When we first walked through the charred insides of this house it was a pretty intimidating sight. The fire started in the dining room, and so that is the room with most of the damage--the door molding was for the most part not salvageable, and the three windows were completely burnt out. Almost every pane of glass in the house was broken due to the intense heat of the fire, but much of the trim work was only superficially
affected. In one way the fire had actually been helpful in that it stripped layers of paint from most of the trim and solid wood interior doors without burning them. This is not to say we don't have A LOT of scraping to do to refinish the doors and trim. That arduous work is underway. More about that later. However, there has to be a moment when walking through a house that is in this condition that something clicks, and you are irreversibly charmed by it--or you run screaming. One of the things that charmed both Joe and I was the passageway between the dining room and the kitchen. A small butler's pantry: built-in upper and lower cabinets that we both envisioned as a bar almost immediately. A gem from a bygone era. Maybe you are not convinced or charmed by the photo of this burnt pantry, and okay, I had fantasized briefly that a real butler would come with it, but it is ours now for better or worse, so we have carefully extracted the cabinets and will be refinishing them very soon.
When we first walked through the charred insides of this house it was a pretty intimidating sight. The fire started in the dining room, and so that is the room with most of the damage--the door molding was for the most part not salvageable, and the three windows were completely burnt out. Almost every pane of glass in the house was broken due to the intense heat of the fire, but much of the trim work was only superficially 
affected. In one way the fire had actually been helpful in that it stripped layers of paint from most of the trim and solid wood interior doors without burning them. This is not to say we don't have A LOT of scraping to do to refinish the doors and trim. That arduous work is underway. More about that later. However, there has to be a moment when walking through a house that is in this condition that something clicks, and you are irreversibly charmed by it--or you run screaming. One of the things that charmed both Joe and I was the passageway between the dining room and the kitchen. A small butler's pantry: built-in upper and lower cabinets that we both envisioned as a bar almost immediately. A gem from a bygone era. Maybe you are not convinced or charmed by the photo of this burnt pantry, and okay, I had fantasized briefly that a real butler would come with it, but it is ours now for better or worse, so we have carefully extracted the cabinets and will be refinishing them very soon.
This blog is a diary of the renovation we are doing on a house built in 1920 that had a fire in it about 1 year ago. My husband and I are both artists. This project is a way for us to lower our expenses so we can continue our creative pursuits 
and have more money to travel. 
Friends of ours spotted this diamond in the rough on Oak Avenue and it was exactly the kind of fixer-upper we were looking for. After the sale of our house we were able to pay cash for this property and begin the monumental task of a complete renovation. We have a small construction loan and must stay within this budget to ensure a small mortgage payment when all is said and done. We are doing most of the work ourselves and are hiring sub contractors for plumbing, electric and Sheetrock. The people who owned the house were not occupying it at the time of the fire, but still had belongings to be moved out when the fire occurred. The photos on this post are images of the house as it looked when we first went inside and some are just after we removed the burnt belongings. I hope you will follow our progress!
