Vintage Life: Look Inside the Bungalow 3

Thanks for joining me again as I show you around our 1920s bungalow renovation project.  We've already seen the outside, and looked around inside in part one and part two.  I left you standing in the family room with the outstanding avocado green and harvest gold patterned linoleum floor.  We were about to head out that door to the left to see the utility room and garage, so let's go.

We believe this area was the original back porch of the house, as the walls are plank siding. It is possible this area may have been a  bathroom, as bathrooms were commonly installed on the back porch of houses of this era.

You've probably noticed the exposed wires running along the wall and the exposed plumbing. The whole house will need to be rewired for and re-plumbed for safety.  The floor is about to give way due to water damage and is quite moldy - don't stomp your feet!

Continue through the door out to the garage and behold the black mold growing on the rafters.  This garage was an addition that the prior owner (shoddily) built over a poured concrete floor.  The door goes out to the driveway.

The window looks back into the utility room.  I really like that vintage blue enamel gamecock - I'm keeping him, but everything else out here has to go.

The door straight ahead goes out to a partially built bathroom that the prior owner never finished.  Go back through the door to the left, through the utility room, kitchen, and dining room.  I'll meet you at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway.

The prior owner started quite a few projects, but didn't seem to finish very many of them.  Converting the attic to livable space is a great idea, but it requires a staircase to get there.  The prior owner knocked through the hallway and used the space in the second bedroom's closet to get there - that's the seafoam green floor of the second bedroom you see to the right of the stairs.

He didn't finish, but the prior owner had started to build a bedroom in the far area of the attic and was planning to leave space for storage on either side of the main area.

This room looks out over the front of the house to the front yard, and the brick fireplace goes right through the middle of the room.

Looking back out toward the stairs, we can see that the prior owner wasn't very adept at hanging drywall.  Hmmm, what was he planning to do to about the ceiling?

He also made a little closet next to the bedroom. Unfortunately, he only used R17 insulation behind the drywall in the whole attic conversion project. In a hot climate like South Carolina, we'll need to use R35 or spray foam insulation to keep the heat out.

Although converting the attic to livable space is a wonderful feature, the work has been so poorly done that we'll need to pull it all down and start over. Luckily the stairs are well-built and will stay.

So now that you've seen the "before" photos - do you think we're crazy?

Be sure to stay tuned for the next blog post to see what happens next!