Our Home renovation update

End of this month is the one year anniversay of Hurricane Sandy, I can't believe how fast time flies (even when you are not having so much fun, Ha).  It's been almost a year since we have been out of our house and started our rebuild after the storm.  Being that my husband is the contractor on the job, I feel very secure that the house is being built well.

My husband wanted so badly to knock the house down and rebuild it from the ground up, but we didn't have the time or the budget for that kind of project.  He would have rather gone that route because when you open up walls in a old house, its like opeining up a can of worms.  Our house especially, because it had gone through a few different alterations with a lot of shoddy work in its' lifetime.

Our house was built in 1912, then in the 1960's it became the only green grocer in the neighborhood.  The neighborhood assosciation didn't like the idea of all the traffic and a commercial store amongst their residential homes, so the association bought out the store and changed the zoning to have no commercial stores in our section of the neighborhood.  They were quite powerful at that time…  As a result of the swift change from the store to a house, they had carelessly constructed the house without adequate support.  Due to Hurricane Sandy and the poor construction, I am surprised only the exterior wall fell during the storm.   We had to  repair and replace all the structural beams and joists and then some!  You can see it here and here.

The exterior of the house got a nice fresh look with blue grey siding with white trim and chose a charcoal ledgestone to wrap the foundation wall.  I love the way its coming together!

Here is the ledgestone for the bottom of the house.

We are added a portico over the steps and the porch I always wanted…

It seems to have already attracted all the kids on the block, that's what its all about!

There's been a lots of progress inside too… We had noticed that there was space between the ceiling in the livingroom, so we decided to raise the ceiling to almost 11 feet,  which can accomodate even a bigger christmas tree this year, yeah! I love a big tree!   So far, all the walls have been insulated, drywalled and all the electric is in place, tubing for the air conditioning has been bought to location.

The first floor is almost done, its just in need of the fireplace wall to be built out and placed, walls painted and floors installed.  It's the home stretch… I can't wait for the fun part, decorating!

I wonder how the livingroom is going to evolve this time, before it looked like this…  I was not thrilled with the sea of brown that was going on here.

Thanks for stopping by!