since everyone's asking.....

Since everyone's been asking about the (ongoing) progress at the Farmhouse we though "Hey! why don't we just blog this?" so here we are.

Back in November 2013 we found an adorable little farmhouse (on 4 acres!) that had all the charm in the world but needed a lot of updating. We decided that it was our dream home and the renovations would be worth it - so we bought it. The first photo is the house when we first looked at it. The one below is a photo we got from the sellers daughter, probably around the 1960's?

The interior was pretty outdated. As with any old house, there was a lot of work to be done. At first we thought we'd paint over the wood paneling and tackle the walls at a later date BUT (& this was a big but) we found some water damage above the fireplace. We took down some wall and found wood rot. This was honestly a blessing in disguise because it prompted us to really get the work going on the house that otherwise would have been put off for who knows how long. 

Not only was the wood rotted, there fireplace was pretty much falling apart. There was visible creosote nearly everywhere (i.e. fire hazard). Since we wanted to use the fireplace we knew we had to repair everything we could. We called a local chimney guy and got the work started to repair the fireplace. 

All the bad brick was removed, the creosote cleaned out & everything was repaired and replaced. The great thing? A working fireplace!! Hurray! The terrible thing? We saw what was under the walls. Which was a lot of beams connected to nothing (structural issues) & tons of damaged plaster. With this first big house project done we decided the next thing to do was take out all the wood paneling (in the entire house) and assess the walls. Since they were plaster we would see if they were still workable, if not we were going to drywall (fingers crossed we could rework the plaster!).