Hi Friends! This weekend a new chapter began in our lives. We closed on our new house & moved in. It’s a mess inside, and honestly, there is so much that needs to be updated that I kinda don’t know where to start. But I guess that’s what happens when you buy a dated fixer upper. I figured that I should share the “before photos” so that I can look back on them someday (hopefully soon!) and see how far we’ve come.

This is the outside. I LOVE the outside. It has a sweet farmhouse, country look to it. Even though it’s not quite as far out in the country as we were looking for, the lot is actually really large for being in a neighborhood. From looking at the outside, you wouldn’t know how dated the inside is. So here we go.

The heart of the home is the kitchen. So I thought I would start the house tour in the kitchen. The lower cabinets are pretty badly water damaged. We were initially thinking that we would just do new doors on the cabinets, but now I’m rethinking that plan.

We are planning on taking out this wall that the fridge is up against to extend the kitchen into a formal dining room. But it is a load bearing wall, so that will be a bit more work than we were initially hoping.

Surprisingly, the stove is the cleanest thing in the house. I guess they never cooked, because everything else is super beat up and neglected.

Behind the kitchen you can see the side door to the house. This is what we are planning to use as the main entrance.

I was thinking of making the shared wall between this room and the kitchen into an entry way with a hall tree. There  really isn’t much storage in the house, so using this room as the entry seems like the most functional idea.

This is what you see when entering the house from the side door. The room to the left is a little laundry room, and the nook on the side is what I am planning on enclosing and turning into a pantry. It won’t be directly in the kitchen, but that’s honestly fine with me. This house has a layout that really isn’t very well planned out, in my opinion. But I’m excited to get my hands on it & make it more functional for our family.

Here is the tiny half bath downstairs. There is a closet to the left side of the bathroom that we are thinking about expanding it into to make it a larger bathroom. But we will see. It’s not a huge priority right now.

Here is what the master bedroom looks like upon walking in. Nothing special, but it’s a decent size.

Here it is looking in from the opposite side of the room. I’m kinda hating that they put the electric fuse box here. Ugh.

And here is the master bathroom. It’s long, which is nice, but EVERYTHING MUST GO! So ucky.

The owners left everything under the sink, and you can tell from the condition of the cabinets that they would put the toilet scrubbing brush directly on the self after cleaning with it. There were even more disgusting things I discovered while cleaning, but I don’t want to gross you all out. I will say that the thing I hate most when moving to a new house is sanitizing the bathrooms. We are 4 days into living in the house, and I still don’t like the bathrooms downstairs, even though they have been bleached top to bottom.

Here’s a little glimpse into the living room. The best thing about this space is that it has three large windows.

And here is the living room looking out into the formal dining room, located right behind the stairs.

And here’s the front door- which I have already started patching due to some cosmetic damage. And you can see in this photo that I have also started priming the trim on the windows.

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE a good ugly before and a beautiful after. That’s what we wanted: a house to add value to. Boy did we sure get it! I can’t wait to turn this house into a home. It’s super crazy over here right now, and I have no idea when things will calm down. But I am hoping that we can get it all done fast. But I’m sure the reality will be a lot slower than I would like. I mean, we are just two adults over here with three kids who make getting projects done very hard sometimes  (who am I kidding? ALL of the time!) #sendhelp Haha!

What would you do first? I vote gut the kitchen, new paint, and new floors!