Boring Stuff First

To really appreciate what the fire did you have to remember what it looked like before. So here are the "before" pictures. Bear with me if you've seen all these before. I don't think I've shown them ALL yet. Some of them show the updates we made to the house before the fire.

The playroom, with the pot bellied stove and fake brick in the background:

Kinda dark, but a really good view of the wonderful carpet in there:

The next picture was actually taken a year before the fire - the first time we refinished the wood floors and had to move the toys downstairs and the dining/front room stuff into here. But this is basically what it looked like the night of the fire:

Turning around you see the footlockers and stairs to the basement (cluttered because this is right after we moved in). We later added corner shelves and coat hooks to that corner/brick wall.

Next room is the kitchen:

Looking toward the windows that look into the backyard. We actually took those shutter-things down pretty soon after moving in.

Here's the sign we made for mother's day last year, it hung in the kitchen next to the wall oven:

View from the hall into the kitchen. Notice where my laptop is? That's where it was for the fire too, and that bench under the half-counter is where the fire started.

Here's the old doorway from the kitchen to the front room:

Front room:

Front room/dining room/front door. The dining room is cluttered with stuff the old owners left behind, and our kitchen table.

Other corner of front room (fireplace and hallway to the bedrooms, cluttered with moving boxes). The hallway was blocked with a half wall/bookshelf when we first moved in. Notice the barely-noticeable wood paneling on the wall adjacent to the fireplace.

The dining room/front room/hallway was the first room we updated (besides painting some of the downstairs walls blue). We took out the bookshelf and wood paneling before we painted the walls. We also took down the trim and replaced the light fixture with a ceiling fan.

And we opened up the doorway from the kitchen to the dining/front room. Then we tried a faux finish on the walls.

Dining room. Picture this with the trim back up and no carpet and this is what it looked like the night of the fire.

Hallway, looking from the kitchen to the kids' room:

Then we ripped out the carpet to expose the oak floor:

Here is what it looked like RIGHT AFTER we refinished the floor a very dark espresso color:

You can barely tell, but the floor started scuffing and the topcoat started peeling up immediately after we started walking on it again. This is Christmas 2009, and we already knew we were going to have to redo the floor again.

 This is what it looked like a year later when we were ready to refinish it again:

A week after Davis was born we were almost ready to restain. The following week we started staining, but didn't get any pictures. We did small sections late at night after the kids had gone to bed. We only got two sections done - the hallway by the bathroom and the hallway by the bedrooms, we never got to the main room. The first night, we cleaned up afterward, making sure to dispose of the rags soaked with stain properly. But the rags that only had a little on them were kept in a bucket in the kitchen (under that half counter) to be used the next night. The second night, we did the exact same thing, but somehow the rags in the bucket spontaneously combusted.

Anyway, back to "before"! Here's our bedroom:

Another corner. Looking into the "sitting room" addition to our bedroom.

Good view of the carpet and wallpaper. The window is in the "sitting room" and looks out to the front yard.

Our closets. Mine is the open one in the "sitting room", Curtis' is closed. His looks smaller, but it just has smaller doors to access it. Pay attention to the set-up of his closet and our entry door - we changed it up later.

The kids' room. Love that shag green carpet. Later we moved the crib to where the toddler bed is (you can just see the foot of it) and put a set of bunk beds where the crib is and moved the dresser to another wall.

The window in the kids' room that we jumped out of.

And last, but not least, the bathroom. Here it is when we first moved in. Still has the speckled toilet to match the speckled sink, and the old-person grab bar. The tub is to the left, behind the door.

We very soon had to replace the toilet. They just don't make replacement parts for 70 year old toilets!

Here's the tub.

 Just before Davis was born we took out the tile and put up a shower surround. We also, very carefully, took down the popcorn ceiling in this room (the whole upstairs, except the playroom and our sitting room, had it - which became useful later). We never got a picture of the shower surround before the fire.

Okay! That's our house (the upstairs, at least) before the fire!