Before you can begin to build, you sometimes have to tear down!  We had a lot of tearing down to do.  On the back of the house were porches, a room used for who knows what purpose, and a bathroom that was a shower, toilet and sink all in one room.  These were encased in tin sheeting, maybe to protect the wood underneath?  When I came out of the camper every morning, I felt like I lived in the ghetto.  So, demolition involved pulling off the sheet metal, completely removing the roof and walls of the mystery room…it is now a patio, and everything in the bathroom.  Eventually, the porch areas will become a screen porch.

There was one bathroom inside the house.  The cast iron tub, potty and tile were all peach.  The bathroom had to be gutted.  The mortar behind the tiles was several inches thick.  We had to break the tub into pieces with a sledge hammer, and then carry each heavy piece outside.  It was a job, one at which Amanda (eldest daughter) worked incredibly hard.

The kitchen didn’t need a whole lot of demolition, as all that was there were some cabinets on the walls.  There was no plumbing, not even a hole in the floor where the pipes would go!

We also decided to tear down a wall in the dining room, and open up some arches in the living room/dining room.

The house was three bedrooms and 1 bathroom.  (If you didn’t count the strange little outdoor bathroom!) We decided to expand the one bathroom by taking the closet from the bedroom next to it.  We also decided to make that bedroom into a laundry room/mudroom.  We pulled the window out and made a doorway that would one day lead onto a back deck.  Then we pulled up the hardwood flooring in that bedroom and built a wall about 4′ from the kitchen wall.  On the other side of the new wall would be a pantry for the kitchen.

We had an electrician come and move the fuse box from inside the master bedroom closet to the crawl space, along with all of its wiring.

Below are  pictures of the two bedrooms.  The peach one would become the master. The purple one would be Bethany’s or eventually the guest room.

All of the windows would be replaced, but we waited until we painted the outside of the house so that we didn’t get paint on the new windows.  The painting had to wait for the demolition of outside structures and the patching of holes left by old ac units that we pulled out.  While all of this was going on, we were waiting for a plumber to come install a line from the street to the house (which Tim decided to do himself with Amanda’s help) and the drain lines in the house to the septic tank.  After one finally came and did that, Tim installed all of the supply lines for the bathrooms, laundry, and kitchen.  That may have been the hardest job he did!

Next post, I’ll talk about the bathroom that we added to make it a 2 bathroom house.  The completion of this bathroom…at least it’s toilet and sink…were anxiously awaited as it meant we could send the porta potty away!  More on that next time!

The family who built the brick house that we renovated first lived in a little wood house that was built in 1942.  It was dilapidated and the terms of our renovation loan were that we had to remove it.  But, in the meantime…. When Bethany (younger daughter) came home from working in Chattanooga for the summer, she wasn’t keen on the idea of living in the camper with her parents.  She, being an outdoor kind of gal who is not afraid of roughing it, set up her tent inside the house and lived there for several months.

One of my special memories was of Mrs. Brenda (daughter of Mrs. Thelma who was the mom of the family who lived in both houses) stopped by one day and walked down memory lane with me.  As we poked around in the yellow house, she told me that the front room (currently housing an old organ and an old piano that were literally falling through the floor!) was the room that if a young man came to court, that is where they were entertained.  She also told me that when her sister, Alice, died at just under 5 years old, her mother would not let them take her to the funeral home.  She was laid out there in that front room for visitors to come and mourn with them.  When we moved to the next room, (also housing an old piano) she took me over to a tiny closet.  Opening the door, she said, “If we couldn’t find Mama, we would look in this closet and she would be on her knees praying.”  We walked around the outside and she pointed under the house and said her daddy had secretly tried making some moonshine down there, but got busted by Mama.  We have found quite a few old jars with something very dark and mysterious in them.  Could it be Roy’s moonshine?

After the family moved to the new brick house in 1962, the yellow house gave a start to life for many of the family’s newlyweds.  I don’t know when it was last occupied, but I would guess in the early 2000’s.  We wanted to preserve some of the history from this house, so in later pictures of our Master Bath, you will see boards on the walls that came from this house.

Once you pass what we have fenced into a horse pasture, you will see a 400 foot chicken house, fields of hay, and beautiful woods.  Soon after we moved in, I found someone to come cut and bale the hay for us.  He cut 71 huge bales of hay.  17 of those were paid to one of the men who grew up in this house, after he moved 54 of those bales into the chicken house for storage.  We didn’t own a tractor at this point, so couldn’t move them ourselves.

As soon as we signed the papers, we went full speed ahead.  Some of the first things we needed to do was to unbury the home from all the plant growth enveloping it.  It was like the villages that have been overtaken by the jungle. We also hired a guy to come bush hog the tall grass around the house and in the pasture.  He used his tractor to dig holes for our fence posts.  Then we had to cut back growth where we wanted to put the fence for the horses.  Once that was accomplished, we started putting up the fence.  We had hired guys from Jericho House to help us move, so we hired some of them to come help us put up fence.  They were really neat guys, all on their own journeys to recovery.  Also, I must introduce Whitney Keen.  She worked so hard with us, from day 1 until the end of the journey.  We could not have done this  without her physical labor! And of course, our daughters, Amanda and Bethany, also helped whenever they were not working at their jobs.

While all of this work was going on outside, we were also removing things from the inside.  All of the old duct work and furnace and pipes were removed from the crawl space.  The 2 rooms in the basement were painted with vapor lock paint.  Whitney and I put plastic sheeting all through the crawl space to block moisture.  We had to remove incredibly thick mortar along with the ugly pink tiles in the bathroom, and the pink toilet, and the pink cast iron tub.  Amanda was a huge help in this extremely labor intensive job!  One of my early jobs was vacuuming every inch of the place. I vacuumed the walls, floors, everywhere I could.  You will see from pictures that there were some small add ons to the back of the house. They were awful!  Rodents or lizards had been living in those areas for years, and the evidence of their existence had to be cleaned up.  Yuck!

Also on the property is a little cinder block building that was used to store eggs from the Chicken House.  It is a sturdy, well built little two room building.  Whitney cleaned that all out, then we painted it with the vapor lock paint.  It became a place to store tools and other items.  We call it the Egg House.  One of Whitney’s jobs was cleaning out the overgrowth behind and beside the Egg House.  We discovered that there was a whole room on the backside that we didn’t even know was there!  It will be a great place to store the tractor when we get it cleaned out.

The third day after we signed the contract, we moved our new (used) camper to the back of the house and officially began living on the property, in the camper.  We would spend the next five to six months living in our little mini home and using a porta potty that was set up in front of the house! This entailed waiting at the corner of the house for cars to pass so that I could run to the potty in my pajamas!