"THE" fixer-uper!

Five years ago my husband & I took a look at our lives and decided to make some major changes. He was working some insane hours and not really loving his job, the kids were getting older and needed a dad around, and we wanted to live closer to family and sunshine. So we decided to sell our beautiful home, move from Northern Utah to Southern Utah, and my hubby started a new career. We needed the money from the sale of our house to get the new business going and to live on for a few years. Real Estate was going absolutely insane so we finally bought a tiny home with dreams of fixing it up, selling in a few years, and moving into something bigger...and newer.

So this is the story of our 1940's fixer upper.
For some reason this house was built out of cinder blocks. It always reminded me of a reststop. Then it was sloppily painted yellow. Some old houses are cute and have a lot of charm but this is NOT one of thoses houses.

Here we have the little tiny kitchen and the doorway led into this laundry room. Yuck. Laundry is bad enough in a cute room! This is unbearable!So I woke up in the middle of the night with the perfect idea! I decided we should tear down the wall, make the laundry room a breakfast nook, relocate the sink to where the table used to belong, move the stove, dishwasher, etc. "What, honey? You don't like the idea?" My poor husband knew there would be no peace until he complied. You'll have to use your imagination here. This is the new kitchen taken from the same angle as the above pictures, minus the wall & with the laundry room transformed into a perfect little eating area. I'm not a big fan of doing dishes while staring at a wall so here is the sink moved to the window. This is where the little table spot used to be. The picture is being taken from the former laundry room, transformed into a eating spot! Because we changed the cabinets around so much, and we were trying to be thrifty, I used the old cabinets, bought some more, and painted them all to match. The kitchen became a happy place!

Now, on to the living room! I'm not even kidding. This is really what it looked like. Gotta love the fireplace, 1940's peeling wallpaper, and pink (very used) carpet! Notice the fireplace. Better, huh? We tiled the fireplace, painted the gold stuff, and added some moulding to the top.
This pic is taken from over by the fireplace. We took out six, completely pointless doors. The door you can see leads into the master closet. Really? So my husband also learned to drywall and it became the home for our piano.


Have you ever removed wallpaper applied post WWII? I'm not sure what they used to put that stuff on, but half the wall would come off with it. Also, we discoved much of the wallpaper from the 80's was to cover HUGE holes in the wall. So we had to texture the whole house after patching for a few days.


Next are the bedroom transformations...

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And since we tore out the laundry room, we needed a new one. So I scraped about 6 layers of moldy linoleum off the concrete and laid tile. This little area worked great.

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It was a crazy amount of work but it was worth it in the end. The house turned out cute, we had a nice place to live for a few years, and then we were able to build a new house. We had someone else do ALL the work. The only finger we lifted was to take pictures of the new home coming together. Thank goodness "they don't build 'em like they used to"!