First look

When we bought our house, it was in quite a state of disrepair. It has eight (yes, eight) doors to the outside, and only two of them locked properly. The carpets stank, most of the first floor windowpanes were broken, and one of the actual wooden window muntins had been smashed. On the second floor there was a giant hole in the wall and a bird was nesting in between the flapping vinyl siding and the better wooden siding. What follows is our first set of house photos. Lots of photos, don't say I didn't warn you.

The back of our house, with large hole and ugly foam exposed to the sun. Also of note: The middle window on the ground floor was completely walled up on the inside.

One attempt to capture the odd layout of the place, but failing. You can see that there are brick paths everywhere in addition to the walls, which I fell in love with.

The front of the house, which people see and say "Oh, it's a cute little house." This door was one of the ones that was locked, by means of a chain through the place where a proper lock should be and padlock and screws.

Electrical meter and main service. Not looking good. Windows on this side also bad,  all six of the lower panes of the right window needed replacing.

A little better view of the walled-up window and the ugly hole and foam. Also the upstairs shower drain is just kind of screwed to the outside of the house.

We've taken to calling this the guest cottage; we can only assume that's what it was. The two rightmost pillars needed repair, and all the fascia boards were rotten. The back outside wall of this also needed almost complete replacement.

It's dirty too.

It doesn't look that bad. You can see the window that had its wood actually smashed.

Turn just a weeee bit to your left, and yeah, it does look that bad.

This was once an outside wall, and that was once actually a window. We found the sash weights inside the frame. The kitchen is on the other side.

This is the kitchen. Yeah.

Beautiful bay window. Has a rotten sill, can't see it from here. Stupid fake closet. Hate.

Awkward bathroom.

The smallest room in the house at 12x12.

Entrance into the stairwell. Interesting how the baseboard ends.

The big attic. We have a small one as well.

From the other side.

A boarded-up window in the small attic.

The other side. I like these closets, they're cute and make sense and are not fake.

Another boarded up window and a patch of linoleum that was, thankfully, just laid over the wood floor and not glued or anything nasty like that.

A half-bath. We later discovered a message written in pencil on the door "Do not use this bathroom." Hm.

The stairs back down to the dining room.

View from the small attic window. It's a handy way to get on the back set of roofs.

The inside of the guest cottage. I like the wood paneling.

Don't care for the bizarre wall art. Someone broke in and stole that heater before we closed.

Clearly some larger windows have been replaced by these. They're on each side of the fireplace, and they don't match each other. This irks me. I'd like to replace them with matching larger ones some day.

This one just reeks of potential to me. This window still hasn't been repaired, we boarded it over and have been neglecting it in favor of house-wide systems.

You can kind of see the shape the window is in from the outside. It's been mostly restored now.

There was a hole. We don't know why. We also didn't know why the holey wall was there, forcing people to go into the small room to get to the stairs, or from the stairs to the kitchen.

Lots of ivy. Broken windows.

Oh, dang, a LOT of broken windows.

Windows from the inside. The black thing on the right is a screen that was actually left by the metal-scroungers, probably because it looks attached.

Another fake closet, blocking off a glass block wall. Why? Who knows. We don't.

The stairs going up to the small attic, and the left side of the dining room fireplace.

View from the big attic down the stairs.

My boys peeking out of the small attic window.