was terrible and so, so strong! It brought tears to our eyes. We left leaving not just the windows open but also the back door. We came by again Monday and the smell was still pretty bad. This time we opened all the doors and then I went and hung out at my mom's for a few hours who lives just across the street. Later that night the house seemed to have aired out so we left the windows open but shut the doors over night. I came back the next day ready to clean! The smell was back! My eyes watered and wouldn't stop. After airing out the house for 4 days the smell was no better. Kory came over on his lunch break and together we ripped all the carpet and padding out and had it sitting on the front lawn to take to the dump. Oh my gosh it was HORRIBLE! There was no way we could move it with that horrible stench!