The Plan

            In congruence with the previous post, I figured I would give you all an idea of the house layout. (Since it’s hard to visualize the floor plan atrocity from a few individual room shots)

I mapped out a rough and dirty “before” floor plan of the basement and the main floor, as well as a proposed “after” floor plan.  Some of the “after” changes have already been made to the upstairs, but the basement still remains design-challenged, for the time being. Too bad money doesn’t grow on trees right?

So here it is, La Casa De Unger, la Maison D’Unger, or perhaps more appropriately, Das Haus Von Unger ;) in ALL it’s layout-challenged glory!

MAIN FLOOR PLAN BEFORE:

MAIN FLOOR PLAN AFTER (PROPOSED):

BASEMENT FLOOR PLAN BEFORE:

BASEMENT FLOOR PLAN AFTER (PROPOSED):



              So far, we’ve tackled the removal of the walls in the main living area (replaced with timber-frame beams to open up the space), as well as installed the new fireplace and most of the windows on the main floor, and re-framed a new stairwell. The kitchen is still in the design stage as we figure out where we want our cupboards, drawers, pantry, island, etc to go, and calculate costs. As best we can that is…our renovation motto so far has been to change the design around sweet deals. So we never can pick all our definite colors or materials until the major ticket items are bought, and even then sometimes it changes if we find a smoking deal on something we’ve already purchased! Hey, that’s what receipts and refunds are for right?!

             As for the basement all we’ve done is purchase a new high-efficiency washer and dryer set (thank you previous owners for leaving us broken ones!) and moved them together, to the future location.  The previous dryer was gas, so it was located next to the furnace (where there was access to the gas line, but not enough room for both machines, or access to plumbing), and the washer was in the adjacent room, about 15.5 Gen-sized steps away from the dryer. We decided it was too cruel to keep the couple separated in different rooms (AND make me walk laundry 15.5 steps back and forth!) so we bought a pair of electric machines and re-fit them to their new home together.

Acknowledgments: Thanks goes to MS Paint, for finally allowing me to finish the floor plans after glitching out on me a bazillion times! (Anyone feel like donating AutoCAD to a worthy cause?! ;) ) To the previous owners, who left such a glorious hot mess for us to transform (as well as broken appliances to replace!) (We’re happy about the hot mess by the way!) And to Brad, my Duracel-Husband who keeps going and going, renovating and fixing like nobody’s business! Who always knows how to turn my tears into a smile when our plans don't go at all as planned. :)

The Befores

We all can appreciate a beautiful thing, but there’s something really fascinating about a beautiful thing that has become beautiful, and not always existed as such. There’s something mesmerizing about transformations. We’re hooked on them. They give us that WOW factor.

Many of us can recall sick days home from school, tuning in to Jenny Jones to watch the latest “you bullied me in highschool, well look at me now” drama. (Well, at least I can, maybe you were better than that ;) ) Even if you were more of a Price-is-Right junkie though, there are countless other popular shows and stories I could list in which transformations from “ugly” to beautiful are the main plotline. Think about it, maybe you’ve succumb to the temptations of some of these titles: Extreme Makeover, What Not To Wear, The Biggest Loser, Bulging Brides, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Restaurant Makeover, My Fair Lady, The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella? You get the idea. It’s everywhere! We’re makeover addicts consumed with “Before and Afters”; inspired by the beauty that can be found in even the most unpromising things. 

I’ll be the first to admit it. I LOVE being shown the potential in something seemingly hopeless. Even more, I LOVE being the one to discover it. Maybe that’s why Brad and I were so excited to buy this: our first house.

It’s funny sometimes how things work out.  Both Brad and I probably drove by this house hundreds of times throughout the last 12 years, and neither of us ever remembers seeing it.  It’s located only a couple blocks away from my family, and just a few further from Brad’s, and yet, none of us had ever given it so much as a glance.

In all fairness, it’s not much to look at, even if you did catch a glimpse of it beyond the 10 foot fence and bank in front, or the forest of trees enveloping it. Nevertheless, something about this dated, baby blue shark house (AKA the “house with the teeth” or, the “house with the moustache”) caught our attention upon that first walk-through, and there was no turning back.

            This house had been on and off the market a couple of times before the listing we viewed, and had also been listed for quite a few days before we even considered it; 73 to be exact.  We had been given prior warning from others who braved its orange laminate and stucco interior that it “must have been a drug house” and “it’s not worth looking at”.  However, not to be swayed by those scared of unpainted baseboards, we decided to have a looksee for ourselves. Here is what we saw…

            Aside from the unsightly shade of yellow paint in combination with the bright orange laminate and textured stucco walls, it wasn’t a terrible first impression. (something about it made me want to throw a Mexican fiesta...)
           Some of its other offensive cosmetic features were the brass ceiling fan and plastic accordion-style closet door. (which I’m convinced was a shower curtain at one point in its former life)

Upon closer inspection we noticed sloppy workmanship in the tile and laminate flooring; an amateur’s quick fix “updating” the house.

Here’s a view of the original living room taken from the dining room:

Notice the classy window valences and curtain hooks. I can just picture the lace curtains that used to hang there…

Further in, we found the kitchen:

Don’t let the picture fool you, take a look down the hallway at the height of the doorways (which are not your typical height by today’s standards either) and then look at the height of the fridge. Yes, it was a tiny fridge. Even though it was barely apartment sized, it probably would have worked for us, that is, if it would have worked at all…I was under the impression that fridges were designed to keep things cold, you know, to prevent food from going bad sooner…I guess the previous owners used this fridge as additional cupboard space, since it couldn’t even chill a can of pop any colder than room temperature.  We later found out that the fridge was not the only appliance that didn’t work in the house. The washing machine and the dryer were both past their expiry dates as well.

Other tasty tidbits found in the kitchen were the infamous sunshine ceiling, metallic gold fleck vinyl countertops, matching gold hardware, soy sauce bottles in almost every cabinet, a giant bag of used chopsticks, and the unyielding scent of cigarettes every time you opened a cupboard or drawer. (it’s safe to assume one of the first things we did was seal and paint the cabinet interiors, a task I would not wish upon anyone who values the use of their hands and back!)

          Moving down the narrow hallway,

          We get to the first door on the left, the office.

           Unfortunately this is the office after we painted over the baby blue walls and moved some of our stuff in. (I never did get a true “before” shot…) It was quite a small room, not big enough to be anything more than a small office or maybe nursery.

           Moving down the hallway to the first door on the right, we see; the hot mess.

Aside from the overall barf-inducing, bacteria-infested splendour, I suppose it wasn’t a complete right-off…I mean, it definitely could have been worse…the toilet, tub and sink could have been the color of a banana slug…

It was just dirty and dated, a dirty date, like Courtney Love on a good day. In our minds, this would have to be project numero uno.

Down at the end of the hall on the right, we found the “master bedroom”:

           I use the term “master bedroom” lightly because by today’s standards, there was nothing master about any bedroom in the 60’s, just that one was slightly bigger than the rest. The “master” in this house was actually a decent size (compared to other ranchers we’d seen). And by this I mean you could fit a king sized bed in there, with side tables, and a large dresser, and still have quite a bit of room to walk around. Which in our books, was as good as we could hope for.

The last door down the hallway leads to the second bedroom on the main floor. (AKA our renovation storage room as of right now)

This is the baby blue color that used to be in the office as well. The whole house was yellow and baby blue, as if babies and clowns were in charge of the painting…

This picture was taken after the great room renovation, so as you can see, it’s FULL of all the stuff we needed moved out of the way during demolition: kitchen stuff in need of a finished kitchen, boxen of books in need of a bookcase in the new office nook, shoes and coats in need of a closet organizer in the entryway closet...the list is endless... 

I mentioned my personality thrives on order and organization right? Well, needless to say this room drives me crazy every time I look at it.  Plus, the door and frame were removed to straighten the wall during the great room renovation, and since it’s directly across from our bedroom, I have no choice but to look at the mess all the time! I’ve come to the point where I now run past it with my eyes closed like a child runs past an open closet in the dark. Thankfully it won’t be like this much longer!

                                                    
 This completes our tour of the upstairs…continuing on to the basement...

           Pictured above (in this mid-demolition photo), is the access door to the basement (the door on the right)…and the infamous staircase. You might be thinking…“hey, that framed in area looks pretty small to fit an entire staircase”…and you’d be right.

          Unfortunately this might come off pretty anti-climactic since we never got a shot of the staircase from the top. (we're kicking ourselves for not documenting these stairs properly)

But I'll do my best to explain the descent into the basement for those of you who never personally experienced it.

         The first step down happens immediately after you open the door from the upstairs, so if you aren't expecting stairs when you open the door, you're in for a surprise! (as my 3 year old cousin unfortunately found out...) The first 6 or 7 stairs descend much like a ladder from there, with no railing, and the stairs are too narrow to fit your whole foot onto (unless you're under the age of 5 or have freakishly small feet) and the rise of each stair varies (so you're brain never knows what to expect). Then, you reach the tiny landing in the middle, and realize you need to somehow contort your body sideways and duck 2 feet to get down the remaining 3 stairs without bashing your face against the ceiling. (compare the height of the door to the distance between the middle landing and the ceiling.)

         Finally, the basement door is half obstructed by this freak-of-nature staircase. Honestly, what would Mike Holmes say?!

           Anyways...

          Congratulations, you've now successfully completed the mental descent of our old staircase!

          If you managed to look up away from your feet during the descent, here is what you would have seen of the basement:

           Unfortunately, the previous owners “finished” the basement to get more money from the sale…which didn’t work out to anyone’s benefit since the layout doesn’t make any sense and it was finished so poorly. The wall’s are visibly not square, the electrical plan is questionable, the flooring is wavy, and the bathroom is comical to say the least. See what I mean?

           It’s hardly bigger than the bathroom you’d find in a trailer. Also, they didn’t even bother to put the plumbing into the concrete. They just built the drainage above the floor and framed it in. (oh people…you clearly should have been watching more HGTV…) Anyways, we already established that whoever did the “renovating” was motivated by speed and not quality (or the building code). 

          As for the rest of the basement, there’s not much to see…the picture below shows the 4th bedroom entrance off the foot of the stairs:

            This one shows the long narrow room at the front of the house:

          And this one shows the other “bedroom” on the far side of the house:

           The door leads to the hallway where the chimney, furnace and hot water tank reside. I'm not sure who wants an exposed pipe in their bedroom, but the listing seemed to think this was a "bedroom".

 So that's it for the house tour before renovations ensued. Other miscellaneous "before" shots are as follows:

                        The rear exterior:

                         Complete with party deck:

                  One half-acre of relatively private property: (it's split level, the bottom fence is the property line)

                               And the workshop:

Now, to clear up the “drug house” comment from the beginning of this post, here’s the full story.  Everyone who viewed this property was told “the workshop is off limits, you aren’t allowed to look inside it.” For most people, red flags go up at this statement…and we were no different.

Upon first impression, the house does give you a sense of unwelcome. The fortress of a fence out front, as well as the large rolling gate in back help fan the flame of any drug house theory. These people clearly wanted privacy. However, no evidence was found within the house to support such a theory. Wiring checked out, moisture levels checked out, check, check, check. We breathed easier knowing the house was safe. There was however, this foreboding feeling when it came to the “forbidden workshop”. We had to know.

Being the super sleuths that we are, we decided to…break...into…the workshop…cue the cheesy "dun dun dun"

Now before you get your judgemental undies in a bunch, you must realize that these owners were not as smart, nor as cunning as us… they left the door unlocked…so breaking in was as easy as turning the doorknob. I suppose the “forbidden shop” warning was enough to sway other potential buyers from turning the door knob. Not us. We don’t heed warnings. Good thing to, because the shop was new inside! It still smelled of framing! Even if it had been used for illegal activity at one point, there was no evidence of it now. It had no sheathing, so no fishy business could be hidden behind the walls. We could see all the electrical and bare framing all the way up to the roof, and all was good! What a relief!

We’re still unsure what they were hiding in the shop, but our theories are as follows: A) they were thieves storing stolen goods B) they were murderers storing dead victims C) they were secret agents storing classified government information Or D) they were dishonest salmon farmers selling illegal fish to unsuspecting sushi restaurants?

They were Asian and they did have a more-than-humanly-possible supply of soy sauce and chopsticks in the kitchen, so I’m ruling option D as most plausible.

Anyways, after we had a thorough inspector confirm the safety and structure of the house, we spared no time making it official. It was such a relief to know that the place we wanted to live was not only a solid house we can improve upon and make our own, but a safe environment we can raise our future children. (Without fear of them growing a third arm or second bellybutton)

         And there you have it; our 45 year old first baby. We plan on nurturing this house into our home, one room at a time. We’ve already tackled some areas with great pride and enjoyment (I’ll post on those later) and are looking forward to tackling the rest in the years to come, slowly unveiling the potential we saw back in June 2009. Some of you may agree with the changes we’re making, and some of you may not. Regardless of our choices in style and layout, we hope you will at least appreciate the transformation. We hope you’ll find some sort of enjoyment watching us turn our dirty date into a thing of beauty. And maybe, it will inspire you to search out the beauty in other seemingly “ugly” things as well.

Lord knows, there’s beauty in even the most hopeless things, sometimes it just takes the right people to bring it out. And I’m not just talking about houses here. ;)

Hello 2011

Or as I will now refer to it..."twent-e-leven"! (as there is no other cool way to pronounce the year without getting tongue-tied...I said it for the first time yesterday and thought, "wow! what a mouthful!" Think about it...twen-ty-e-lev-en, that's alot of syllables! twenty-eleven, twenty-eleven, twenty-eleven, say that five times fast! Those of you who liked saying "oh-ten" last year can sleep easy, I've thought of a shortened version for this year as well...enter "oh-leven". You can thank me later! ;)

For serious though...2010 was a pretty good year in the younger Unger household. We didn't do anything crazy like go on a fancy vacation on a whim, or buy another house, or donate our bodies to scientific research when we pass on...but 2010 definitely didn't leave us without its memorable highlights. To name a few...

1. Finding out someone attempted to kick down our shop door (thankfully without luck, however unthankfully weakening our deadbolt and doorframe so that we Brad had to build reinforcement for the door and ponder the idea of an alarm)
2. The startling realisation that we had a squatter living next door in the charred carcass of a drug house that unsuccessfully burnt down on Halloween, 2009. (possibly the culprit of highlight #1?)
3. Vacationing in Kelowna and starring in a Doc Walker live video concert special on the beach! And by starring, I mean watching from the mob of people in the audience. However I did catch the special on TV and you can spot Brad and I in the crowd once...so pretty much a starring role...I'm thinking of including it in my resume anyhow...;)
4. And the one that took up most of our free time: Renovating almost our entire main floor in true Brad and Gen fashion...you know what that means, rip out and redo everything!! I'll post about that once I get all the pictures organized (and we install the baseboard/window casings maybe...)

Now to look forward to the many adventures that twentyleven will bring! And what would a new years post be without a list of my resolutions:

1. Take more pictures. We bought an amazing digital SLR camera when we got married to document our new life together, and so far, it hasn't been used to its full potential by either of us. This is a very sad fact. I think back to all the crazy random things we've done, or just the great times spent with friends or family, and that's all I have...the memories in my head. I hope to glue the camera to my hand this year and learn how to use it properly, as well as test my skills at photo editing. If you'd like to help me with this resolution, feel free to yell "hey where's your camera!" if you see me with my hands empty of said camera. You can't miss it, it's black, and big, and has a lens cover.

2. Learn to cook, and enjoy it. This might come as a shock to some of you, but I consider myself to be an oh-so, so-so cook, mostly because I do not enjoy cooking. I absolutely love to bake, but thinking up meal plans and making meals has never been a thrill for me. Quite often, after spending a couple hours preparing dinner, the constant smells of cooking make me so sick I don't even want to eat what I've made after all is said and done, even if it does taste good. (Maybe I have food aversion?!) In any case, I would be perfectly content to eat cereal for every meal if given the option.(namely Froot Loops, however I have been known to succumb to the temptations of plain Rice Krispies or Honey Nut Cheerios from time to time. PS you did read right, I said plain Rice Krispies, as in, no sugar. I also enjoy warm pop, but that's another story)
Thankfully Brad is not picky when it comes to food. None the less, I wouldn't feel right about feeding him a bowl of cereal after a long day at work, nor would our bodies rejoice at the level of nutrition received from a diet of pure sugar...And finally, our parenting abilities might be questioned when our future children bring baggies of cereal to school everyday for lunch, rather than sandwiches made from PB&J and a mothers love. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm a terrible cook, (I can make PB&J for those wondering) and I can follow recipes just fine. My problem lies in picking recipes that will taste good, and then fixing the epic fail that sometimes results, I don't cook well on the fly.
So my plan of action around this problem: Form a collection of good recipes (as in, previously tasted by moi or coming from a highly reliable source, or at the very least containing a pretty delicious looking picture) and have at 'er. Maybe I'll even blog about my successes and "wah,wah wah"s.
Hopefully the result will be a slightly less boring version of Julie and Julia. (sorry if you enjoyed that movie...I for one, was not a fan...)

3. DRINK MORE WATER! I'm terrible for this.

These are my three main goals for the year. I have about a million more, but every year I think about resolutions and set goals I always set too many and the perfectionist inside me implodes a little when I can't accomplish them. So as to avoid that same disaster this year, I'll limit myself to three main ones. Hopefully having told other people about them will help keep me motivated. :) Let's see how this goes!