In today’s blog, I will be talking about the resurrection of the farm house. If you want to see more pictures, join my Facebook page and simply click the “request friendship” button. I’ll be sure to add ya so you can follow along on our journey of transforming the Farm.House.Studio.
We were super happy to be able to snuggle and hang out in the house.
Don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but when we had the chance to finally get inside the little red house on our property and really root around, we knew that in order for the place to be livable, we had a lot to do. If you recall from a couple blogs ago, it is the reason why we lived in The Love Shack for quite some time. This was a job that would take opening windows to air out the house, getting running water going so we could boil water for cleaning, seal up holes that gave mice free range, and do some major gutting…..and I mean major gutting.
This is what the house looked like when we got in to see what we had.
It’s interesting, because while I am writing this, Brad and I have been following the journey of a person named Alex Archbold who purchased a house in a small town on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border. He is an antique collector and store owner in Edmonton, and was given a tip that there was a house LOADED with stuff and he was being given free range to sift through. Instead of doing that, he just bought the whole house so that he could slowly go through the gutting process. (Sound familiar?) He questioned whether he was crazy to do it, and we had the same questions about our purchase as well. Anyone that knows us knows the answer to that one….probably better than we know ourselves! If you are interested in seeing Alex’s journey (along with his family) check him out on YouTube at Curiosity Inc.
There are many times through the process of watching Alex Archbold sift through stuff that Brad and I found ourselves nodding in understanding. We too related to the situation of cleaning up after someone else and what leads them to being in that situation. The journey into hoarding and collecting is a long psychological process, and we have no judgment of what the people that lived in the house before us went through to get to the point where they were living under those conditions. Just like Alex, we were just happy that we could take the situation we found ourselves in and transform it into something that brings love and life back to a space that was close to demolition. Now, we are not going to be taking our house to the level that Alex has in what he refers to as “The Potter’s House”. (You will just have to watch the episodes for yourself to see what I’m talking about. The transformation in that space is absolutely phenomenal.) We just wanted a space that we could comfortably exist in while we slowly started to work the land, the other outbuildings, and explore what was around us. We knew that the gutting of this house paled in comparison to the job we had before us gutting all of the outbuildings, but I will save that for a future blog or two.
Here is a list of the things we did to the house in 2015 in order to get it in living condition (keeping in mind that several other transformations happened along the way over the years!)
completed gutted en suite bathroom
added new chipboard flooring in en suite bathroom
stripped wallpaper and painted walls in en suite bathroom
cleaned cupboards and stocked shelves with bathroom toiletries
stripped all wallpaper in bedroom
removed carpet in bedroom
re-painted bedroom with paint dropped off at the landfill
scrubbed bedroom floors
removed carpets from livingroom
bleach scrubbed livingroom walls and ceilings
bleach scrubbed kitchen walls, counter, cupboards, and floors
removed ceiling tiles in second bedroom and supported with scrap metal
threw away lots of stuff and salvaged a few interesting things…..
gutted the porch and removed a big ass refrigerator
eventually, a few years later, we removed the porch completely. We were tired of having snakes in the house.
It’s amazing what a bottle or two or six of bleach can do for a home (and for burning off your fingerprints). It wasn’t long before we were out of The Love Shack and living la vida loca in the house. haha (Now you want to go listen to that song, don’t you?)
Now that this job was done, for the most part, we could get on to gutting other buildings. Little did we know that we’d still be gutting years down the line, but with every 10 pieces of scrap or garbage we removed from each building, we found a gem as well. Who says you can’t polish a turd? You just have to have the tenacity to do so….right Alex? 😉
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