Renovation Update: The Moore House
Last week, I flew out to Arizona to check on our house in Willcox. And you know what I can report? Forward progress. Hooray!
What a journey this house has been for us, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. My husband and I often joke about how strange it will be for us when we finally get to visit and actually stay at our house. Stranger yet? When we can stay and not have to work on said house. We can’t ever really see the days of the latter, however, since the house is more than 100 years old. I think there will always be projects to work on.
Right now, the electrician is working on rewiring the entire house while the contractor is tackling a laundry list. They took out the wall between the kitchen and the former family room (now going to be our dining room). Within that room, there was a very distinct hump in the floor and creaking noises to match it. One of the tasks was to pull up the subfloor and see how to fix it. Turns out, it was a random extra layer of OSB, and it somewhat freaks me out to now walk over it without the hump and squeak.
Back to the electrician—I walked through the electrical plan with him, double-checking switch placement and what each switch will control. He also helped me get a couple of pieces ordered, so I could utilize two older flush-mount lights that I love.
While I was there, I also walked through the house with the city inspector. Did I want to induce heartburn? Not really, but I had a few questions, and I wanted to make sure everything was on track. Read as: I don’t like surprises. Also, unreal amounts of knowledge can be gained by walking around your 100-year-old house with an inspector for an hour.
The middle bathroom (which I’ve actually nicknamed something I won’t repeat on the internet) is slowly looking like its former self. With everything demoed, we were able to confirm that we could actually get a 5-foot tub in there as we thought. Hooray! The house will have two full baths.
You can see the cool ceiling light fixture I’m rehabbing.
Future tub/shower combo with tile surround.
The other bathroom has been framed up. This bathroom was awkward. While it will still be quirky, I’m excited about the new version. We’re taking out a section of the garage that served as a laundry room to expand the bathroom, making a place to put my grandmother’s clawfoot tub back in the house, a roomier vanity, and a refreshed shower. We’re going to widen the doorway next to the toilet—while we’ll lose a few inches from the shower, I think we’ll notice it a lot more with a wider walkway.
New wall with access to the garage.
Since I took out the laundry room, where are we going to wash all the things? We’re putting a large-capacity washer/dryer unit in the pantry. There’s a lot of grace, problem-solving, and concessions that have to happen in a project like this. While we’ve moved a few things around, I tried to stay within the original footprint as much as possible—keeping plumbing near existing plumbing.
Last on my trouble-shooting list were ceiling tiles. The original structure had beadboard ceilings that were covered up. Would I love to have the original ceilings exposed again? Heck, yes. But I’m not about to take on scraping that much glue and refinishing them. I’ve been searching for replacement tiles to patch areas where we were either “exploring” or where there were once upper cabinets. With no luck in sourcing something similar, I hatched a new plan. We’ll take a few tiles from the kitchen to patch the other areas of the house. Since we’ll already have beadboard going up on the walls, we’ll put it on the ceiling in the kitchen, too. A little homage to the past.