1964 Ranch Home Tour

After almost a year of home searching, we finally found a house we really love and were lucky enough to buy. Today I’m taking you on a home tour of the house before we made any updates at all. Hopefully you see all the potential that I see!

I’m just going to jump right into it and try to explain the photos and our future plans for each space. Obviously things can change, but this is what we’ve discussed so far, two days after closing.

The above picture is obviously the entryway. You may have noticed the wallpaper. Every inch of this house is wallpapered except the rooms that are paneled. Every room. Even the bathrooms. I think it was a very stylish home in its prime when it was built in 1964.

To the left of the entry is the hearth room and kitchen. This room is actually really dark in person because there’s no overhead lighting. I’m pretty sure the only overhead lighting in the house is in the kitchen and basement.

Sometime soon I’ll definitely paint this paneling white to brighten things up, but eventually we’ll tear out that wall that’s in the middle of the house.

I love the brick fireplace and built ins and will eventually paint that too, but I’m not sure if I’ll paint it white or black.

I think we’ll put a dining table in the hearth room for now. Maybe. We sold our dining table before we moved to the apartment, so we got a temporary one that’s super cute but too small to be the permanent table. It’ll work for now though.

On the other side of the kitchen is the garage. You can see the edge of the garage door on the right side of that photo. I honestly don’t hate the wallpaper in the kitchen and will probably leave it for now. I do plan to paint the kitchen cabinets and put up a more modern stick-on backsplash.

Then eventually we will get a new kitchen. We’re throwing around the idea of moving the kitchen to the backside of the house, but we’re still figuring out how we could make that work.

The above and below pictures are of the dining room and living room. The wooden door leads to the kitchen and the white door leads to the stairs for the basement and the plant room. I dropped the ball and didn’t get pictures of the plant room or the sun room, which are arguably my favorite rooms in the house, so I’m not sure how that happened. Whoops!

The french doors in the living room (next photo down) lead to the sunroom and it’s so nice! I see us spending a lot of time there. It looks over an amazing hosta garden that takes up most of the yard.

If you want to see more of that view, check out my instagram stories. I saved some photos of it under the “home tour” highlight. I’ll update photos here when I get a chance!

On the opposite side of the house are the bedrooms. Traditional ranch style. Check out that flowered hallway.

Here’s the master bedroom. It’s actually pretty good sized for a house this age. Finding a bedroom that would fit a king size bed was a bit of a challenge, but we have plenty of room in this one. It also has a master bathroom and two closets, so what more could we need?

The bathroom is difficult to get a photo of, but there’s the vanity, then a wall, then the toilet, and another wall separating that from the shower. We’ll definitely take everything out of this bathroom and I think it’ll feel quite a bit bigger without the walls separating everything. But there won’t be room for a double vanity. That’s not a huge concern for us and just the price you pay to have an older home.

Another awesome thing about this house is that the hardwood floors go throughout the entire main level, except in the kitchen. So that wood flooring you saw in the kitchen, hearth room and entry is actually a prefinished hardwood placed over the original hardwoods. Except in the kitchen of course.

The wood floors are in really good condition and we’ve already got the carpet out of all the bedrooms. They’re actually being refinished this week. I’m going with a much lighter stain and can’t wait to see how it changes the look of everything.

I want to get the bedrooms as close to finished as I can before we move in. At this point that entails refinishing the floors, removing the wallpaper and painting the walls.

I definitely want to get all that done in the kids’ rooms so they’re never displaced for a night of sleeping while paint dries. We’re going to try to enforce sleeping in their own rooms once we move.

For now we’re only refinishing floors in the bedrooms. Since we’re going to be removing walls in the future, there’s no point in refinishing the wood floors in the living areas yet because they’d need to be redone when the big remodels take place anyway.

One of the bedrooms has a set of french doors, which is a little strange. We’ll just have to make sure they’re locked and baby/kid proofed. And then someday teenager proof :)

These bedroom projects should go pretty quickly. I’m expecting them to take 2-3 weeks. Then once we move in we’ll focus on the hall bathroom.

I think it can be done pretty quickly and inexpensively. I want a new vanity and mirror and flooring, and we’ll need to replace the tiles around the bathtub with something a little more modern. They’re the same ones you see around the sink.

So there’s the main level! The basement is finished and has a kitchen with yellow retro appliances that are awesome, another fireplace and a bedroom and bathroom. I’ll have to share another post with those later!

The previous owner is the only other owner of the house and she has taken amazing care of everything. Everything is in great shape and you can tell she really loved it for the 53 years she lived there. We were actually able to meet her on the day we closed and she told us more about the house and her time there. I feel so privileged to be the one she trusts to take over everything.

Overall I am so so so excited for this house! I think we’ll be super happy here and I’m so excited to turn it into a home we love even more!