Cass House: porches, roofs and siding

It's been eight years since we started renovating our house and I'm trying to remember in what order everything was done. I know that after we got the foundation and floors redone, we started working on what is now our laundry/mud room and on our master bedroom/bath.

The original house was built (we were told ) in the 1890's and was called a two over two. (Basically two rooms below and two upstairs.) The two story wing was added next. This wing became the kitchen/dining area downstairs and the master bedroom/bath upstairs. There was also a one story-lean-to addition that ran along the back of the house that was probably added last. There were three rooms: kitchen, dining room and bedroom. Since this addition was in bad shape and the roof didn't have enough slope, we tore it off and replaced it with a laundry/mud room and back porch.

I hope this all makes sense.. It's hard to try to explain it, rather complicated. We have moved and re-arranged every interior wall in this house. A lot of evenings were spent drawing and redrawing house plans.

Another interesting thing we discovered, when we removed the beadboard, we could see the lathe marks on the studs. This means it was once lathe and plastered, then that was taken down and it was modernized with beadboard. When taking down some beadboard on the back addition, a penny fell out of the wall. The date was 1900. Kind of neat!

Here are some "before"pictures showing the back of the house.

I don't seem to have any pictures of tearing off the old and building the new but this is more exciting, I promise!

Below is the laundry room and we also added a very small half-bath.

I love our back porch, even though it made the total square footage of our house smaller, it was definitely worth it!

These are the rocks that came from the old house foundation. This was my project - I pretty much did it all by myself. (pat on back!) I think reusing the old rocks adds a bit of character.

Most of the original wood siding was replaced with Hardie Plank. You can see on the picture above where we blended the Hardie Plank with the wood siding. I love Hardie Plank, would definitely recommend it.

So you can see, by this time we have all new windows (bought at Habitat) and French doors leading into the living room.

The front of the house still looked like this:

Look at our nice sturdy fence, didn't we do a great job? I use "we" loosely, my husband can take the credit.
Throughout this house reno, I became a highly skilled "helper". My job was to hand him tools, clean up and go for things that were needed. I became quite good at it.

The old metal roof had to come off. I would have loved to put metal back, but it was more practical to use shingles. Still love the metal, though!