The Tiny House Renovation Project

We purchased our tiny house back in June.  It was sold “as-is” by the estate of a deceased woman.  She had 8 children (all girls) and lived in this 1,100 square foot cape.  The house was built in the early 60′s and was built solidly.  We loved the bones of the house, but to really live there we had to make a few changes.

Kitchen

The kitchen was the most obvious place to start.  Standing in the existing kitchen, I just couldn’t picture myself living there.  There were only a handful of cabinets and the room was completely closed off from the living areas. I couldn’t picture myself preparing a meal in this space. We had to do something drastic.

The rest of the kitchen. That’s it. That’s all there was.

The kitchen was completed closed off from the rest of the living space

There were two rooms next to the kitchen, a full bathroom and a large laundry room.

Here’s a view of the bathroom (to the right).

We decided to remove the full bathroom and use that space to add to the kitchen.   We added a half bathroom to the laundry room since it was large enough to easily accommodate a toilet and sink/vanity.    We added a tub/shower to the upstairs half bathroom, since it also had plenty of space to accommodate this fixture.

We started by demolishing the existing kitchen, ripping down the walls between the kitchen, living room and bathroom and demolishing the existing bathroom completely.

The kitchen and bathroom area after demolition was complete.

We left the center chimney for now.  There’s a strong possibility that natural gas will be coming to our street.  Once it does we will purchase a direct vent natural gas heater and will no longer need the chimney.  Then we will demolish it and probably build a kitchen island/breakfast bar in that general area.  For now, the chimney is an “architectural element”.

This was about the time that I rented a Chevy Tahoe and took at trip down to IKEA in Boston.  Turns out, a Tahoe isn’t really big enough to fit an entire kitchen including microwave and dishwasher.  But the car loading angels at IKEA somehow got all 155 boxes (9 flat carts) into the vehicle with the dishwasher strapped to the top.

I’m not saying I could see out of the vehicle on the way back to Maine, or that it was safe,  but I did make it, so I was pretty relieved.

The next step was putting all the cabinets together.

This was a daunting task, but it got easier with practice.

Jeremy and I are good at demolishing things, but not great at making them look pretty again.  So we hired a contractor (Jim Dance and Larry) to put it all back together and install the kitchen.  Jim is the same contractor that transformed our beach house in Pemaquid.

Here’s the kitchen without counter tops, flooring and trim, and pulls, and some appliances.

Here is the kitchen almost complete. We had a wood floor (birch) installed which comes close to matching the existing floor in the dining room.

All that is missing at this point is some paint and lighting.

The after pictures!

Bathrooms

The kitchen was by far the biggest impact, but we also renovated two bathrooms. We added a half-bath in the laundry room and we added a tub/shower to the upstairs bathroom to make it a full. We also added new vanities, removed wallpaper, and refinished the floors.

This is the laundry room that was to the right of the full bathroom next to the kitchen that we demolished.

All we had to do was remove the wallpaper, have the floor refinished, paint the walls and have a toilet and sink added.  It definitely looks better now.

The upstairs bathroom looked like this when we started, it had a closet but was only a half-bath. It had plenty of room for a bathtub behind the door.

We added a shower/tub, a new wood floor (maple), new lighting, and a vanity that I found on Craigslist.

Here is another picture that shows the vanity and the lighting.

Here’s the tub/shower that we added. Eventually we’ll have glass doors put on, but for now, it’s fine with a curtain.

The bedrooms really didn’t change much. We painted the walls and refinished the floors.
Here are the before and after pictures of the master bedroom:

We finished the remodel in early September and found a tenant right away. We have our current house on the market and once it sells, we will move into this smaller house. We have given away a large portion of our things, but have to keep minimizing in order to fit into 1100 sq ft comfortably. It’s been a fun process, and we are excited about living in it someday.