The Miti House

The first home hubby and I bought together is tiny, and very dated.  It has two bedrooms, a lounge, hall, bathroom/laundry, toilet, and the smallest kitchen you've ever seen.  Outside is a bit desert-like, but has an abundance of fruit trees ranging from plums to quinces, and in addition I think we counted 15 almond trees.  At the time, we bought it with the vision that we would extend it and live there for a very long time.

As it turned out, we didn't much like the town.  We liked the only school close enough for the children to attend even less, and decided that with what it would cost to extend (tradies don't like coming out that far and if they do, they're expensive - we couldn't do it all by ourselves), we'd pretty much have to live there until retirement to recoup our money.  So that's about when we decided to pick up and move into 'town', a move which as it turns out has been great for us....but what to do with this house?

We thought about renting it out, but the calibre of tenants out there is often not the greatest, so with that in mind, we decided to update the interior and sell it.  To date, we've demolished the kitchen, including the wall between it and the hallway (which has opened up a LOT of space, and given it room for a dining table), ripped up all the floor coverings, had it restumped, repaired the walls (old house - lots of cracks), replaced the toilet and the oven (I think the oven had Jesus' signature somewhere underneath), and pulled out the old vanity.  The new one is sitting there ready to go in.  We've also pulled out the dated, falling-apart built-in robes from both bedrooms.

I'm excited about it today because after making a bigger mess for what seems like forever, today it actually looks like we did something out there!  Granted, it was only half the cutting in for painting the walls in the second bedroom, but the room is empty, it's getting painted, and we can actually SEE how much better it's going to look.

I will put progress reports here in the blog, but for now, check out these photos of what it looked like before:

The business end of the kitchen - I'm sure the oven belonged to Jesus at some point

Useless, horrid cupboards on the useless wall

More shots of the kitchen

We have replaced the tiles there

Icky....everything is brown.  Why did people like mission brown so much?!

Better shot of the squishy kitchen - see how our average-sized dining table took up all the available space!  And it's HOSPITAL GREEN....with more mission brown.

Front of the house shortly after we bought it

Bathroom/Laundry - we don't plan to do much in here, except paint, replace the floor coverings and the vanity.

Some of the work so far - removing that stupid, space-taking wall

Now you see wall....now you don't!

See the gorgeous original pine lining boards up there?  They covered them with CANITE.....canite, I tell you!  Who does that?!