We spent a wild & wacky Friday night putting up drywall in one of the bedrooms that we gutted last Friday night. Having a 100 year old house is both fabulous and frustrating all at once. I love the character and quirks of old houses, but until we bought one I had no idea that the character and quirks equals big huge bill at Home Depot and lots of headaches and swearing. We didn't set out to buy a fixer upper... husband and I aren't handy types... well, we weren't handy types.
We were in a bit of a time crunch when we bought our house and we knew we wanted to live in Strawberry Hill, so we basically looked at every house for sale in the area during a 3 week time span. We looked at our house early on.. hated it, and walked out. Fast forward 3 weeks later, we went back and looked again... maybe it wasn't so bad... maybe it didn't need as much work as we thought. It had all the original woodwork intact, under the green shag carpet there was supposed to be wood floors, it was HUGE and it was really cheap. No one had lived in it for over a year since the lady who owned it had died. It was pretty creepy and dingy, the whole house was painted green, ceilings, and walls, green carpet and heavy green drapes from the 70's. We put an offer in on another house but was beaten out by a few hours by someone else. So we put an offer in, went back and forth for a bit and closed on it just 2 weeks later. Immediately after closing we headed over and started ripping up shag carpet.
Now 3 years later exactly, we have gutted multiple rooms, rewired all the electricity (we still had knob & tube!), re did all the plumbing & pipes, replaced ceilings, sanded down and refinished the wood floors, painted all the rooms at least twice (I was having colour issues), completely gutted both bathrooms, and redid the kitchen twice (don't ask). And I'm sure there's a million other things we've done that I can't remember now. We're pretty darn handy now... well mostly my husband is pretty darn handy. He's done an amazing job going from someone who barely owned a hammer to someone who can practically build a whole new house. He's pretty terrific and patient.

We had taken about 6 months off from doing any projects, because we were both tired of living in a constant construction zone, but as of last Friday we're back into it again. This bedroom is going to be "mine". It's the smallest of the 4, but it has a door onto a private deck.. happy happy joy joy! I can't wait to move my computer in and decorate it all girly.