The 1912 farmhouse renovation project which has taken us more than ten years, and likely ten more to complete, has been an exciting adventure, especially when you find interesting things in the walls!
It was 2008 when we first moved to the farm with a million different idea’s of how to improve the already perfectly fine 1912 farmhouse which was built more solid than any other old farmhouse we ever looked at. When a home is over 100 years old you just expect problems but this house seemed to be updated in all the right places and was functioning fine the way it was. The problem was however that we are never content to live in another parsons home without making changes to it to suit our own tastes, interests and colors. So we began with considering changes upstairs where all the kids would sleep, which at the time only had two bedrooms at the top of the long steep stairway. So we did what anyone would do, turned the attic, which was the length of the house into a 3rd bedroom. We remodeled each of the other rooms by ripping out all the plaster walls and replacing them with sheetrock and new paint. We remodeled the bathroom to ‘flow’ a little better. This progress happeded within the first two years of owning the home. Once most of the trim was up, we began looking at other area’s of the home, like the kitchen.
The kitchen is what you would probably consider a galley kitchen, but it could also possibly pass for a U shaped kitchen and if you were to really go crazy you could say it has a butler’s pantry in some ways. But really, it was just a make-shift way to add countertops and a place to slap some upper and lower cabinets on an old house, which really only had a wood burning stove, a small table and a larder, back in its heyday. The design was poor but it was the only way to really do it without wrecking everything else and something tells me that after the first prestiges owner, the owners to follow were pretty content with the lack of flow the kitchen had. As the world got bigger, so did refrigerators and the fridge is in the way most of the time, but it all got the job done, so everyone was content with it, as were we, until pinterest came along. Oh blasted pinterest and Johanna Gaines. Why do you make me so discontent? We became dazed and confused with what we had and began to explore and dream up ideas. In other words, I started my search on pinterest for the absolute perfect kitchen.
The problem was that there wasn’t any money to go with all those perfect kitchen ideas. We tried and tried to save and save and I kept on pinning and pinning until one day, we decided to just go to the bank, who was very kind to accept a few of our cows for collateral. Small towns are nice. Finally, we had five years to do some construction on the old farmhouse. We had already been pinning ideas for 3 years and now we had an additional five years to complete the job before they would come and butcher our cows. This seemed perfect. But then we started argueing and disagreeing. I’m very creative and extreme and he is very logical and he’s a builder so most of my outlandish pinterest ideas were squashed like a pop can crusher. Infact, I even do the motion of crushing a can when he shoots my ideas down all the time. Needless to say, our five year was actually closing in on us quite quickly. Luckily we had a friend at the local lumberyard who gave us access to the cad program on the drafters computer so we could draw up our own plans at leisure. This was fantastic, but not really. It allowed for way to many changes and way to many plans printed and rolled up and tossed aside. We could not, for the life of us agree or come up with a solid kitchen addition plan that worked with the way the ballooned framed house was built.
Fast forward to that glitch in everyone’s life, COVID, year 2020 when we all shut down and shut up and life sucked. Lumber prices were through the roof, supply chain delays, no workers and all the other crap. That was all just the worst pause in life ever. Neeless to say we didnt move forward, we but we just kept planning and dreaming of what it could be. We sat many nights at the kitchen table wondering how to lay it all out, how to do it without hiring a builder, how to remodel the existing space and how to design the interior of it all. We still coulnt figure it out, so we decided to remodel the back porch which is actually the front of the house I’m told.
The back porch, we discovered in a difficult way by using some big jack hammer type tool on the back side of the house under the porch to see how far in the concrete went. We dug in for about 3 feet and it seemed to be solid. We decided to rip up a few floor boards and see if we could discover what what under the floor easier. We came to discover that it was solid concrete all the way across the entire porch and was 3 maybe 4 feet deep, so we did not remove it. The reason it mattered so much what was under the floor was because the floor was freezing cold in the winter, and the air temperature, though it was supposedly insulated, was no less than 55 degrees all winter long. When your laundry room is freezing cold, it really deters you from doing any laundry at all.
We loved/hated that back porch so we decided to rip it apart, restore it as much as we could and add heat somehow. We discovered that the wood floor was cold because it was 3 inches off that concrete with no insulation in between. We pulled up the entire fir floor and added 2′ foam between the floor framing. We tore the walls apart to discover old mens jeans ripped up into smaller lengths and used as insulation. We even found an old polyester button down shirt with the buttons removed. We found a tin can, which I really hoped was filled with cash. There was an awful lot of newspaper and some old broken down insulation. We discovered that one entire wall was was horribly rotten, which we replaced. The ceiling had 60’s style cardboard like 12″ square tiles glued to the original wood paneling which we were able to clean up and paint, only to discover after a few month that all the vermiculite which was up above that ceiling began to fall like snow often enough to annoy anyone. We decided to sheetrock over that original ceiling and not mess with the mess. We didn’t need to use sheet rock and we could have focused more on the restoration of it as we had originally said, but I think we got tired. We just wanted it done and didn’t want to spend any more money on it. This is usually the case with restoration projects on a farmhouse.
The back porch was one long porch the length of the house and instead of one long room we divided it into three rooms which included a bright white, warm laundry room on the south end, an actual entry with a small closet in the middle, and a little office on the north end. Replacing the windows with a prairie style window added to the farmhouse appeal and small electric heaters were more than sufficient to warm it up along with the new insulation in all the walls, no old jeans. We put the treasured wood floor boards back down in the laundry and entry way, but placed linoleum tiles in the office since we had to destroy a few floor boards in order to make our original discovery of the concrete floor. The door was replaced with a new 3/4 light window and we removed the door between the house and the porch since it was warm now. We decided on crown molding for the ceiling to really lock in those vermiculite crumbles but since the ceiling is a little uneven, it is still unfinished. The back porch is more than livable, usable and done enough to move on to the next project, the kitchen, which was still being dreamed of.
The farmhouse kitchen remodel was next in line. We were two years past that covid year, almost 10 years in the home and it was finally go time! Though still undecided about the final plan, we had somewhat of an idea which was good enough to start. We figured that all we really needed to know for sure, was where the windows would go. We knew where the addition would go because there was only one place to logically put it without adding too much. We had a budget of $40,000 to stick to. We would have to pinch our pennies pretty tight with this budget and we would do almost all the work, including finish work. It was an adventure beyond our scope but totally doable with pinterest and youtube tutorials right?
Originally the focus of the farmhouse was a restoration project of the old house which was built by prestige in the early 1900’s. It was a beautiful new home at the time with the clean hardwood maple flooring throughout both up and down stairs. Plaster, in that era, was thought to be an expensive way to finish walls and every wall in the house had plaster slat walls, hand nailed. Porches on both east and west sides, a full concrete-ish basement, three full huge bedrooms with walk-in closets. The house sits facing the south sun down a 1/4 mile gravel driveway and is protected by a small grove of trees which we have continued to add to. We are the 4th owner of the home and every generation added one thing or another to the homes interior or exterior but it has stood firm. Remodeling and restoring would only add to its longevity.