Vintage Life: Our Renovation Continues Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote a post to remind readers of our antiques and home decor blog about the story behind our own 1920s bungalow renovation. It's been such a LONG story since we first spotted the vintage bungalow for sale in historic Newberry, South Carolina back in 2011. The house was in awful condition… but we saw the potential!

In Our Renovation Continues Part 1 I took you up to the first major demolition work we did. Here's what happened next…

We pulled down walls and changed the flow of the house. We planned a master bedroom with an en suite, and started work on the upstairs attic space, but found a very gross mess that had to be cleaned up. Apparently the former owner had allowed a dog to use the attic as a yard - seriously?

And then we were really on a roll. I admit that I tend to be a little compulsive - actually it is a personality trait that Greg and I share.

Sometimes when I start cleaning, I end up, hours later, having scrubbed the whole house, because since I've cleaned this, I might as well clean that... and on it goes. Well, that's what happened in our little 1920s bungalow. We hadn't originally meant to replace all the windows, but with the new subfloors in place, suddenly the old ones seemed so ugly. The new sliding glass doors in our sun room bring in so much more light!

Of course, we always intended to replace all of the wiring in the house. But since we were on a roll, we also buried the ugly electric lines connecting to the roof of the house and had a new telephone pole connection installed to access the City's power line. We also re-plumbed the whole house, and accessed the City's water main. We dug a trench through the front yard to connect to the City water line at the street level, and ran all new PVC/CPVC pipes from the street to under the house!

We hadn't originally planned to replace all of the exterior siding, but once we pulled down the interior walls and could actually see daylight through the old lap siding (because there was not a single piece of insulation), we knew that would have to be done too.

We also found some termites munching away on the house and had to replace a part of the front sill. Now do you see why this project has taken three years?! But the new exterior siding (below) looks so much better, and we added OSB under the siding for more stability too.

Oh, and we've been doing landscaping for three years now. The little yard is starting to take shape, but still has a long way to go. First we clear-cut the jungle, removed all the poison ivy, and hauled out about 9,000 pounds of yard debris. That is not an exaggeration - truly about 4.5 tons!

We painted around the brick base of the house, and created large flower beds in the front yard, where we planted baby roses, camellias, azaleas, gardenias, hydrangeas, crepe myrtles, and boxwoods, and a large variety of bulbs (most of which did not come in). We shoveled 18 cubic yards of mulch and started grass from seed. We planted baby trees around the perimeter of the privacy fence we put up, and we even built a brick sidewalk with old, antique bricks. We have plans to build a new driveway with antique bricks too, but we haven't gotten there yet.

The last Vintage Life blog post was from the end of the summer of 2012, with the landscaping in full bloom. Everything was coming up roses, but we still had a long way to go. We finally plan to move in to our 1920s bungalow before Thanksgiving this year, whether it's finished or not. So, what has happened in the past two years? Stick with me, I'll show you how much further we've come!