Hodge podge lodge

I am new to this blogger stuff, but here I go. I met the greatest guy in the world, Nov. 5th, 2004, I personally thought all men were no good, I guess it wasn't the men who were no good, it was my ability to pick a good one out or the one who was right for me. Believe me, he had a hard time too. He found women who were cheaters and drug users, so women we are not alone, there are men in bad relationshios too. Now we are remodling a home together. We bought my aunts old homestead, she lived here over 40 years before she died. I found all kinds of letters and pictures in the basement from the past of my family.

My name is Barb & Jim is my fiancé, we are in our early 50's, and yes it took me that long to find a good guy. Jim can fix and do anything, he amazes me. I will show you before and after pictures, but right now we are just starting.

Jim calls our home Hodge Podge Lodge because who ever built the house used a lot of used parts and used wood. Nothing matches. When taking the walls down, we found old shutters filling in holes where windows and doors use to be.

We bought the house Nov. 2007 and moved in Thanksgiving Day that year.

This is the house the day we bought it. It is all white, I want to add some color to it, so the middle of Sept. 2008 we had a painter coming here to help out.

This is a before kitchen picture. This is where were by March of 2008.

This is the way the kitchen use to look , we are now still working on that. I kept the old sink cast iron sink covered with white porcelin. But the old cabnets were pulled out and Jim has made me knew ones out of the old floor boards from the dinning room. I love the look of tile, so my counter tops are made of that. I would of kept the hardwood floors in the dinning room if most of them were not rotten from the water leaking in the bathroom over many years. We had to totally replace the floor in the dinning room and right now I am not sure if I want hardwood floors again or carpet.

This is the dinning room, the floors from one side to the other were 4 inches off, so if you were eatting meat balls you would have to make sure it didn't roll off your plate. This is the living room, we tore the dark paneling off ( it is amazing how much bigger the room now looks)the walls and took that down to the studs. Jim dry walled the whole room except for a small outcove, it had bead board under the old walls, so we are keeping that and putting a small table with chairs there.
I just had to add this picture, I took it when Jim wasn't looking. Doesn't he have a cute butt, lol.

We removed an old shed that was in the back yard and replaced it with 2 new buildings.

The larger shed, the blue one, is Jim's work shop. the gray one is

my potting shed.

Our golden retriver's name is Diogie, he came from the same people we bought the buildings from. And yes he is a water dog, he loves it.

This was Dioge at 3 months old. He seemed to grow every day.

There is also a 2 bedroom apt. upstairs, that we are now storing most of our things in, but when we are done the downstairs, we do plain on renting it out to help pay the bills.