Okay, here's ye old tour of the house interior. It's a bit confusing, so here's a bit of a floorplan. Notice that the exterior wall is stepped. There's also four external doors. One goes into the living room, one into the grand entryway, one into the kitchen and one into the pantry. The ones into the grand entry and kitchen have large porches.
What I'm calling the grand entry way is green and has real wood parkay floors that must be ancient, but are in pretty good shape. The green was painted over wallpaper, which we're removing, and we'll refinish the floor to make it really a grand entry.
The kitchen is a lovely shade of turquoise with yellow walls. While it's not totally awful, it does seem a bit polarizing. We'll be painting it and replacing the turquoise countertops.
The den on the main floor was probably originally a dining room? I can't quite figure it out. It's been partially re-wired. There's original 2-prong outlets, and several new grounded outlets that leads me to think this was the office to the most recent residents.
The living room is quite large -- pretty much the entire "front" of the house (the widest part). It contains not only a radiator, but a fire place. Yep, this house is old -- radiant heat. The living room carpet is ugly too. I'm pretty sure we'll replace it, all the way up the stairs. That won't be cheap.
On the west end of the living room are the stairs up.
The structural issues of the house are most visible in the entry way (where there's a nice large dip in the floor that lines up with the edge of the staircase) and the stairs. See it?
Inspection into the very tiny crawl space (less than 18 inches tall) reveals a cracked beam, that allows several bowed joists above it. We'll have to replace or (probably)sister that beam. It promises to be great fun. It's likely we'll buy a steel one, and jack up the house with it. But the crawl space isn't big enough (height wise) to fit a normal house jack. Suggestions, anyone?
It's pretty interesting to walk in the house -- almost like walking in a ship, the floor has plenty of unpredictable small waves that are more pronounced when you go upstairs. A new beam and the structural security will go a long ways toward making this house re-sellable. The actual structure is amazingly square considering the beam -- the foundation is in great shape.
Upstairs there's three bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedrooms are quite large, with big closets too, and nice wooden floors.
And the bathroom is huge, with a separate tub and shower.
One of the rooms has this horrid wallpaper that is unfortunately in really good condition. We'll probably rip it out anyway. And the carpeted hallway will be ripped up, and probably re-carpeted with whatever we put in the livingroom.
So there you have it. We've begun work, but forgot the camera the past two days (don't worry. It's all been rot removal and paint prep). Progress pics will likely come on Monday.
