One Year Later | Part 1: The Transformation

 

August 26 marks one year at the Somerset Farmhouse! We've been going non-stop since settling into what was basically a blank slate of a house.  And a family full of ideas in a new home is bound to produce some incredible results, right?

Well, here's a quick snapshot of how we've done:

  

They say a lot can happen in a year, and boy, did a lot happen this past year! We've renovated all but one room, started planting our own food, and have been raising a litter of kittens alongside our regular cats.  

Our first week or so involved tearing up carpets, rugs, and old linoleum:

Finding beautiful hardwood floors underneath was like digging up gold! Day after day, we sliced up carpet, took out the linoleum in pieces, and also had fun reading old newspapers as far back as the 1930s.

Little by little, from dawn til dusk and sometimes 12am, we worked like crazy putting our personal touches on the house:

We removed wallpaper, stripped the floors of old underlayment, sanded trims, laid down new flooring in the bathroom, and started adding our personal decor to the rooms.  Each room came with its own unique challenge: where I sleep, the walls were covered in 4 layers of wallpaper; old, dusty underlayment in my sister's bedroom took weeks to remove; faux paint covered the trims and windowsills; and we needed extra counter space in the kitchen, so Pop put up a quick fix.  Even the dining room ceiling was in need of repairs.  

Finally, after a few months, it started coming together:

The hallway all the way down to one wall of the foyer got a warm-up with a fresh coat of muted orange.  I repainted my room a more saturated blue.  The parlor became the living room.  Sunlight entered the dining room via a beautiful candlelight yellow tone.  Country homestyle decor graced the kitchen with shelves we brought from the old house and illuminated with warm white lights.  

It's like we transformed the house into a work of art:

Out of all the updates, my favorite glow-up was the hallway!

It's hard to believe we accomplished so much within a year - but there's still more to go! The final room to tackle will be the old servant's quarters where my kittens sleep at night.  My hope is to turn that last room into a reading/cat room that doubles as a place for me to record music at some point.  Or maybe it'll be my home office as I get into proofreading.  Decisions, decisions!  

Now, we didn't stop at renovating the house - as has been mentioned in previous posts, growing our own food was at the top of our list! With grocery prices getting more expensive, buying seeds and setting up garden beds became our summer project.  Potatoes were harvested this year, tomatoes are ripening, and even one of the strawberry bushes produced the sweetest fruit I've ever tasted! 

But all that will be its own post, as will any talk about the kittens and cats on the farm.  

Keep an eye out for part 2 and 3 - more photos are on the way!

See you in the next post!

~Gigi