This is the second post on the “before” pictures of my house, pre-renovation. This first one was on the exterior and how it looked when I bought it. If you missed that post, see it here. This one is about to get real with pictures of the interior.

It was a 5 bedroom, 1.5 bath house. Two of the bedrooms are in the attic and they qualify because both rooms have a window and a closet.

Please be nice in the comments. The bones were there and I could see the potential. Granted, it was a long way from its potential, but I could see it in the far, far distance.

Walking through the front door, the burgundy paint slapped me upside the head. I thought, what in the world is going on here? The only good thing I could see was the chair rail molding that went all throughout the living and dining rooms. There was an ugly swirly texture on the ceilings that I tried not to look at.

You can also see a huge return in the floor of the hallway where you could see down to the ground of the crawlspace. More on that in the future.

There was a little tiled room that looked like an add-on off the living room. I don’t know what it was used for, but it was extra square footage so I was cool with it.

The dining room was open to the living room on one side and the kitchen on the other side. It had double doors that led to the side deck, which you can see pictures of in my previous post here. I still couldn’t get over the side deck, so I had ideas swirling around my head on what to do with that.

Off the living room was a hallway with a water heater closet, a guest bath and a guest bedroom to the right. There was also another small bedroom to the left and I don’t have pictures of it before renovation, but I will have pictures of it during the renovation.

The guest bathroom was dark and dingy looking with a brownish mauve color that took you back to the 80’s. This room definitely needs to be brightened up.

The guest bedroom was painted in a wonderful olive green. That is sarcasm. Green is my favorite color but paired with the burgundy in the living room and the dining room, it was giving Christmas vibes. The ceiling was also jacked up.

The kitchen originally had a granite countertop at the bar, but when I got the keys after closing, the granite top was missing. There wasn’t anything I could do about it at that point so I just rolled with it. The kitchen supposedly had been renovated but whoever they hired did not do a good job.

The original wood flooring was rotted out in several places and there was a lot of water damage.

These are the stairs to the attic. They are really steep and I remember thinking that these were not to code. Well, you can probably guess what we had to do down the road, huh?

There were two rooms at the top of the stairs that were virtually identical. As I said before, they both have a closet and a window so can be considered bedrooms. There were missing baseboards and no doors inside the closet leading to the attic crawl spaces. A plus was that in each room, there are dressers built into the wall. So cool.

Somebody primed the wood paneling which gave me a WTH moment. I would have preferred they leave the wood as is. Can you imagine how beautiful they would have been to sand down and poly over them?

Beyond the kitchen is the pantry, the laundry room and the powder room. The tiled floors were atrocious and nothing was caulked in terms of the trim, baseboards and sometimes there weren’t even any baseboards. The color of the day back here is forest green. I swear, I don’t know why the previous owner wanted to live in a cave, but they did.

I’m calling this the pantry, but it’s really just a closet. “Pantry” was just swirling around in my brain.

In the laundry room you could actually see the back of the original brick house. This house was a kind of Frankenstein creation. Again, the tile work sucked.

This powder room was special. Dark green and there was a shower jammed in there. “Not up to code” was screaming inside my head.

Across from the powder room was a huge opening and a really spacious room. There was ceiling damage and the floor was plywood so I suspected there had been water damage. Master bedroom clicked inside my head.

Here’s a picture of the house looking from the back door to the front window in the living room.

So what do you think? I was scared to ask, but hey I was excited buying this house because it ticked off all of my boxes. I knew it was going to be a lot of hard work, but I was up for it. If you read this whole blog post and still haven’t seen the pictures of the exterior “before”, please click here.

There were a lot of ups and downs and I hope you will  join me on my journey of making this renovation happen with some help from my family and friends. I will be doing blog posts taking you along.