{PART 4} TEARING IT DOWN TO BUILD IT BACK UP

When my husband started working on fixing up our house, we were living with my Dad.  My Dad's house is about 30 minutes from our house.  My husband was also working at the fire station and at a car mechanic shop (part-time) when he started working on the house.  He was working so many hours during the first month of re-construction.  He would would be at the house until 1am many times and then have to be up at 6am to leave for the fire department until the next day.  Then he would head to his part time job, come home for dinner and then head to the house to be gone until 1am again.  He was extremely exhausted.  After a month of that, he had to quit his part-time job.  It was just too much to keep up with.  It took four months for Nathan to get the house ready for us to move in.  He worked so many hours, so many nights.  He put everything into it.  He worked so hard and did an amazing job!  

Here's how it went:

This is what you saw when you first walked into the house.  We hated that big wall and the little wall.  It made the house feel so much smaller.  We wanted to be able to see into the kitchen when we walked in.

So Nathan knocked out the little wall and cut down the big wall.  He moved the hot water heater down to the crawl space, and built a space for a counter to go over the washer and dryer.

Did you catch a load of that wall color???!!!

This was the hall bathroom.  The toilets in the house were so awful.  At first Nathan had said we were not replacing the toilets and sinks but then one day I showed up to see how things were going and he surprised me with ....

 New sinks & toilets!!!  Oh thank goodness!

 Nathan took the wood beams off of the ceilings.  Let me tell you...sanding down a ceiling is not easy.  It was a lot of hard work. 

I don't have a picture of every room but this was the color of one of the bedrooms...orange!  Another room was purple and another was brown!  It was terrible.

The boys liked it when we went to the house to see how things were progressing.

I was pregnant with Alanna during all of this, so I wasn't able to help very much.  But I did manage to get out to the house a few times to help Nathan paint a little bit.  It was a really difficult experience going through buying a short sale and then having to do so much work on it, but it was also rewarding and well worth it.

After four months, the house was finally at a place where we could move in.  Fresh paint, new wood floors, a few cut down walls, a new pantry, and a lot of hard work and love!

This is what the house looked like the day before we moved in.

I was so thankful Nathan knew how to do all of the things he did to the house.  He did an amazing job! We still have a lot of projects we'd like to do to the house, but all in time.

Next time I'll be starting posts on what the house looks like now that we've been here for almost three years.