restore a house

We did have the party in the house, but we aren’t completely finished. However, we have electricity, running water, heat, floors, doors & windows. What little we have left to do inside is moldings, finishing touches and the like. Outside we need to build the deck, and underneath we need to put in some insulation and some braces, and to attach the floor joists to the foundation with some bolts. VERY CLOSE to finishing this goal!!!!!

a nice dream for me atm, but i’ll accomplish this goal maybe more than once in the future cuz i want to be an architect and i want to restore old historical places around europe and make a boutique hotel from them… running places myself would be a nice additional idea maybe :)

Well, we solved the leak problem with a little more caulking and flashing on that section of roof. Now we are setting a goal of having my stepdaughter’s graduation party in the house. She graduates May 31, so we have two months to finish the house. The second floor is nearing completion. One room is done, four more are within a days’ worth of work. Only the Master Bedroom has a lot of work to do left on it, and even it can be finished up in a few days. It’s been four years we’ve been working on this, and finally we are coming to the finish!

We thought the leak in the living room had been fixed, so we finished the sheet rock and painted. Now we’ve discovered there’s still a leak somewhere. I am hoping we don’t have to tear apart the entire wall to find it, but it’s not going to be good. :(

http://www.1907millerhouse.com/

We ran some power into the breaker panel in the farmhouse, and tested circuits in the house. It felt so cool to finally turn lights on and off, fans on & off, see & hear them working. It was so satisfying! Then we started digging the ditch to run the power from the meter to to the farm house, and we ended up breaking both our water main & our septic line. A very low feeling. Luckily it was easy to fix, and while we had to work on the septic line, it was in a spot we were able to connect the first floor drains from the farmhouse into the septic line as well, so some progress was made even with the set back.

Well, we’re still working away at the hosue, but man, the finances are weighing us down. We have a line of credit, and several credit cards like Home Depot that are getting maxed out. We’re making all the payments, but we still have so much to go. It’s very frustrating. We wanted to be in the house by x-mas, and that didn’t happen. We thought we’d try for Easter but that wont be doable either. Now we are hoping to have it done before her daughter graduates high school this May.

If anyone has advice for the financing I’ll gladly take it. We can’t re-finance until the house can be lived in.

there’s a crazy farmhouse in quitman i want to restore someday, a really run down place that looks like it may actually be haunted with a barn out back.

who knows if it’ll still be around by the time i’m developed enough to actually achieve this goal? i hope it is.

Okay, here’s a shot of the house from February last year. For more recent pix check our website at http://www.1907millerhouse.com and you can see all the work we have done since we started this back in 2004!

We want to be in this house by the time my Stepdaughter graduates in June. We’d like to be in it sooner, but we’ll see how that goes! We have come a LONG way on this project. I’ll attach a before picture so you can see what it looked like back in 1907 when it was being built. Then I will follow with as current a picture as I have here at work. We just got the kitchen counters put in and that gives us a real feeling of accomplishment as that room was a bare shell when we got the house!

Well, in 2004 we bought a farmhouse and moved it to our property. We’re in the process of restoring it and hope to move in this year. It’s been a MAJOR project. We have it all documented on a website I made: www.1907millerhouse.com So far we made some structural repairs, moved it two miles from it’s original site to our property, built a basement foundation, replaced the roof, repaired the siding, restored the original double hung windows, tore out most of the lathe & plaster walls, wired it for electricity & plumbing, sheetrocked the walls, painted most of them, replaced the fireplace, put in radiant floor heating in the basement (tubes only haven’t hooked up the boiler yet). We’re still working on getting water & electricity into the home, and many other projects to go. But it’s a goal that is finally coming together.