[Note: This post was started about six months ago. Whoops.]

Now that the summer has come and gone, it is time to acknowledge that we have owned our little white brick house in Magnolia now for over a year. We bought it last summer knowing full well it needed work done and in the past year have managed to cross some major things off the list.

Last fall we had the whole house rewired, removing the unsafe 1930s knob-and-tube wiring. This was also required to safely support the new kitchen appliances we had installed. All along, Chris has been spending a lot of time on Craigslist selling furniture. Turns out a lot of the furniture we purchased for our first house back in 2002 did not fit this house.

Right after we moved in I had repainted the kitchen cabinets and freshened up the paint in our bedroom, but the rest of the house waited for Chris Brown to visit. He painted our dining room, living room, the hallway and the guest room. We also put him to work changing out the light in our dining room and hanging a ceiling fan in the guest room.

The biggest item crossed off this first year was to having our floors refinished. We are fortunate to have nice inlayed white oak hardwood floors in most of the house. It appears that at some point these original floors were probably covered with carpet, so after 80 years they needed some work. Here is an idea of the damage and wear to our floors before the refinishing.

In fact, the stains and areas of high traffic wear were some of the easier fixes. At one point in time someone had circled a bunch of the nail pops with a pen and then proceeded to fix them with large nails.

In a few areas almost every tiny tack nail had been replaced with a large nail. Our floor guy did an awesome job taking all these nails out and refilling the holes. The result it pretty awesome.

Now the fun part – some before-and-after photos of the work done.