Pre-Renovation Tour: 1st Floor

Part one of a four-part pre-renovation tour of the house ....

Photo above courtesy of Curbed Detroit.

C'mon on in our front door.

Don't mind the dumpster and the dust.

We've had a crew in for the last week or so, getting rid of the, ahem, detritus left behind by the the previous tenants (both human and animal). Things we weren't sad to see go included dried raccoon poop, squirrel carcass, styrofoam take out container with what was once lunch still rotting inside, random bits of plastic tarp, torn lineoleum, falling down shelves, and molding cabinets. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's step inside ....

This isn't quite the front door. The door you are looking at is actually an interior door that leads from the front door and a tiled entry vestibule. The plan is to move this interior door to just behind you, making the entire length of this hallway (from the front door to where you are standing) a tiled entry area and to add a coat closet (on the left, nearest the front door) and a half bath (on the left, nearest to you) by stealing a little space from the living room on the other side of that left wall. 

We'll reuse some of those ribbon oak floor boards you see to patch up damaged areas elsewhere in the house.

Photo above courtesy of Curbed Detroit.

1st Floor Hallway

Step on into the house and you are standing in the first floor hallway (in the center of the house).

In this picture, you just came through that dark doorway on the far left. I'd offer to take your coat but those closets at the back aren't really "inside" the house; they are basically a rotting wood box clinging to the outside of the house. 

Here's the exterior picture of where those closets are. See those three tall boards jutting out from the 1st floor of house toward the tree? That's the outside perspective of the back of closet you are facing in the picture above.

As you can imagine, it's a little drafty and cold around that section. We plan to move the closet into the interior of the house  (as mentioned above) and take off the clinging closet box and wall it off with proper insulation.

OK, back inside the house, standing in the central hallway, take a sharp right from the front entry way into the green living room.

Living Room

The person who owned the house last (well, technically, lease-to-owned it) had begun some renovations, ran out of money, and just boarded up and walked away one day, leaving supplies and garbage behind.

We're not sure but we figure that this is where the neighborhood raccoons roasted their marshmallows. They got in, most likely, through one of the broken windows upstairs.

Spin around and face back out into the hallway. Me thinks that abandoned shovel is going to come in handy.

1st Floor Hallway

We're back in the central hallway, facing the opposite direction from those boxed out closets. The door off the left of the hall goes to the kitchen, but first let's take an immediate left into the dining room.

Dining Room

You are in the dining room, looking back across the hallway (where we were just standing), past the leaning shovel, and at the old radiator in the living room. The hallway to the right of the living room is the entry way, and that interior door to the front vestibule where we started.

The dining room actually extends behind you quite a ways and gives way, through another set of french doors, to a sun room. But because this is the darkest corner of the house and the windows are boarded up, I don't have good pics to show you here.

There a door on your left that leads into the pantry. But let's get there a different way. Put yourself back in the hallway (see staircase picture, above) and go through the door to the left of the staircase. Welcome to our teeny weeny kitchen, with the cabinets and sinks (pics below) just to the right.

Kitchen

There are no words that can really capture the configuration and condition of the kitchen and pantry area. You'd think that rabbits or prairie dogs designed the flow here.

The kitchen has very little free wall space (what with the windows on one side and three doors on two other walls, leading into three different areas). And, not that there are actual appliances anymore, but I can't imagine where they ever fit a refrigerator.

For a historical perspective on kitchens, check out this old post.

Pantry

Do a 180 in the kitchen and you'll see what I mean. That's the sink counter in the bottom right of the photo. The door on the back right leads to the back door vestibule, which leads to the back yard (or it would if there were stairs down to it anymore). The door on the left leads to a pantry which is halfway in the house and halfway in an addition off the back of the house.

So, basically, the kitchen does not extend to the original back wall of the house. It stops a few feet short of that and the leftover space creates a vestibule for the back door (on the right) and flows into the addition to extend the pantry outward (on the left).

The pantry then leads circularly into the dining room-->hallway-->kitchen-->and back again to the pantry). To top it off there is some sort of milk door-sized opening for passing items through the wall between the pantry and the sun room without having to walk around the through the dining room. (I mean, it's a solution to a flow problem. But what kind of design allows a problem like that in the first place?) Anyway, total rabbit warren, with about as much elbow room.

Let's take a look from the outside to see what I mean.

Photo above courtesy of Curbed Detroit.

Imagine that back porch gone.(It's too decayed to safely walk on it anyway). What you have left is a two-story addition on the right half of the house (which houses a sun room off the master bedroom upstairs and another off the dining room on the first floor). But there's more: See the shuttered window at the back of the porch? That's the face of a one-story addition extending off the back of the original house and the side of the two-story addition. 

The eave over the pantry is rotting. The porch attached to it is rotting. The exposed lath in the two-story addition above it is letting in water which has trickled down and molded the wall and cabinets in the pantry below it. 

Back inside the pantry room, you get a glimpse of the molding cabinets, peeling paint, and other water damage in the wall. 

The plan is to take off all the water damaged, exterior walls. That means removing the additions and restoring the original line of the house. The expensive and tricky part here is figure out how to recreate some structure so the back of the house doesn't crumble as we rebuild. Needless to say, we'll have professionals do the work.

Inside, we'll knock out the wall between the dining room and kitchen (and the remaining, interior half of the pantry) and make one, large cooking/dining space to accommodate modern living and modern-sized appliances.


A tour of the other areas of the house coming in a few days ....