Sycamore Street Cottage: Before and After cont...

As promised I am back with some interior photos of Sycamore Street Cottage. If you missed the exterior photos or would like to be bored by the back story check it out here. These photos were all taken as the moving van was being loaded so the rooms are empty. If empty rooms give you the willies, you may want to avert your eyes and sing a happy song until the pain subsides. For the rest of you, the before photos are horrible (I never actually planned on sharing them with anyone, they were merely a reference to motivate us - as in "look how far we've come") and the afters aren't much better (I would take better ones, but the new owners might think that a tad strange). The colors are reading all wrong and the lighting is screwy, but it will at least give you an idea of how we spent three years of our lives!

Before

After: New molding all around: crown, base, casing around doors, windows. There were hardwoods under that lovely blue carpet that no one, including us, thought were salvageable. They were! We patched them and stained them a mixture of dark walnut and mahogany. 

Before: This is the best pic I could find of the stairwell wall. To the right of this photo is a solid wall that backs the stairs to the basement.

After: We removed the wall and put in a newel post and railing. This really opened up the living room and made it feel larger, as well as add needed light for the basement. We added the arch to hide a structural beam which matches the arch to the dining room and the arch from the dining room to the kitchen. 

This newel post we found at a salvage yard. It was pulled out of a 90 year old victorian mansion in The Avenues (an historic district in Salt Lake City).  I can't find the before photo of it, but it was a mess. We stripped off all the layers of old paint, cut it down to the right size and gave it a new life.  The egg and dart molding is magnificent! Why they tore this out, I'll never know, but the old adage holds true: One woman's trash is another woman's newel post.

Before: This photo shows the old kitchen and the sunroom behind it.

After: We took down the wall between the old kitchen and sunroom, added another structural beam, and expanded the kitchen to make one larger open space. We reworked the window placement and added new windows. Matching hardwoods extend to the new kitchen.

Before: Looking from sunroom into old kitchen

After: We added a peninsula for bar seating. The wall behind the peninsula was built specifically to house my grandmother's hutch. Mr. even installed a spot light to highlight it!

Another view. To the right of this photo is a door with a window leading out to the back porch. I chose this door to let in more of this glorious light. Because this kitchen has windows on three sides, it gets bathed in northern light all day. 

We chose a counter-depth, french-door, bottom freezer refrigerator so that when open it wouldn't inhibit traffic flow. A side panel and top cabinet make it look built-in and much more expensive than it actually was. Next time I would bring the cabinet closer down to the fridge to avoid that black hole space. Live and learn. 

I actually bought that light for our first home and couldn't part with it so I took it with me to house no. 2. It looked so at home in this house that it finally found it's permanent residence. Glass-front cabinets on either side of the sink add depth to the space and bounce the light around even more. One of our next projects was to add a white subway tile backsplash but we moved before that was done. I think it would have really finished off the space. 

Before: This was looking from the old kitchen into an office/bedroom.  On the other side of that closet is the living room. 

After: We took down two walls and the closet and we gained a dining room. The arch on the other side of the room led into the old kitchen and the arch closest to the camera was were the closet used to be. We removed all the walls and added arches to open up the flow of the small house. By using the same paint color(which in person is not at all this yellow) and the same flooring throughout the first floor, the small space appears larger and has a sense of continuity. 

Before: Bathroom. Scary. 

Before: Another view of same bathroom. Scary. 

After: We ended up moving the sink wall about 20 inches into the old kitchen to gain more space in the small bathroom. No idea whatsoever why I painted this room red. But there it is. We all make design mistakes.

Floor tile: Wavy edge travertine. That is not the technical term, just what i call it. It has a softer, more cottage-like appearance than the straight edge travertine. 

You may recognize this jetted-tub from our current house's bathroom renovation. We liked it so much that we have now used the very same one three times. It is super deep and looks huge but has the same length and width of a standard tub so it can be retrofitted to work in any almost any tub space. 

We put the ORB faucets in long before they were a common sight at all the big box stores. We had to special order them from a plumbing specialty store and I paid out the nose for them. I tend to do this a lot. I pay more for the new 'it' material because it isn't popular enough yet to hit the mainstream and I have to track it down at some obscure factory where they don't feel bad about stealing my inheritance. Would I do it again? No. Take a tour through any historic home and you will see chrome fixtures in the bath (along with white subway tile and white marble). The chrome still looks classic, never dated. I still like the look of ORB, but I think it is a better bet to spend my money on classic materials that I won't tire of. 

Check back tomorrow for the last installment of interior photos from Sycamore Street Cottage.