When the house was inherited, it hadn’t been lived in for 20 years.
Anyone who has ever lived through a house renovation knows just how frustrating it can be. Planning to do the renovation yourself can seem daunting to many.
One person, however, decided to take on the challenge of fixing up his ancestral home. He and his spouse inherited the house after a grandparent passed away and knew they wanted it to be their family home. Built in the 1860s by his great-great-grandfather, the house had been passed down through the generations.
From the 70s to the early 90s, the house was unoccupied and had fallen into disrepair. As newlyweds with limited funds, they couldn’t afford contractors, so he decided to handle the renovations himself. The couple bought a small trailer, parked it on the empty foundation of an old barn, and lived there while he worked on the house.
With minimal construction knowledge beyond what he had learned in a high school shop class, the early stages of the renovation involved a lot of research. His first task was to remove the old kitchen area and fix the house’s foundation. The kitchen’s foundation was made of old stones, which he painstakingly pulled up by hand and repurposed to build a low stone perimeter wall around the property.
