You may be wondering what it is you can expect to find here on these pages and I thought it might be helpful to offer an illustration of one of our previous projects from our last house (meaning, the one we are currently leaving). When we bought the house, I was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of work that needed to be done in order to make it "our home," and we both came to the conclusion that the quicker we got to work, the sooner the projects would be done. Because we had a couple of weeks off from work at the end of the purchase, we figured there was no better time to start.
The house was built in the early 1960s and is part of a small tract development that has houses that all look pretty much the same. Being an artist, that was not something I was interested in owning, but because we didn't have a lot of choices in inventory to select from, we knew we weren't going to get everything we wanted. Knowing that this house had the spaces that we needed, we went ahead with the purchase, believing that we'd make it something we would enjoy and that would feel like home for us.
One of the first projects I wanted to do was to open up the house. It felt dark, dingy, and not horribly welcoming. Because we didn't need the third bedroom and it backed to the living space, we decided to take down the wall between the living room and third bedroom to create a dining space and to help the house feel more open, light and spacious.
I should point out that the house is a ranch and made of brick, so the load is carried on the exterior walls. We did double check though before removing the wall, and also reinforced everything (despite the fact that it was unnecessary). In the background in the photo above, you can see the door that was the entrance to the third bedroom, as well as the closet to the rear-right of the photo.
In this photo, as Sam worked on figuring out the situation, we realized that the flooring didn't continue under the walls. We had thought that maybe they would because in other spots in the house (such as under the cabinets in the kitchen) the flooring was complete, but we didn't get so lucky here. Fortunately for us, the oak flooring is pretty common, so finding patch pieces wouldn't be an issue, and we'd intended to sand/re-stain the floors anyway.
As work continued in the tear-down phase, we tried to figure out what we'd do with the closet so that it didn't look like we'd turned a bedroom into an eating space. We thought about drywall to just close up the hole, but there is a very specific 60's texture on the walls that we wouldn't be able to match so we'd have to skim-coat the entire room and re-texture or figure something else out. Since we were attempting to build some charm into a house that had none, we decided on trying to build out a built-in hutch type area.
Neither of us our woodworkers though and we weren't sure how difficult it would be to build a complete built-in from scratch, so we had a thought: find an old piece of furniture as a base, and then build out the area from that starting point. So, we went on a hunt to see what we could find.
Unfortunately, most of what we were finding that would work in the space were very nice pieces and neither of us wanted to destroy something that was beautiful on its own, so we kept on the hunt. One day, while browsing a local second-hand store, we spotted our piece. It had drawers like we wanted, but it had definitely seen better days, so it made sense to give it new life as a repurposed project piece.
So that the piece would be at an appropriate height, Sam built a platform for the furniture to sit on and bolted it in. Once the hutch was in place, we had to build around it - shelves and trim to make it look as though it belonged in the space and not like we'd added it in to fill a closet hole/space. The rusty-red color was not in-line with what we were doing, so the whole thing would need to be painted as well.
To give it a little extra something special, I found vintage-looking knobs and pulls to put on the drawers and cabinets.
And, voila! What was once a bedroom, was now a dining room for us to enjoy. Although at the time it seemed as though the project was taking an eternity, it was not too bad of a project time-wise, taking only a couple of days (not counting time spent looking for a piece that would work well in the space).
Ultimately though, we ended up creating something that met our needs, gave the house some character, and gave life to an otherwise throw-away piece of furniture. We were thrilled with the outcome and believe that it added some interest in an otherwise pretty dull room/house.
Comments
Post a Comment