Joe Graves

In 2017, Allyssa and I bought an old house in Franklinton. Over the last couple years, we’ve been trying to fix it up—and after a few small investments and the help of a lot of great people, we’ve made a lot of progress.

Now, we’re looking to refinance and pay someone to finish the work. This means an appraisal (and thus a clean house).

Today feels like a significant step towards where we want to be. It isn’t done, but this is a bit of a rest stop on our home improvement journey. As such, It felt like a good time to show you how it’s gone so far (also, when’s the next time our entire house will be clean again?).

Here it is, room by room.

Entryway

Here’s our entry way when we bought it.

Here’s what it looks like now (and someday, it might be closed off and turned into a pantry):

Kitchen

The current entry way opens into the Kitchen, which includes a strange little nook for the sink. Here’s what we started with:

Here’s where we’re at so far:

With the main sink back in a nook, we added a small bar sink with a cold water pot filler.

You can see the sink and dishwasher back in that little nook.

The island is made mostly from leftover pieces, including an old door. It’s not level or square, but we will keep it for now.

Livingroom

The kitchen leads to the living room:

Here’s where we’re at:

Dining room

Next to that is the dinning room. When we bought it, they had it listed as a “bedroom”:

Here’s how it looks currently (we still haven’t mudded the walls and honestly, we’re looking to add an outside door, and remove a wall, so we decided to wait and see what happens next)

Bathroom

Then we go upstairs. The biggest transformation is in our bathroom:

We might redo all of this eventually, and even though there is still trim needed, it’s good enough for now:

The rest of the upstairs isn’t much different, other than a few new windows.

Master bedroom

Then:

Now:

Bedroom

Finn’s room needs a good amount of work still.

Then:

Now (we haven’t done much yet)

Fun fact, under his rug is a bunch of replacement boards. I stole some of the hardwood to fill in some bad pieces in the kitchen… hope to eventually get new flooring to cover it up.

Upstairs Library.

Then:

Now (and honestly, all we did was add furniture and bookcases):

Sunroom

This room sits above our front porch and is currently only a three seasons room.

Then:

We didn’t do much yet in this room, other than install all new windows. (The old ones were pretty worthless):

Backyard

There used to be a house here, and now it’s our back/side yard. It still needs a lot of work. But here’s where it started:

We’ve tried to get the grass to a better place, planted a tree, trimmed the posts to the height of the fence. hung a sun shade, and for now, that’s about it. Some day, we hope to have a set of french doors that lead from the house to this space.

Front yard

Other than the fence, this is what it looked like when we bought it. As you can see, there were steps that lead up to the previous house that used to sit where our backyard is.

This was a lot of work to get it this far, and wouldn’t have bene possible without my friend Baron’s help! Someday we hope to have new siding, and a front porch.

And that’s pretty much so far.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped us along the way!

Joe and Allyssa