After Pictures: The Main House

After lots of late weekend nights, we finally finished the inside of the main house! We had tenants moving in July 1st, so we were on a deadline! We worked until 1 am on Sunday, June 30th. Nothing like a little pressure! I'll shut up now and just show you pics. :)

And just for fun, here's a silly video of the things that kept Greyson entertained while we worked:



Also, I can't take credit for these pics; the tenants took them on their first day of moving. :)

The Biggest Project So Far

When we bought Brookwood, we expected to have to do a lot of work. Our thoughts going into it went like this: Well, the previous owners let it go to foreclosure, so we'll have to do about 3 years worth of property maintenance to get it up to par. In some ways we were right, but mostly it was a gross understatement. For instance, we hauled out over 100 yards of garbarge. 100. Yards. The barns have 39 stalls. I would guess that about 25 of them were full of junk. Not to mention an entire loft in the hay barn. Here's some of our pile:

But even that wasn't our biggest project. Our most extensive and expensive project was the main house. We underestimated it because the previous owners were still living there when we first looked at the property. We figured that if they still lived there....then it was livable. Nope. Between an unusable HVAC system due to a dead racoon on the main duct under the house, and a carpet where 8 indoor dogs had soaked through the carpet with their urine, the house SMELLED BAD. Here's some before pics:

The Lovely Emerald Green Carpet

There wasn't really anything wrong with the kitchen. Though the light blue paint didn't match the green that was EVERYWHERE else in the house.

A Cute Pic of Greyson for No Reason

The Laundry Room

Before and After shots of the door between the main house and the attached MIL. We wanted the living spaces to be seperate, so we took out the door.

Once we realized how bad the carpet was, we started tearing it up.

Yep, those were pet stains all the way down into the subfloor. That meant we needed to coat it with Kilz. 3 coats of it!

Our work truck and trailer

Tre getting ready to go fetch the dead raccoon under the house.

Now it was time to get some new flooring in and do some painting. We had new carpet installed in some of the house, but the pergo we did ourselves.

And a thank you to our friends that helped! (I didn't always have the camera out, so sorry to those not pictured! We still appreciate you!)

Coming up next: After pictures of the house!

Before and After - Barn Apartment

The Barn Apartment is getting the first "Before and After" treatment because it's the first project that we finished. It's a small studio apartment located right off of the barn aisle in the B barn (No, I don't have a stutter. It's actually called the B barn). I'm pretty sure it's every horse girls' (Or guy; I can only go on my own experiences here) dream to open your front door and have your horse right across the aisle! Non-horse people: Not so much. Non-horse people don't understand that we actually LIKE the smell of horses! Anyway, I'm getting off topic. Here are some before pics:

Here is the living room/bedroom area. Left to us full of junk. To date, we've hauled over 100 yards of junk/garbage off the property. There's a half-wall type thing in the middle of the room to give privacy to what would be the bedroom area. The problems with that were: 1. It would only fit a twin size bed and we weren't planning on moving in a 7 year old. 2. There was no window on that side, so the "bedroom" was more like a dark, depressing cave.

Here's the living room in process:

And here is the after pic. We left the frame of the wall up for now. We also added a window to that side of the room to make it less cave-y.

Next up is the kitchen area. Here, again, is some junk:

We didn't change much to the kitchen other than painting, cleaning it up and getting a new oven. But here's the after:

The biggest project in the barn apartment was the bathroom. You could step right through the floor due to a prior leak that led to rotting. Most of the floor needed replacing. Here's the bathroom in process:

And now the after. New floor, updated vanity, and a fixed shower.

And lastly, a new bathroom door. It even fits with the barn theme!

After all this, it looks amazing! Our tenant moved in at the beginning of June and she loves it! I can take almost NO credit for any of it though. The only thing I did in the entire apartment was to vacuum and steam clean the carpet. All of the credit goes to Kerry and Phillip who worked their butts off! Also to our only outsourced labor, Kerry's brother-in-law Hans, who added the window.

More to come! We're still spending almost every weekend there trying to get it cleaned up. I'm exhausted just typing about it.