Today marks owning our new home for eight days! We’ve had so much great progress and learned so much about our 110 year old home. We had to make the decision to gut it. That was so hard for me. We didn’t have any intention of doing that and that most certainly wasn’t in our completion time line or budget either. Once we got to peeling back layers, I was very happy with this decision. The hardest part about this was the trim! Every single window had different trim around it. I loved that! It was similar but not the same. We are trying to decide if we will recreate that aspect of the house.
As you will notice, as you look through the photographs, all of the exposed wood. The house appears to have been built out of old barn wood. The braces that hold up the corners are very unique too. It’s so interesting seeing how they built this place. There are NO headers over any door or window. It’s as if the structure above is so solid there was no need for them because we haven’t found any sagging anywhere. We do plan on having this checked out to confirm before we keep on trucking! After uncovering the walls, you will see they are covered in old boards of every kind. They weren’t picky at all. It’s as if they just used what they could find.
Other fun things we’ve found:
- knob and tube wiring that was still being used
- electrical problems galore! The house should have burned to the ground!
- no insulation in the exterior walls
- rotten windows
- rotten front porch
- news paper articles
- so much wallpaper
The MOST exciting thing about gutting the house, we will now have ELEVEN foot ceilings! Whoa! We were told that back in the day, houses had really high ceilings and they dropped them to 8’ or 9’ foot to cut back on the expense of their heating and air bills. We plan on restoring that feature in every room!
We’ve also found two door ways that were covered up. A fifth fireplace that was covered up and unfortunately partially removed. Also, the front door windows were covered up for some reason. We plan on restoring the front door sidelights! It’s going to bring in so much extra natural light.
We’ve had lots of progress in the yard too! My nephew and father-in-law stopped by to help us pull up the nandinas that had gotten out of control and all the overgrown shrubs are gone too. We can finally see all of the house! We also had an arborist take control of the trees! It was so sad, but one of the trees, a pecan, was growing right up against the house. It was so beautiful but was so unsafe and had to go.
I had to give our sweet new home a name. . .it’s so perfect too!
Two Chimneys on Cherokee
I created an Instagram account to document our progress. You can find it here if you would like to follow along.
