Here We Go

Welcome to our blog about our newest adventure in home creating. This is house number three, but will be by far our greatest undertaking. 

Some of you may remember our first house in Winchester, Virginia—the cute little Cap Cod. We made a lot of changes most notable, taking off all the wide chalky aluminum siding and window awnings to reveal the original 1940s wood german siding which we scraped, primed and painted.

Then there was our 1970s country home in Indiana County, PA which we worked on over the past 15 years. Starting out as a very basic Patwell split-entry, we basically remodeled the entire house inside and out, right down to replacing the 3 inch Ranch baseboard with 4 inch Colonial. 

But this house, our newest adventure, has a bit more history. We believe that it was built between 1890 and 1910 and most likely was a farm house. Currently it's in a small town neighborhood—no it wasn't moved, the streets were added. 

There is much work to do, but our old house has “good bones,” as Bob likes to say! As some of you know, there is nothing like an old house.

This time we will recruiting help—the contractor is waiting in the wings. Also, we will be on an accelerated plan—we hope to have the majority of the work done in 8 months. 

Since the house will be undergoing a major facelift and since most of our free-time will be devoted to the renovation, we've decided to do a blog. Neither of us has done any blogging before, so this will be new, too. But we are hoping for two things: that we can keep our friends and family in touch with our project (best way to let you know we're alive and involve you in the conversation if you are so inclined) and we will have a journal of writings and photos at the end of the project.

We're excited! A bit overwhelmed, yes, but God has led us thus far and we're ready to go. We expect there will be more than enough little surprises along the way—problems to solve and a story to discover—the story of our old house.

Hope you'll join us,

ChrisAnn