Big news everyone! We bought a house in Portland! She's a 2-bed, 1-bath semi-fixer-upper from 1949 and we have lots of big plans for her. We get the keys tonight and are taking a long weekend to start putting our spin on the place right away! I can't wait to share our progress, but for now all I have to share is the real estate listing photos. Let's take a tour, shall we?
Here's the front of the house. We hate the color scheme and plan to paint it immediately (cross your fingers the Portland rain holds off just long enough for us!). It actually doesn't even look as bad in these photos as it does in real life--up close, it's a clear DIY paint job that should've been two coats but was only one. Plus....yellow and brown? Really?
The tree/bush to the right of the door is blocking a window...definitely need to bring it down to size! We were also a bit worried about the state of the lawn initially, but the pics were taken during a very dry spell (they happen in Portland, I swear!) and the lawn has since bounced back. So the front needs some zhushing but is overall in pretty good shape.
We're planning to paint the house a
slate-y teal blue with white trim, white garage door, and hopefully keep the wood door (it needs stripping and re-staining).
Here's the front den, where you can see the window I said was covered up by the tree. Despite that, the room gets a lot of good light. We plan to make this the movie/library room with a cozy vibe.
In this shot, you can see the white door to the laundry room and garage.
This is the view with your back to the front door. To the right are the guest bedroom (bright doorway you see here), master bedroom (behind the bookshelves), and bathroom (to the left of the guest room).
See? Such happy light. And the floors are original!
Here's the small guest bedroom. Its the brightest room in the house since it's south and east facing.
Small closet but it will work as a spare bedroom.
And here's the master bedroom. Orange walls and boob light will be amongst the first things to go!
The closet is much smaller than our current shared closet, but the room itself is much bigger so we plan to get a dresser. We may install a sliding barn door or pocket door for the closet (the door on the right) to save more space.
Here's the only bathroom. It's small, and the tub is angled so it takes up more space than it needs to. We plan to gut this ASAP to make it more functional and will replace that window and its painted-on tropical scenery at that time ;) Until we have the funds for the reno, we'll be making some smaller changes like replacing that huge mirror with a smaller one plus shelves for storage since the sink doesn't provide any!
From the den, you next walk past the small kitchen. It's clean and functional, but long-term we would love to gut it and expand it into the sunroom (to the left in the photo). For now, we're planning on a makeover including ripping off the wood backsplash (???), tearing down the spice rack over the dishwasher, and adding a fresh coat of paint. We'll also replace the light and pendant and put new knobs/pulls on the cabinets.
With your back to the kitchen, there's a wall with the door to this laundry room. The door you see in this photo leads outside, and there's another door to the left (out of photo frame) to the garage.
Continuing on past the kitchen, you pass a large closet (seen in the left corner of the photo above) to the large living room. This room also gets really beautiful light!
Through the sliding doors is a sunroom that was added on to the house. That stove works and apparently heats the house really efficiently in the winter. We plan to use it over this winter and then decide whether to keep it or rip it out.
For some reason, when the sunroom was added to the house, they left the former exterior sliding glass doors and the frame (without window panes) to the former exterior window. We're hoping we can open this whole wall up eventually so the renovated kitchen, sunroom (which would then be used as a dining space), and living room form one large room. ("We're gonna rip down the wall between the kitchen and living room so we get a niiiiiice open concept..." -Southpark)
These floors were added at the same time as the sunroom. From this pic, it drives me nuts how they installed the flooring so uniformly rather than staggering it! Once furniture is in I'm sure it will be fine, at least until we replace the flooring when we renovate the kitchen years from now.
And here's the sunroom! In addition to being south and east-facing, they installed skylights, so this room is always flooded with light. The door to the right goes to the backyard. I want to add a cozy chair under that far window--wouldn't it be so nice to drink your coffee there on a Saturday morning??
So many weird cutout windows in this room! The one straight forward in this shot looks through to the kitchen, and the one to the right of that (to the left of the glass sliders) is the exterior window frame I mentioned before. The sunroom is bigger than it looks from the photos--we plan to put a dining table in under the kitchen window space.
Here's the sunroom from the outside. In that L shape we plan to put in a deck. Barbecue baby!
The fully fenced yard was a major selling feature for us. Our dog will love all the extra room to play, and we imagine it to be a great space for whenever we decide to have kids.
The yard features several ginormous trees that are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. I love the shade they provide but will likely also live in perpetual fear of them toppling over on us!!
Another great feature of the property is that behind the back fence is an alleyway, so we don't actually have a rear neighbor. Long-term, we can imagine putting in a garage with a small studio apartment on the second floor of it for when we have visitors. Then we can convert our existing garage and laundry room into a master bedroom suite.
So them's the new digs! What do you think?
