These aren't totally pure "before" pictures because Steve already has done some work on the house.

This was our first impression of the house. See the cross in the metal burn can? (people use these for burnable garbage in rural NY state where you have to bring the garbage to the dump and pay by the bag.) That marked their dog's grave when we first pulled up to the house. I imagine the dog is still buried there in the right angle between the sheds. I hope he's buried deep or Wes will dig him right up. We have since found dog shit not only in the basement, but quite a bit in a crawl space that is accessed from a bedroom closet. It's a horrible place to keep a dog.

The first time we looked at the house, we never saw the front, which is actually quite charming.

Here's the back door of the house, which is the main door. It's not situated at all for front door use. I'd like to change that somehow, because there is this really nice room just to the right of the front door that I am imagining as a web design office/drum lessons room, and I'd rather have clients/students use the front door. All of that stuff around the door is kitchen cabinets that Steve already ripped out.

Here's a panorama of the kitchen. My new camera has this featre for building panoramic shots, it turned out allright I think. The thing on the left is Tyson dancing. The thing on the right is the inside of the freezer. See how nice and clean it is? I have a wonderful husband. It was horrifying before he cleaned it. Behind the freezer is the back door and mudroom and a wall with a tall window and a radiator. The window that you see in this picture probably used to be long like the other one, but was shortened for modern kitchen appliances: the electric stove was here. It just looks out onto the mudroom now anyway, which was most certainly an addition and not part of the original house design. Steve's mom's kitchen has a pair of long windows like this that she was unwilling to give up and it made re-designing her kitchen very difficult. The houses are probably about the same age - about 100 years. There are two doorways behind Tyson. One goes into a sort of mystery room with no apparent purpose (this doorway was previously blocked by a thin piece of wood and the fridge). The other doorway goes to what has been called the dining room, but it is also the room that has the front door, so I have trouble calling it that. There is a doorway between the mystery room and the dining room. We want to tear down some configuration of these walls - all of them or pieces of them to open up the space on the first floor. It used to be that kitchens were messy, noisy places, and you wanted them separated from the rest of the living space. Modernizing means undoing that. We'd also like to fit a half bath in here somewhere, but that's not at all hashed out yet.

All of the pictures are a little yellow, I didn't use the flash. There is a way to adjust the white balance on the camera, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Some kitchen details. Layers of flooring. The ceiling is plywood with strips of wood to make it look like acoustical tile (why on earth would you want that?) and stickers in the center of each square. This is one of two outside walls after a piece of thin cardbord-ish plywood was pulled off of it. It's sort of interesting to speculate what went on here.

Here are the stairs and again. Steve ripped off carpeting from them and is going to paint them because the paint on them is likely to be lead. Why do you think there is that unpainted stripe down the middle? Steve thinks there was a strip of carpet there and someone painted around it. Very odd. We want to retread them in the future, but it's not high on our priority list. It bothered us at first that the stairs are all enclosed like this, and we talked a bit about opening them up somehow, but we're not minding them as much now. They just need a railing. The upstairs is not all that interesting - so I just have one picture of our bedroom. It's a nice room. The previous owners had redone the whole upstairs when they bought the house five years ago, so Steve has just had to rip out the dog pee soaked carpeting and he put down plywood. We'll put wood flooring down over the plywood as we can afford it. He's priming the whole upstairs and we decided we'll paint when the weather is warmer and we can have the windows open. Aidan knew he wanted a light blue room, so his room got a coat of paint. Upstairs is two bedrooms, a bathroom and a short, wide hallway.

I've spent way too much time at the computer this morning so qhickly three more pics. A panorama of the front room aka "dining room". You can see the doorway to the mystery room on the right. See all of the stuff around the top of the wall? Those are all individual little stickers. The house is full of them - it's like a little kid lived there.

Here's a shot of the mudroom that makes it look very charming and farmy. It's not really all that charming. It's slated for domolition and reconstruction. That paint might be lead, we'll have to test it.

Here's the view out the backdoor. There's the detatched garage (I hate it when garages are attatched) and a nice tree. Oh and here are the garage doors. They need some help, but I love them. For an old outbuilding, the garage is in remarkably good shape. It looks plumb and square and it has electricity which will come in handy because we discovered this past week that we are going to have to keep the engine on Steve's truck warm in some way in the winter. We couldn't start it for three days because of the cold.