Discoveries

My neighbor sparked my interest in learning more about my house's past when she shared a picture with me of her house, circa 1900 I would guess, and just a sliver of our house could be seen on the right side, enough to know that there was once a decorative widow walk
on the roof of our house and that the front of our house, which I had always assumed was an addition because of its awkwardness, was actually original to the house, but as an open porch - actually a beautiful open porch that Eric and I are very sad was changed. We hope one day that we can make the now mud room something that enhances our houses appearance and doesn't detract from it, but we have a long way to go before that happens!

This discovery made me want to know more; like who originally owned/built the house, could we see complete pictures of what our house once looked like, did our house have any interesting history. I knew we would have to go to the town library and the county's registry of deeds to learn most of that stuff, but I decided a google news search of our address might turn up something of interest...and it did, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Sadly, on February 27, 2000 a woman, one of the previous owners of the house, was strangled by her boyfriend who lived with her. She was killed in her/our home. Now the saddest part: she had 4 children ages 11, 10, 4 and 2. After making this discovery I looked for a few more articles about the incident and found that her boyfriend had killed her because he caught her with another man. Of all the things I had hoped to learn about my house this was not one of them.

Now this bit of information is something that we already half knew/suspected. We had two different people make reference to this, but until now had not been able to find any more information about it. When we were looking at our house our Realtor told us that he thought a murder had been committed here, but we couldn't be sure about it and it didn't really change our feelings about the house. Then shortly after Dalila was born a man stopped by our house who claimed to be the victim's brother. Because he wanted to come in and see the house, we had to turn him away( I wasn't comfortable with having a stranger in the house, especially with a newborn), so we weren't able to get any more details than what he provided with his introduction.

I know some people might think that our house is cursed or haunted, but I don't feel this way. It was a horrible thing that happened, but our bringing new positive energy into the house I think helps reverse any negativity from that event that could still be lingering. I also don't think her ghost is haunting our house, or if her spirit is here, I think she protects the house more than she haunts it.

A Few Improvements!

Our new bathroom is taking a long time to complete and there is a lot of waiting in between steps, but that doesn't mean we aren't keeping busy! We recently have been working on giving our house a little more curb appeal because considering the vinyl siding falling off our house, the peeling paint on the window trim and the crumbling brick steps - we have become( if were not already) "that" house on our street. It only took 3 days to complete( well its almost done) but the entrance to our house is finally looking nice! Below are a few befores and afters and some explanations of what we did :)

Before


After with new granite steps

We honestly didn't have to do much to get the steps installed( we paid the granite company to do that), but the prep work was pretty intense. We had to demo the old brick steps, which was the easy part, then with a sledge hammer, remove the concrete beneath it. Then we had to level and compact the ground so it could handle the weight of the granite. We also had to get rid of all the old bricks and concrete. That turned into quite the event when the only place we found that would take the materials was a gravel pit - we paid a guy in an excavator

to scrape the rubble out of the u-haul trailer( hell yes we paid the $8.95 or whatever it is for insurance!) which was super scary - I dont think I could ever accurately describe what this experience was like!! You really don't know the strength of one of those things until you are in a car being pulled back by one of them as it scrapes bricks from your trailer! Maybe we were taking a risk by doing this - but after spending hours loading that thing up, we just didn't have the strength to unload it ourselves and luckily for us, we made a good choice - the guy didn't even dent the u-haul trailer! It was seriously crazy.

Ok so on with the improvements. You can see from the pictures of the new steps that our door is "a contractor special" straight from Lowes or Home Depot. This door isn't all that bad, but it really didn't fit our old house and because the do it yourselfer before us took all the short cuts he could, it leaked and let tons of cold air in during the winter. The water leaks were damaging the floor of our mudroom and we decided we couldn't go another winter with the door like this.

My Dad's friend, Steve, works construction and at a demo job he removed a wonderful old stained glass door that he saved for us. It has been sitting in our mudroom, waiting to be installed for about a year now and we finally got to it this weekend. This wasn't a straight forward install - because the door wasn't prehung we had to hang it ourselves, make sure it was weather tight and of course, make sure it looked professional. We had to cut the opening for the door 6 inches wider and because of this had to remove much of the vinyl siding. We have put up some primed thin plywood for siding( we are still finishing this part) as a temporary fix - we plan to take all the vinyl siding off our house next summer and restore and replace the clapboards underneath, but the mudroom was an addition to our house and it does not have the clapboards like the rest of the house. Unless we removed all the siding, we wouldn't be able to match the new clapboards up to the old ones and this would make the house look very funny once we removed the vinyl siding on the main part of the house. So maybe it doesn't look the best that it could, but we have to take baby steps towards the end result and sometimes that is going to mean temporary fixes. Ok, so on with the pictures...

Here are the pictures after day one of the install:


And here is the picture of the nearly finished project after day 2:

You can still see some of the black ice and water shield behind our makeshift siding and trim, but we will be covering that today. Regardless, it completely changes the look of our house - it really restores that "old house feeling." More pictures to come as we finish the project up!