This Old House: 2025

Cleaning up 2020!

Ross Construction installed a railing where there used to be a closet and wall.

Besides having a new kitchen, this has to be one of my favorite things. The spice drawer! 💣

It's a favorite!!

Building the hearth has started.

Ross Construction, once again, helped us with this.

The red barn wood was actually taken from our own barn. Have a piece of history right in our dining room. The mantel came from a tree just a few miles north of us on Robert Ross' land, and they've had it drying for years and was waiting for the right project to use it on. I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

This wraps up 2020! Besides some trim work that I don't have pictures of getting done, I believe the house remodel is pretty much complete. We do want to do the back entry and the rest of the basement at some point. However, this home has changed substantially since the day we moved in. We made it ours, and we survived!

October 2020

Fireplace base.

I think Jay has become an expert at refinishing wood floors. This is the last one in this house to do!

As you can also see in the picture, the fireplace has been installed.

I just love how these maple floors have always looked. Just beautiful! I'll never have carpet again.

💗

On top of the house remodel, we were also prepping the building site for the new shop. Not sure if I put that in the blog, but the old shed fell down from the snow load. Therefore, rebuilding on our north side of the property. So the pictures below are just getting started on that as well!

Exterior

This house is the blank canvas right now. By the end of the post, it will not look the same!

Roof stripped, and new roof installed by the wonderful work of Nisley Construction.

That's going bye-bye soon.

This little section was my "trial" portion. If I liked how the blue worked here, we'd keep it and do the rest in that color. I am very happy with that color.

Old siding removed. Getting ready for the new look!

Yes, it was a mess!

Southside porch coming down!

Prepping the porch area.

Had to throw this beautiful Rib Falls sunrise in here. I'm typing this as we're getting the biggest snowstorm of the season. When I checked two hours ago, we already had 9" of snow that has fallen.

Yes, NINE!!

We had a great summer to do this project. Being that it was 2020 and everybody was still being isolated for the most part, it was easy to stay focused.

Although, I didn't want to take this tree out, I decided I didn't want it overhanging my new beautiful porch. Therefore, it had to go!

Robert Ross Construction setting the sonotubes for the porch columns.

The siding is coming along!

It's starting to take shape here.

Carter and Parker setting the rebar. These kids helped out a ton. So much experience they gained. At this point Carter was 14 years old, and Parker was 15. Not many "kids" that age doing jobs like this. Very proud of their hard work!

Pouring of the concrete.

All hands on deck! Work fast!

We decided to do a colored and stamped porch. It's a beautiful look. However, I do find it hard to keep clean. After a rain, the worms tend to end up on the porch and harden, and it does seem to look dirty a lot. We'll have to look into options someday. For now, I'm just happy I have such a beautiful finish. Thanks to Robert Ross Construction.

Finished and dried.

Time for Nisley Construction to build the porches. No haters, but I didn't want a wrap around porch, even though we have concrete stamped on both east and south sides. I know Jay wanted a wrap-around, but I wanted something different. Imagine that! I didn't know exactly how it was going to work, but I wanted it separated. I explained that I wanted two separate roofs, but didn't want the south side to cover the whole side. I wanted the southeast corner exposed. We had some smart men working on this project and together they were able to come up with a winner for me.