The 1927 American Foursquare
How We Modernized Our 100-year-old Home
As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve only lived in our current house since October 2019. Our move was pretty sudden and unexpected.
We actually hadn’t planned on moving from our previous house… ever. Seriously. A couple of months after we decided to make our former house our “forever home”, we had to majorly shift gears and start looking for a new house.
The decision to list our house was made on a Sunday night and we had it listed the following Wednesday. The first day our house was on the market we had 10 showings and 3 offers! I barely had time to clean, let alone style and declutter the house the way I would have preferred.
We put our house on the market and moved so quickly after announcing to our family and friends that we were going to make that our forever home, that I think we left many of them baffled as to the sudden change. Most people didn’t get a chance to even see the listing – let alone how the house looked when it was complete. So I’d like to take the opportunity now to show the before and afters and give those who know us personally, and those who don’t, a peek at how we modernized our 1927 American Foursquare, while still keeping its charm.
As a side note - if you love checking out old houses like I do, I highly recommend the Instagram account Cheap Old Houses where they highlight old houses across the country, typically for sale under $100k. I also wrote a post where I got the opportunity to tour a gorgeous historical Victorian mansion (built in 1901!). Now, let’s get into this house tour!
The exterior
We actually didn’t do much to the exterior of our old house. I would never paint the brick on a historic house like this, but we did want/need to repaint the shutters and window sills.
I love the symmetry and functionality of the exterior of this house. On all four sides of the house, there’s an exterior door leading to some sort of functional outside area. For instance, the front door leads to that amazing porch. Unfortunately, it took me almost two years to buy a porch swing because I’m cheap… and then we moved a few months later. It got a lot of use during that time, though!
In the driveway the side door leads to a carport, on the back of the house the door leads to a patio, and on the opposite side of the house from the driveway there’s a screened-in sun porch. There’s even a balcony over the sun porch which you get to through the master bedroom!
If you’ll notice in the pictures above, the last one is taken from the balcony overlooking some sad looking grass (and a pretty awesome sunset). Here, I’ll post it below so don’t have to go searching:
When we bought the house, our property ended at the treeline you see above. About a week after we moved in, the house that once lived in that empty space of land beyond the treeline was demolished and by today’s standards it was too small to build a new structure. It just so happened that the next door neighbor of that house owned it.
So last summer when we decided to make this our forever home we bought it from him, planning on putting up a retaining wall, a fence, adding a pool, and pretty much making the yard into an oasis. Obviously those plans didn’t work out, but we did sell the land with the house so at least we don’t still own a random plot of land!
The foyer
Check out all that sweet, sweet wallpaper. And it didn’t stop here! There was wallpaper in every single room of this house (bathrooms and kitchen included) when we moved in with the exception of ONE bedroom. Also, apologies for the creepy looking child in the picture of the stairs.
By the time we left, I had removed all the wallpaper! So I definitely meant it when I said I’ve had my fair share of stripping wallpaper. This house was a doozy!
Aside from stripping wallpaper in the foyer and painting it with my favorite neutral (Villa Grey by Valspar), we pulled the carpet off the stairs. I planned on refinishing them, and actually started experimenting with how much effort they would be to sand down to the bare wood, but soon after I got pregnant with our younger daughter and had to put that project on hold. And then we moved a few months after she was born.
While I was on maternity leave with her I did manage to paint all the trim in the foyer and the upstairs hallway though.
The half bath
I debated not sharing this room because it didn’t have any sort of real transformation, but decided to go ahead and show it anyway because, why not?
I liked to call this the Harry Potter bathroom because it’s under the staircase on the main floor. It’s super tiny and Lucius, being a rather large fella at 6’1’’, could barely fit.
I had big dreams for this tiny space that I would have loved to see to fruition. I pictured doing something bold and unexpected in here, like painting it a strong jewel-toned color. I even considered (gasp) WALLPAPER. Hey - just because I tend to strip wallpaper in every house I live in doesn’t mean I don’t like it. It just needs to be the right pattern and style.
I also planned on replacing pretty much everything else in this room - the vanity, mirror, toilet, light fixture. All of it.
Unfortunately, the most I was able to tackle in this room was stripping the wallpaper and potty training a toddler. Hence the M&M’s & Reese’s Pieces (for bribery, of course).
The living room
We were so excited after we closed on this house that we drove straight from the closing to the house and ripped up the carpet in the living room. Aside from removing the carpet, we also stripped the wallpaper/painted, replaced the sun porch door, replaced three windows, and whitewashed the fireplace.
Thankfully this was the easiest room in the whole house to de-wallpaper because it’s also the biggest. The wallpaper actually came off in full-sized floor-to-ceiling sheets. We literally just pulled them off by hand (no steamer, no wallpaper goo) in about an hour.
The sun porch door was old and drafty so we replaced that pretty early on. The windows throughout the whole house were original and also so, so drafty and noisy so we started replacing some of those before we moved. We ended up replacing 6 windows in the whole house. Three of them happened to be in this room.
Since this house is by a pretty busy intersection, every time someone playing loud music would stop at the stoplight nearby we’d hear the windows vibrate. Also, most of them didn’t open so strategically replacing them gave us the ability to let some fresh air flow through the house! Also, you know, fire safety…
Lucius taught himself how to install windows and reframed the windows in the first picture above at least 3 times… without consulting with me first. Seriously. I walked downstairs one day and there was a gaping hole in my living room. And no, that isn’t the first time something like that has happened (and I’m sure it won’t be the last).
The dining room
Oddly enough, the dining room ended up being one of my favorite finished rooms in the house by the time we left.
In this room we, once again, stripped the wallpaper and painted the trim. We also removed the chair rail and I took my first stab at scraping a popcorn ceiling (which is actually really easy)!
Lucius really hated the light fixture, but once I redecorated the room I felt like it actually fit in the space pretty well and I managed to procrastinate replacing it until it was too late and we moved. Luckily, the new owners like it too!
You know how they say styles always come back around? The light fixture in this room is a great example of this. The use of gold tones are really popular right now, and I’m seeing sputnik lights pop up all over the place. In a way this light has kind of a sputnik-style to it, while still being pretty traditional. If you don’t know what a sputnik light is - check out the picture below.
The story of the dining room table is actually pretty interesting, too. The previous owner was elderly and was moving to a retirement home, so his family was auctioning off all of the furniture in the house. Someone at the auction was bidding up the table just for fun, then decided at the end of it all they didn’t want it.
The owner’s children, who showed us the house, remembered me commenting on the table during our showing and called Lucius to see if we wanted to buy it. They sold it to us really really cheap, considering that it’s such a large table (it has SIX leaves!). And we learned that the table is actually older than the house, which I thought was pretty cool.
It didn’t feel right to take the table with us since it had lived there for so long, so we sold it with the house and I have no regrets. It just belongs there.
You can also see the buffet table I talked about in our dining room renovation kick-off post and how it just doesn’t work in our current house. Maybe I should have just left that, too.
The kitchen
Whyyyyy with the carpet!? Seriously.
And the surprising thing is, this isn’t the first house I’ve lived in with carpet in the kitchen. Gross.
In this room I, you guessed it, stripped the wallpaper! I also painted the trim, the ceiling, and the walls. Can we just assume that’s a given from here on out? Because I made those updates in just about every room.
Aside from the above, we tore out the carpet in here and replaced it with some rolled laminate. It definitely wasn’t the nicest or most expensive stuff, but we assumed it was going to be a temporary fix that would be replaced with something nicer, like tile, down the road. It at least got us through a couple of carpet-free years and gave the new owners a cleaner slate to start with.
We also replaced the hardware on the cabinets, the appliances, the two side-by-side windows, updated the light fixture, made a chalkboard area, and exposed the brick chimney, because I love me some exposed brick. And Lucius loves destroying things.
The upstairs hallway
Unfortunately the only “after” picture I have of the upstairs hallway is from one end, but I think you get the gist.
Oddly enough, the foyer and this upstairs hallway are what really sold me on the house. I was actually on the fence when Lucius started talking seriously about wanting to buy it, but there was something about these spaces that really drew me in.
In the picture above, the little bench at the end of the hallway is actually one of my favorite elements to this house - a laundry chute to the basement! Man, that definitely came in handy. Though we often joked about adding a pulley system to bring the laundry back up two flights of stairs that never did happen.
Aside from the aforementioned list of updates, we also replaced all the door knobs to the bedrooms after I got trapped in the master bedroom one day.
And just for fun, here’s a not-scary-at-all shot of me stripping wallpaper over the staircase:
Cool as a cucumber…
The bathroom
Like the half bath on the first floor, I considered not sharing this bathroom either because it wasn’t even a little bit close to the finished product when we moved. But, I’d like to be honest and transparent in this blog and sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to in the end.
For a long time we called this bathroom “The Smoker’s Lounge” because of its beige and burgundy color scheme. It just felt old and dingy like someone back in the day spent a lot of time smoking cigars in there.
We started to remodel this room little by little, first replacing the shower with a bathtub. We moved into this house with an 1.5 year old and bathing her in a portable baby tub just wasn’t cutting it. That update required us to replace the cupboards next to the shower stall because the tub wasn’t the same proportions as the shower stall.
After we stripped the wallpaper, popped off the tiles on the bottom 2/3rds of the wall, and painted, we ran into a ton of issues with the plaster cracking. We were so sick of trying to patch and smooth this room that we decided (before we made the decision to move) that we would gut this room and start from scratch during the coming winter… then of course we moved and none of that happened and when we left the bathroom looked like this:
It was certainly an improvement from where we started, but definitely a far cry from where we wanted it to be.
The office
Let’s start the tour of the bedrooms with the least exciting one: the office. This was the only room in the house we didn’t really touch before we moved, aside from removing the carpet and the shutters.
Fun note: this was also the only room in the house that didn’t have any wallpaper.
The master bedroom
This room was pretty overwhelming to look at when we moved in, but it was surprisingly easy to update, even with two layers of wallpaper.
Can you imagine how it used to look with that green/yellow wallpaper!?
In the end, the updates made the room feel so much lighter and airier.
Our older daughter’s room
I actually didn’t mind the wallpaper in this room - most likely because we knew it was going to be our daughter’s room and the floral wallpaper was dainty and cute. But I got the itch about a year after we moved in to do something fun in here so I took a week off work and tackled this room and the nursery, because that’s my idea of a good time.
The area rugs were actually left by the previous owners and fit perfectly into the color scheme so I kept them. I wish I had a chance to switch out the light fixture before we moved, but whaddyagonnado?
The nursery
This is another room that we ripped the carpet out of as soon as we closed on the house, so in the pictures above it’s already gone. For being one of the smallest rooms in the house, this one took the most time to de-wallpaper. There were two stubborn layers of wallpaper on the walls and even some sort of wallpaper backing under the popcorn ceiling! By the end of it, my shoulders were lookin’ gooooood.
The color inspiration for this room stemmed from the fact that Lucius told me I was being a wimp using so many light colors in the house, which caused me to have an “I’ll show you!” moment. And I’m so glad I did because I loved the dark teal so much I want to paint it everywhere now.
There’s a lot of fear in using dark colors, and although I’m still choosy on where I use them, painting this room a dark color gave me a lot of confidence. It didn’t make the space feel small at all and brought a neat kind of drama to the space.
What you can’t see
Although I showed a majority of the house, it also has a full basement and a walk-up attic that I, unfortunately, don’t have pictures of.
When we moved in, the basement was finished but old, dark, and musty. It had dark paneling everywhere and forest green carpet. We ended up tearing everything out and it’s a good thing we did because we discovered that there was water gradually seeping in every time it rained. Interestingly, we also uncovered an old root cellar behind the paneling that we turned into an unfinished storage area. The previous owners had no idea it was there!
The attic is actually a pretty cool space with a lot of potential. Most of it is usable space, though unfinished, with enough headroom for even Lucius to walk around. It’s a walk-up attic that you access through a door in the upstairs hallway. I had visions of turning it into the ultimate kids’ playroom someday, but again, the whole moving thing got in the way.
Lastly, one major renovation you can’t really see is the HVAC. We ended up replacing the furnace and air conditioner and having the venting rerouted for efficiency. Spending money on those types of updates is always a little hard to swallow because you don’t get that visual gratification, but it was definitely worth it when temperatures dipped or soared.
A happy ending
Lucius and I had a blast renovating this house and we learned so much along the way. A super common reaction I heard when word got out that we were moving was along the lines of, “But you put so much work into it!”
Yes, we did put a ton of work into the house, but when we bought it, and for much of the time we lived there, we didn’t expect to stay long-term. We renovated it because it’s what we enjoy doing.
In the end, I definitely ended up falling in love with the house and it was hard to leave. But finding the silver lining: moving to a new house is giving us an opportunity to flex our reno muscles again on a new project and gave me the motivation to start this blog!