Historic Stone Farmhouse Restoration – The Story of Our Blythe House 1860

Our First Nest

The Beginning

When I was a child, my family moved from a teeny tiny town in the Midwest United States to the city of Hamilton Ontario Canada. My Dad is a minister and we moved to plant a Church in an area very different than what we were used to. Although I mostly grew up in the “big city” of Hamilton, it never felt like home. I lived for every trip when we would take the long drive “back” home to our big extended family and stay with my grandparents at the family farm. I never imagined that I would make Canada my permanent home when I grew up, but of course, I fell in love with a Canadian boy and the rest is history.

Newlyweds

When my husband and I were first married, like most newlyweds, we were young and broke. We had managed to get through college without accumulating any debt though, so that worked in our favor. At the time (2005) interest rates in Canada were relatively low and as an incentive to first time home buyers, banks were offering mortgages to new home buyers for zero down at just a slightly higher interest rate. We didn’t have much, but we also didn’t have any debt, so we were approved.

At that time, there were many homes available in our price range (if you were willing to compromise on location) that it actually ended up being cheaper for us to buy a house than it would have cost to rent. We knew that if we rented, we wouldn’t have anything left to save towards a mortgage, so we went for it and bought a 1897 Victorian foreclosure fixer upper in a sketchy neighborhood near downtown Hamilton, two months before we got married. We were twenty-one.

The First Fixer-Upper

For all its faults, I really loved a lot of things about that neighborhood. Everyone had a big front porch, and all the homes were beautifully old. The neighbors looked out for each other and there were always lots of kids playing in the street and on all of the postage stamp sized front yards.  

I absolutely loved that first house of ours. Our realter didn’t even want to show it to us (he didn’t approve of the neighborhood), but I persuaded him. I saw what he couldn’t, potential. When we first bought it, it felt HUGE for just the two of us. Three bedrooms, a partially finished attic space with tons of potential, and a creepy unfinished basement that had more than an acceptable amount of animal poop in it.

We slowly made that first house a home. Like I said, we didn’t have a whole lot of extra cash to work with, but my new husband was incredibly handy (and came from a handy family) and I had enough plans and painting skills to keep us busy working on the house every chance we had.

A Growing Family

We added a main floor, second bathroom. Then came baby number one… she spurred on a kitchen renovation. Two years later, baby number two inspired flooring updates on the bedroom level. And finally, the news that we were expecting multiples lit the fire under us to totally finish the yucky unfinished basement, take down a supporting wall on the main floor, finish updating all the windows, and add a third bathroom. There is something about the inevitability of a newborn (or two!) arriving that really motivates us to finish up projects. By the time babies three and four arrived, the house was almost entirely the way we wanted it. Of course, we had a myriad of little loose ends to finish up in every single room, as one does.

The basement renovation expanded our living space just enough for us to live comfortably as a family of six… for a while. The thing about kids is, they grow. We already had two kids in each bedroom (one room was the size of a walk-in closet) and we started to feel more and more closed in. I had also started homeschooling our oldest, and our yard, though a decent size for the city, was itty bitty for four growing kids, never mind having room for a garden.

We longed for more space, not only for ourselves but to be able to host larger gatherings, grow some of our own food, and maybe even raise some animals. We felt like the city was closing in around us and we both wanted to escape it, but it also didn’t feel like it was the “right” time to move. Our Church, my family, and my husband’s job were all nearby and we couldn’t really imagine how we could afford what we were looking for anyway.

Making it Work

 I have kind of always been an old house snob, and I really loved the old home that we had worked so hard on, and we were content enough where we were, so I was determined to not move anywhere else unless it was a whole lot better than what we already had. And truthfully, (for me) it had to be an old house.

We resolved to make our small home work even better for us and began making plans to fully finish the large walk-up attic space. It was not insulated so it was boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. We primarily used it for storage. We even had dreams to add a mud room on to the back entrance of the house (which would make our small yard even smaller).  We pushed that dream of a someday home to further “down the road”. Even still, we were always keeping an eye on real estate listings in our desired area… just in case.

We weren’t looking to move when we found our dream house…

Finding Blythe House

The “Accidental” viewing

It was common knowledge among family and friends that we wanted to “someday” move out of the city. Occasionally someone would send us a listing for a possible candidate. Well, it just so happened that a family member sent us a listing for a home located in the small town my husband grew up in. Or so she thought. She had actually accidentally sent me a listing for a rural property that was not far from that same small town.

The photos showed an empty dilapidated interior and a charming stone exterior. I was smitten, but it was sooo far above our price range that we didn’t even seriously consider looking at it. Still, I couldn’t get that house out of my head, and not long after first seeing the listing, we were out in that area visiting family and we had some time to kill. I suggested that we drive by it, just for fun. Then, since we were already in the area… it would be convenient to have a viewing… “Just for fun” …

It was February, so the house was cold. The systems were all in working order, but no one had lived there for six years. It was mostly empty, except for a few odd things stored there. There were dead flies and mouse droppings in every windowsill, and the basement was a dank cavern with a dirt floor. Besides the kitchen and single bathroom being perfect time capsules of the seventies and eighties, all the original features were intact. From the douglas fir floors to the abundance of trim, to the original wavy glass in the massive two over two windows. It even had that wonderful “old house” smell.  There were two large bay windows that I knew would be perfect Christmas tree “rooms”… Despite my best efforts to not get too attached to a home that we couldn’t afford, I fell instantly in love, and I knew, this was home.

Now What?

I wanted the stone farmhouse. The problem? We were not anywhere near ready to move, and the beautiful vacant farmhouse was way above our price range. Plus, we had our own unfinished home to think about. The thing about fixer upper houses is that nothing is ever one hundred percent “done”. We had been working on our little Victorian in the city for almost twelve years, and though we had made a ton of upgrades and improvements, it wasn’t exactly “open house ready”. There was still the five to ten percent left on every project in the house. Little paint touch ups needed, trim bits that were never finished, and perhaps the biggest project I had never found the time to do, restoring the steps of our beautiful, but shabby main staircase.

We knew that the stone house had been empty for six years and had already been on the market for one. We knew that we probably had a little time to get our house ready to sell before making an offer. We committed ourselves to working on our current house for a full month straight to see how much we could accomplish before making an offer. We also had a realtor over to give us an idea on what to focus on to give us the best return on our investments. Since we still had a few more large-ish projects we had saved for the future, we weren’t sure if they would be worth doing or not to sell. She helped us clarify our plan and gave us the encouragement to go for it.

Hopeful

Hamilton, Ontario had recently experienced a huge surge in the real estate market and our previously sketchy neighborhood was experiencing its own regeneration of sorts. With houses in our area suddenly selling for way above asking price, it was the perfect seller’s market. We were hopeful that we would get a good price and maybe, just maybe, enough to buy the dream house. So, we got to work.

We worked our tails off that month. It was February, and with no space indoors to set up tools, our front porch was our workshop. At the time we had an eight year old, a six year old, and three year old twins. I was also homeschooling the oldest two. Life was busy. We worked every single chance we had, taking turns when the kids were awake, and working late into the night after they were in bed. We didn’t get everything on our list accomplished but we did enough that we thought we were ready to make an offer anyway. Besides, there was always a chance that the offer wouldn’t get accepted.

Our offer didn’t get accepted. We were discouraged, but by that point we were still motivated to get the rest of our projects finished and keep looking for another dream house in the country. It was becoming obvious that it would be a wise time to move out of the city as home prices had risen so much in our neighborhood but weren’t rising as quickly in our preferred rural area, meaning it would be the ideal time to leave the city and get a bigger property if we were ever going to.

We spent March and April continuing to finish our projects and we also looked at several different properties. We never found a house that compared to that dream house, but we remained hopeful that we’d find something. And the stone farmhouse was still listed for sale…

More Offers

In May, we made another offer on the stone house. It was rejected. We continued finishing projects and I finally finished restoring our staircase. Our city house was looking pretty good. We looked at many more properties, but none of them were right and I just couldn’t get the stone farmhouse out of my mind.

In June we made another offer, and (finally) we were given a counteroffer! It was still too high of a price for us, so we returned with a higher offer. At this point, we were just guessing on what our budget would be as we still hadn’t even listed our house. Well, we went back and forth with the seller for a while until FINALLY, in mid July, they accepted our offer!

Time to Sell

We were overjoyed, although still hesitant to celebrate too much… we still needed to sell our home, and we needed to get enough to cover the cost of the new house. We went into high gear and completely staged our home in about a week to get it ready for listing photos and showings. Our amazing friend offered to let us borrow her garage as a storage space for all our excess stuff. We needed to make the home look spacious, and for the six of us, it definitely wasn’t feeling spacious. We had already decluttered a whole lot earlier in the month, but now we put everything we didn’t need everyday in our friends’ garage. I took down any personal décor and minimized and simplified every room. This part was truly fun for me, l love making rooms look like show rooms. Not very practical for us to live in but still fun.

Once the listing photos were taken, our realtor set up the showings and open house. Since the market was so hot at the time, we decided to hold any offers for six days (until after the open house) to hopefully get the highest offer possible. I don’t even remember the exact number of showings we had but it was a LOT. I do remember that I was running the VBS at our Church that week and that it was super stressful to get all the kids up and out of the house every morning in time for VBS while also leaving the house so spotless that it looked like nobody lived there… (Here’s a tip if you ever find yourself in a similar situation… Feed the kids breakfast in the van.)

I stayed away from the house with the kids all day every day that week and there was a constant rotation of showings. It was exhausting but exciting. Our open house was scheduled for Sunday afternoon, and I remember a couple showing up at our house with their realtor and home inspector just as we were leaving for Church that morning. They wanted to get an inspection done before the open house… another good sign. The open house went well, and we returned that evening to several notes, messages, and even flowers from prospective home buyers!

click HERE to see the listing of our old home

The Moment of Truth

The next day we had a couple of last-minute viewings before we met with our realtor at her office. The time had come to see if we had any offers come in. We had ten. We were blown away at the number of serious offers and we couldn’t believe that the best offer we had, came with zero conditions and was fifty thousand above our asking price. Well, of course we accepted that highest offer and celebrated!

It turns out that we had made enough off the sale of the old house to finalize the purchase of the new house. We were elated, and a little stunned. What had been a very long and sometimes frustrating process was suddenly over. We could see looking back how God had opened some doors and shut others. We felt surprising peace throughout the whole ordeal and trusted that moving out of the city would happen in God’s timing. His timing was perfect.

Moving Day

Once the sale of the old house, and the purchase of the new house was finalized, we just had to wait… and pack. Moving day came and it was more emotional than I expected. We were leaving our first home, the home we returned from our honeymoon to and started our life together. It held the memories of when we had brought each one of our babies home, and where we had welcomed countless guests. We had poured our hearts and souls into that house, and I truly loved it. Saying goodbye to the neighborhood wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be either. Yes, there were plenty of annoying things about living downtown that I was ready to leave behind (zero parking, tiny yards, discarded needles in the alley), but there were also many charming and homey things I knew I’d miss as well (sitting on the front porch and having conversations with the neighbors, being walking distance to everything, our favorite little pizza place). I was sad to leave, but equally excited for our new life.

The Stone Farmhouse            

The Two-Week Head Start

Because the new house was not exactly move in ready, we arranged to bridge finance the two homes for a period of two weeks. We would have loved to have more time but the two weeks of technically owning two homes was stressful enough. We had a pretty big list of things to do to the new place before we moved in. Obviously, we wanted to clean the place, but since we had so much demo to do we didn’t start there.

When we bought our first home as newlyweds, the only thing we did to it before moving in was rip out some old baggy carpeting and clean. This time around we knew we’d have four kids underfoot and anything we could accomplish before moving in would be a big head start.

The Kitchen

The kitchen was an untouched yellow with blue paint sponged over top, and dark wood housewife’s dream, circa 1980. We know that it was last renovated in 1980 because we found the newspapers under the linoleum to prove it. The matching yellow electric cooktop and wall ovens were an electrical hazard, so they had to go. The pipes under the sink had visible holes in them allowing any drain water to seep into the cupboard below. The laminate counters were a faux marble (also yellow) and falling apart in places. There was a closet added with particle board and sliding doors, immediately when you entered the kitchen, making the whole room feel smaller and dark.

The cupboards themselves were actually in surprisingly good shape as they were made custom for the space of solid wood. Although the doors have a dark “smoky” finish that was popular once upon a time, and yucky hardware, we didn’t hate their profile. The floor was expertly laid to last a lifetime (ask me how I know…). Brown and gold sheet linoleum that I surprisingly didn’t hate… it was sort of nostalgic for me. They reminded me of my eighties childhood and the many homes had that same pattern.

The biggest problem in the kitchen was the fireplace. Now, when I say fireplace, don’t get too excited. This was not at all the type of kitchen fireplace that you’d expect a house built in 1860 to have. There may have been something glorious there originally, but when they updated the kitchen in 1980, we’re assuming the woodstove was updated as well. There was an ell shaped hearth built up about eighteen inches high off the kitchen floor of eighties brick with a non-working woodstove partially attached to the pipe hanging from the ceiling. The brick went up the wall about two thirds and the rest of the wall to the ceiling was textured stucco. I’m assuming that the previous owners had once used the woodstove to heat the kitchen, but it was obvious that it hadn’t been in use for a long time. It also wasn’t included in the sale, so when we got the house, the hearth and the dangling stove pipe was all that remained.

It’s not hard to imagine how much space that brick hearth took up in the kitchen. So much space that the only place left to put a refrigerator was at the landing at the top of the basement stairs. That’s right. To fit a fridge in the kitchen (not a big one!), the previous owners had rerouted the basement stairs so that the fridge could fit in the door opening to the basement. This not only meant that we could only fit a small fridge, but also that the basement was almost inaccessible.

Now, I have to say that the kitchen itself is huge. I think it measures about 20 x 20 feet or so. The problem is, there are ten openings in all into the kitchen. By openings I mean windows and doors. The two exterior doors measure at least four feet across including trim, and the two windows are massive. At least four feet across each as well as ceiling to almost the floor. The other six openings are six interior doors that lead to various parts of the house. One wall has doors leading to the school room, hallway, and basement. (A fourth door on that wall leading to the dining room was closed up years ago and for that I am grateful!) The opposite wall has three doors as well, leading to the one and only bathroom, the laundry room/pantry, and the back staircase. You can imagine how hard it is to design a kitchen with so little wall space. No wonder the past owners stuffed the fridge into the basement door opening.

The Floor of Doom

We knew that the kitchen sink had to come out because of the water damage, and we knew that the brick hearth had to come out as well. We also tore out the oddly placed coat closet. Because we had to remove so much of the fixed kitchen, we knew that we’d be ripping out that linoleum floor.

I was dying to see what was underneath and whether or not we could save it. The rest of the house has its original douglas fir wood flooring, so I was hopeful that it was also in the kitchen, just waiting under all that linoleum. I wasn’t disappointed. The wood flooring was there, and it wasn’t in terrible shape. What we didn’t expect was that it would take us nearly seven days to take up the old floor.

You see, when they laid that linoleum in nineteen eighty, I’m pretty sure they decided that they were never going to lay another floor again. They first laid down newspaper and flyers as underlayment, thicker in some areas to compensate for the worn dips in the wood in some high traffic spots. Then they put down plywood underlayment. They did this in a way that would ensure the kitchen floor would survive any number of natural disasters or the apocalypse itself. The plywood was nailed to the Douglas Fir with four ribbed nails making a one-inch square, every four inches across the entire vast floor.

We used every tool we had, and every family member or friend that stopped by to get that stinking floor up. Like I said, we weren’t counting on it taking seven days. Taking the brick hearth out by hand was a breeze compared to that floor. By the time we got it all up there was still newspaper sticking stubbornly in some places Thank goodness there wasn’t any glue.

We had removed all of the cabinets to reuse once the floor was finished and set up a sort of camp kitchen in the adjacent sunroom. The goal was not to finish the kitchen in two weeks, the goal was to get it completely gutted before we moved in. Anyone who has done any sort of renovation in their home while also living in it can confirm, it is super dusty and dirty. We were very glad to have the opportunity to get that part out of the way (mostly) before we moved all our stuff, and the kids in. I should say that the kids were with us those two weeks full time. I’m pretty sure they demo’ed most of that hearth themselves.

The Pool

Another huge project to do before moving day was to fill in the pool. That’s right, this fixer upper came with its own fixer upper inground pool complete with diving board. We were not too thrilled with the pool. It had not been used in over a decade and was full of green slimy rainwater and frogs. It was also incredibly deep and took up the best part of the yard, right close to the house. It had an old zinc liner that was completely destroyed. To fix it would have cost us thousands. Thousands we didn’t have. Not to mention it was a huge liability and safety concern.

We were very happy when my brother-in-law offered to fill it in for us for fweeee, using all the fweee backfill that the neighboring farmer had in his field. That was a memorable day for the kids. They were mesmerized watching their uncle and family friend fill in the old pool with the excavator and dump truck. We were relieved once that was all filled in.

Restoring The Wood Floors

The other big jobs we wanted to tackle were the floors and the basement stairs. We were fortunate that the original floors were all still in the house. Unfortunately, some were not in great shape and all of the upstairs floors were painted. I am a fan of painted floors in old houses, especially when they were originally meant to be painted, but these were needing to be re painted after being covered by carpeting for so long (carpets were removed before selling the house) and there were old splotches of different colored paint on them in places. I knew we didn’t have time to repaint them and let them cure within the two-week timeframe, so we decided to sand and oil them instead.

Well, we learned a lot doing those floors, but I think that’s a story for another day, another post. Long story short, we ended up sanding and finishing all four upstairs bedrooms, the upstairs hall, the kitchen, and the downstairs hallway, but because the kitchen floor took longer than we expected, we ran out of time to do the living and dining rooms… aannd we still haven’t.

Safety First

The stairs to the basement were rickety and worn and cut off in a weird way because of the whole fridge situation, so they needed to be rebuilt. We returned the original door to the basement back to its original spot leading into the kitchen. (It had been moved to the hallway to accommodate the fridge.) Thanks to my husband and father-in-law, we have a new set of very safe and sturdy steps to the basement. The old ones were made of beautiful, thick, old growth lumber, so we saved the wood for a future project. They aren’t making more of that stuff.

I had also wanted to paint all the bedrooms before moving day, and I even ambitiously bought all the paint… but of course that didn’t happen and I only just painted the last of the bedrooms, more than seven years later.

Settling In

On moving day, we moved into our new dream house with a completely gutted kitchen, freshly finished bedroom floors, a newly built set of basement stairs and a giant patch of mud out in the yard where a pool had once been. It was a great head start.

Settling into the new house happened quicker than I expected. We moved in in September so I didn’t plan on starting our school year until October since I knew the move would keep us very busy, plus, all the schoolbooks were packed up.

We moved with two three-year-olds, a six year old, and an eight year old. Very soon after moving in, our three-year-olds turned four. We hosted a big family birthday party for them, and even with the house still in disarray from just moving in, it was so nice to be able to fit everyone into our new place with plenty of parking and yard space for everyone.

We didn’t have a working kitchen for a while, but we had the nearby laundry sink hooked up for dishes and all of the appliances we needed set up in a sort of temporary kitchen that worked just fine. Compared to the city house we moved from; we were swimming in all the space.

We decided to keep the old kitchen cabinets for now and just reconfigured them to fit in a better layout. We also installed a beautiful antique enamelled cast iron drainboard sink that I had found on facebook marketplace. My husband took a few of the old cupboards and screwed them together to make an island. We used two old desktops as counters on it. It wasn’t at all perfect or our “forever” kitchen design, but it was big, it was functional, and it worked for us.

The kids moved into their unpainted bedrooms just fine, and we moved into ours. Although, I did paint our bedroom pretty quickly after moving in. Ours was painted bright white with hot pink sponge painted on top. We lovingly called our bedroom “SpongeBob’s brain”. It had to go. It was keeping me up at night.

Home Sweet Home

Before long, this old house felt like home and it’s hard to believe that we ever lived anywhere else. We still have so many projects and restoring to do but we take it all a day and a dollar at a time. We’re in no rush, if the house has been here since 1860, I’m sure she can wait a few more years. In the meantime, we’re loving learning everything we can about the original family that built this house and all the stories we can find.

Are you interested in what we have in store for Blythe House? Read part II of the story of Blythe House for all our plans for the future HERE.

Thanks for coming by!

Lindi joe