There are all kinds of things wrong with our new home, but we take them all on gladly.
It needs a ton of work on the inside to make it feel like a real home for us, but when you start with a shell like this, how can you go wrong?
We were able to do a final walk-through over the weekend and got to see everything again and see if it was all just as we’d remembered it. I had a great time getting some quick photos around the property in the peak of Summer and (bonus!) the rooms all seemed much bigger and brighter than what we remembered.
We are thrilled. Can’t wait.
Let me show you around!
This is the Summer view from right out the front door. That’s a real honest-to-goodness wheat field in all it’s golden glory.
There’s my (already) beloved barn out across the creek.
And a corn field! All I really wanted was to have a house with a cornfield behind it. Of course next year it will be soy because of crop rotation and all that, but still… let me have this.
Chris and I were able to ditch the real estate agent for a few minutes and we took a walk around the property and along the corn field. He showed me how to de-tassel the corn like he used to do when he worked in the fields growing up. Is it completely strange that I found that kinda romantic?
This is looking across the street down at the end of the property; what will be our orchard area. Another cool barn!
Inside I took a few quick shots of some things that caught my eye. They didn’t turn out so great. The real estate agent was wondering why I was taking so many pictures with just a week to go until move-in day, I think.
The dining room archways… and that horrifying ceiling.
The banister.
The upstairs hallway.
Some great trim and some not-so-great trim.
Looking into the kitchen. Lots of room for a GIANT table!
And this was our fun discovery of the day:
Chris noticed the floorboards under the oldest part of the house while we were in the basement.
They look pretty interesting from here. I wonder how they’ll look from the top once we get all that peel and stick tile off of every. single. floor. in the house.
So you can see there are a lot of horrible, ugly, back-breaking problems that we’ll have to deal with all over this house, but to tell you the truth, I’m feeling pretty grateful for every one of them.
Almost there!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.