The Hearth Room

Ben and I fell in love with our land immediately. It featured an adorable little farm house, a super-cool barn, lots of space for our dogs to roam, a fenced-in pasture, a chicken coop, rabbit hutch, goat run-in, oh the list goes on... There was just one little hiccup. The interior of the house was not as super-awesome as the aforementioned amenities found on the property itself (though it did have a lot of charm).  We decided to just go for it - the manner in which most of my good decisions are made (see generally: Emmy).  But while I was signing purchase agreements, and other real estate type documents, in my mind,  I was tearing down walls.  I wish I would have taken more pictures from before we embarked upon our renovation, but I'll share what I do have, and try to take corresponding pictures so that you guys can see just how far we've come.

The Exterior

My idea was to turn the garage into a living room.  We're not garageless now though. There is a detached garage that we always used, even when the garage was still a garage. You can see it in the back left (marked with a star).

We hired someone to build a chimney (though I think we could have done it ourselves) and framed in the wall where the garage door was located.

The chimney is really quite striking. We'll need to repaint the house at some point and I'd like to change the colour of the roof. But for now, I'm happy when I pull in the driveway and see smoke gently puffing up from the chimney on a cold winter's eve with the Ash and Oak standing silently guard... Actually I'm lying. We have a catalytic stove so there's no gentle puffing but that makes for poor imagery - albeit a happier earth.

The Interior

When we first bought the place and I gave tours to people, I would open the door into the garage and say: "And this will be the living room." A comment to which I received mainly silence and politely skeptical looks. To their credit, the garage looked like this:

 

Ben did the electrical in our remodeling project. He's a genius with electrons and circuits and the like. The door you see in this picture led to our future master bedroom (more on that later). We framed in the door. The wall to the left was removed. We put in shiny new ducts for central air - which will help with resale as well as make me a happier lady during the hottest of our Tennessee summer nights. Now the room from this angle looks like this: 

Ben and I read... a lot.  Right now one of the upstairs bedrooms has books piled up to the ceiling and falling all over the floor. We were thinking maybe we'd turn this little adjacent room into a library:

We tore out another wall for access to this room. We also put in some windows along the front wall and reworked some of the electrical. We dug out a bunch of pavers - which are being used for a lovely composter that is in the process of being built - and poured concrete for the slab.  Now this little room looks like this:

The washer and dryer used to be in the front entrance hidden by a partition wall. We moved the plumbing into another room, which we like to call the laundry room, and removed the partition. We also framed out a small closet under the stairs for winter coats and shoes and such. We ripped up the carpet, tile in the front entrance, and laminate going up the stairs and installed a rustic looking bamboo floor from Cali Bamboo. We chose the scraped wide plank java.  It's tough as nails, which is wonderful if you have two crazy puppy dogs. 

 Before

   After

 Before

  After

  After

The best part is the catalytic wood-burning stove we installed. Ben and I installed the stone veneer in one weekend, it was fairly simple and it makes such a dramatic backdrop to the cast-iron stove.

We still have a couple of things that we need to finish up but all the big stuff is done. Sometimes when Ben and I are sitting in the hearth room I like say: "Hey, remember when this was a garage?"