Restoration

After Pat’s Mom Louise Irwin passed in early 2023, we decided to take a leap of faith and on a wing and a prayer we acquired this old family home (rather than selling and letting it leave the family).

We had no idea where to begin and had never done any remodeling before. But we had lots of hope and being super naive helped too. We showed up at the Historic Hawkins House October 2nd 2023 exhausted from our 18 hour flight from Alaska and began cleaning the house out, one thing at a time.

It had not been lived in for over a year and was beginning to show signs of disrepair. First thing was a new roof and pressure washing the outside. Then it took over 45 days of sorting and yard sales and trips to the dump to clean out 60+ years of stuff. We kept the things we needed. One of the best treasures (besides other things) were the amazing handmade quilts we discovered which are now are on every bed.❤️

Then we started to pull up rugs , TWO layers of rugs glued to the bedrooms and backrooms that were over 50 -60 years old. We felt the restoration Gods smile upon us as we revealed beautiful hardwood floors underneath. In fact we cried with joy. Then we began to pull down some walls and ceilings discovering original 100 yr old wood in 2 bedrooms. (also found old spaces in the walls where extra windows used to be, we filled them in with pine, so there's new and old wood in the bedrooms)

This old place is a little crooked and creaky but its solid and whoever built it used oak framing! We used some of the old original boards for places like trim around a window or trim in the bathroom . we reused the walls in the old bedroom closet to put on the ceiling in the main bathroom. We repurposed doors and old wood wherever we could.

Then we had to move the existing bathroom with corroding pipes to a new room that had a basement under it to add new pipes. While we were at it we added a new full bathroom to the big closet off the master bedroom. We could not have done all this without some local contractors that needed work and we needed them (we think Pat’s Mom may have sent them) and they did the major work and then we did the finishing.

Kathy sanded and stained and finished all the woods floors in the bathrooms, bedrooms and backrooms herself, they are not perfect but they are awesome.

The old ceilings were driving Kathy nuts so we took another leap of faith and called our guys for one last push to replace all the old white cardboard ceiling tiles with wood, getting the idea from Shenanigans’ beadboard ceilings. 💡

We are using the leftover beadboard to put on the walls of the laundry room as we write this. It feels like a new house and we think the house is smiling again! We are exhausted but happy. Below are some before and after pictures and a link to the google photos if you want to see more of each project.