West to East

Despite all cultural indications to the contrary, Andy (the husband) and I decided to leave Portland, Oregon to live in my Pennsylvania hometown, a farmland-cum-Rust Belt spattered with forests and abandoned steel plants.  It has its angles.  Because everyone in our generation has fled to the coasts, property values have decreased steadily over the past 30 years. For $228,000, we acquired 15 acres and a farmhouse built sometime in the first half of the 19th century.  There were no covered wagons involved, although my 2006 Hyundai Accent was, arguably, only a slight improvement.

Andy and I only saw the house once in September of 2013, and we thought it was a bit of a beautiful disaster.  We had no realistic plans to purchase the place, but it started to sound more and more appealing from a 2,500 mile vantage point. $228,000 would buy you a fixer in a marginally terrible Portland neighborhood, we said. And so the dream metastasized -- it was a lot of space and there was a lot of room for dreams -- maybe we could raise unpretentious farm kids without all the Portland Montessori new age bullshit.  Maybe we could get some pigs, maybe start a brewery, maybe get some Carhartt jackets and just do something different. 

My father has known the former owner for almost 40 years.  She and her first husband bought the house back in the 1970's and had their own dreams for the place. Unfortunately, he died of a rare leukemia several years later, and she spent the next decade alone in the house.  I can only imagine what that was like, because it's a fairly isolated property and the solo upkeep on a big house with two outbuildings must have been ridiculously difficult.  She eventually met her second husband and they lived there together for 20 years.  

So.  We got the keys and went to the house for the first time on February 2, 2014.  No more antiques, no more furniture, and good GOD, what a disaster.  The hardwood floors are different in every room, even nonexistent in some.  Our first project was to rip out the 40-year-old carpet to see what was underneath.

Oh dear lord, what is THIS?  The beautiful formal living room has some kind of fake oak flooring placed over the original floors, but only around the edges, a perplexing move at best.  A giant blue Persian rug covered the original flooring in the middle. 

Well, this room is red on red on red on red on red. My eyes are bleeding.  You can't see the blood because it's the same color as the carpet and wallpaper and the design within the wallpaper.

Goodbye, 20 years of dust and dog dander.

This is one of the spare bedrooms.  It has beautiful trim work and was covered with a lot of stained dog pee carpet pads.  Ciao, carpet.

                                                  A vast improvement.

The family room appears to have wide plank walnut flooring.  Lovely. Well,  no.  They didn't actually finish it.

There is a deep hole right in the center.  They filled it with carpet pads.

Days 1 and 2.  Only 30 years to go!