In The Beginning.........

Once upon a time, in a far off land a prince met a princess.
(Ok, it’s our story, we can tell it like we want to.)
In reality, boy meets girl in college,
they date a brief period of time,
they marry, have three children
and live happily ever after – with lots of details in between!

We met 34 years ago at college in Kankakee, IL.
We married in 1978 in Mundelein, IL.
We had three children between 1978 and 1982 – we work quickly, as you will see!

We first lived in Lake Villa, IL. Then it was Hastings, Michigan. Then Ft. Riley, Kansas and Wiesbaden, Germany for a short stint in the military. Then back to Michigan where we finally settled down and raised our three children. It was then that we began to realize we had a common love, or maybe I should say passion, for building. We love to build things, take things apart and make them better, tear things apart and start all over….if it involves creating, we love it.

We began to build things and remodel what we could in the small rental house we lived in, in Grand Rapids. When I say small, I really do mean small. It had three bedrooms, but by small I mean a bed and dresser fit with just enough room to walk between them. The kitchen and dining area were adjoining. One year the ceiling in the dining room began falling down on us and had to be replaced. I wish I had pictures of that project! What a fiasco as we pulled down the old ceiling with all its horrid contents (which included squirrels nests) then as we tried to hold up the heavy sheets of drywall and screw them in place!

The one bedroom downstairs started out being shared by the two oldest (girls). Dan decided to build a very high bed (like the top of a bunk bed without a bottom bunk) so they could put their dresser underneath the bed. That worked until one of them fell out one night sleeping. (There’s a rude awakening, huh?!)

We eventually had to fix the one and only bathroom. Bathrooms are gross to work in, I don’t care what you say. This was no exception. (Dan did most of the work in there!)

I couldn’t change a lot there so I wallpapered. Where I couldn’t wallpaper, I painted. I didn’t keep track of how many coats of each I put up at that house. I honed my skills at it though!

We lived in that house 8 years. It had a large back yard and we used it to the fullest. We had a garden some years. A couple years we had a pool. We built swing sets and play houses.

We then bought our first home. We found an empty house of 2,400 sq. ft. We thought that was huge! We bought it on a land contract and moved in thinking it was the find of a lifetime. It provided us with more projects than we could have imagined. We had empty rooms for a few years before we began filling them up.

This is where I learned what remodeling is all about. When we started a project, I expected it to be finished in a very short period of time so I could enjoy it. But there is always a glitch: it takes more supplies than you had anticipated, you run into problems you didn’t expect, you get sidetracked with life issues, something always comes up to make it take at least twice as long as you thought it would take! (I now double whatever time Dan says it will take on any project!)

We had a brick fireplace in the family room that drove Dan nuts! He is a mason by trade and he would sit in front of it and describe everything wrong with how it had been constructed. So, one day, we decided it would be stone instead of brick. We went and got the stone, cleared the room, laid out the stone on the floor, and he prepped the fireplace and went to work. The comments then changed to how awesome the fireplace looked – it did turn out great. He did a good job on it.



The same family room also had a large window that looked out into the backyard. We kept talking about how nice it would be to have a slider there with a deck. So, one fine spring day, we got the materials and went to work. We spent many evenings on that deck. One night we all met out there (with a few guests even) and watched the Northern Lights!





The front of the house was ordinary. We thought we’d make it look like a mason lived there! We tore out the front walk and steps and put in what a mason calls "saddles" with lights in them and put pavers down the front walk.





Then there was the playhouse. We had two granddaughters born while we lived at this house. As a new grandpa, Dan wanted to build something for the little girls to play in, so, a playhouse was planned. On this, he had no blueprints, the idea was all in his head. We all tried to help however we could, be it nailing boards down, putting up siding and roofing or painting. We drywalled the whole thing, put windows in, and dressed it up quite nicely. The girls still talk about that playhouse to this day! Here are a few pictures that tell the story.




Our favorite project at this house was our master bedroom. We made it out of two bedrooms. We took the wall out between two small rooms and made it one large one. Then we made built-in shelving at one end for an entertainment center. It turned out really nice and we enjoyed many hours in there – even the grandkids liked coming in and spending time with us there!




Several tragic things happened in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. We lost that house. We spent a few months in a small rental that we couldn’t muster up enough courage to change. We were reeling pretty badly from losing the house we had spent 13 years in. As soon as we found a nicer place, we moved. This was a duplex that had just been built. We got to be the first ones to use the bathrooms (bathrooms are an issue for me, can you tell?!)

This duplex was in a quiet little neighborhood, on a short street that T’d into a cemetery on one side and a school on the other. We spent 4 years at that house. It was brand new, so there were no changes or improvements that needed to be made. We made up for it by practicing other hobbies (mine was stamping…I think I made several hundred cards while there!)

During this time Dan was unemployed and could not find work no matter what he tried. Well, not quite true. He worked for several months in Chicago and commuted. Then, work at that company got slow. He found a company in Grand Rapids that hired him to do masonry estimating but after several months, that company also felt the economic crunch. (see a pattern here? Michigan’s economy, ugh!)

We decided we needed to reduce our monthly outgo. Since the rent is the biggest amount, we started looking to see if we could find a more reasonable place to live. We checked Craigslist.com and found a couple guys looking for a person to exchange rent for remodeling work. Well, isn’t that convenient?! We needed a project, lower monthly outgo and they needed us, what a perfect fit.

We began the project in May of 2009 with an agreement to have the work done in 6 months. When we first got to the house, we had to haul out the garbage before we could even begin working. A huge trailer was used to haul it to the dump. Then we pulled out nasty carpet from several rooms, thoroughly cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. Once the cabinets were clean, we decided they were salvageable. I did some research to find out how to distress cabinets. I thought black would cover up the case of uglies it had and make it more appealing. Once I got the black paint on the cabinets, they looked so decent I decided to forego the distressing (that will happen over time!) Dan built a unit around the refrigerator to match the existing cabinets, adding more storage space. ***

Every window in the place was devoid of trim. So Dan leveled and trimmed all the windows in the place. He also put up crown moldings and trim in the living room, bathroom and dining room.

We painted almost every room in the house.

The stairway to the bedrooms upstairs was so rickety you had to watch every step (and skip a few if you didn’t want to wobble!). Dan replaced all of them with really nice new oak planks, then built a rail with spindles. ***

The upstairs bathroom was just a bare room. The drywall had been hung, but he had to do everything else. He had that up and running in a week. ***

Now that this project is finished, we have decided to tackle another house. This time for ourselves. We found one in Ionia, Michigan that has 3 bedrooms, two baths, formal living room, family room, and kitchen and dining room. Nine rooms total, plus a basement. It is in very poor condition. The little family room is completely covered in barn siding. Rope is hung as a trim at the ceiling. The dining room has black and white checkered “stick down” tiles. The carpet in the formal living room smells so bad you can hardly breathe while in there. Two windows have been broken, so there are huge pieces of plywood hung to secure the home. (I feel so much better just seeing them hanging there!) The bedrooms upstairs have old shag carpet: one room has baby blue the other has red shag carpet. The third bedroom has brown carpet on the main wall!!

That’s the bad, here’s the good: it is solid. It has 2x12 floor joists, it has a gabled third floor that is completely unfinished (can’t wait to see that finished for the grandkids play area), the woodwork in the entry is in fantastic shape. It has never been painted and isn’t gouged or nicked up. The layout is good for an older home. The roof is newer, it has a furnace and hot water heater. (Do you know how many homes that have been foreclosed on have had the furnace and hot water heater removed?)

We’ll be able to do some fun stuff and make it beee-u-teeee-full! Keep checking in, we’ll keep you posted every step of the way, from the day of close, getting the keys, to taking out the branches that scratch your car as you drive up the small driveway! That’s the first job according to Dan! Then we’ll strip everything in sight and begin the work of making something great out of it.

We're off to pack a few more boxes...lots of that to do yet!