Good Bones but Needed a Major Renovation #

We finally landed back in Simi Valley but in the Bridle Path community. This is a community of 630 homes that was developed in the mid 1970’s within the city limits but zoned for residents to keep horses on their property. What was unique about this neighbourhood is that the street looks like a normal street but the space behind the houses were acres. Mary found a house that was an English Tutor that the owners were trying to make look like a Ranch but the bones where there. It was on 2.5 acres, all on one floor and just under 3000 square feet. This was much bigger than our previous house and the biggest house that Mary had ever owned.

Taking some of the ideas that we saw from some of the other houses that we thought were pretty cool we began a very major renovation. We did something to every room in the house except for the bathroom off of the office. The total renovation took about 3 months. Mary lived and worked in the one bedroom that would eventually become the office. It got too dusty and dirty to stay there after 2 months so the last month I moved them into a dog friendly hotel in Westlake using points that I was earning from. I had it pretty easy during this renovation as I was working on a 9 month consultancy project in Portland, Oregon. I was gone from Monday to Thursday night so only had a few days a week to deal with the inconvenience.

Eventually the renovations were completed and we were able to setup the home, buy some furniture for the family room, hang the TV’s and start to enjoy this new home that we purchased. It was a fun place to invite people over as we had the room. Mary had a dining room table that we always set to the smallest size and it still felt to big for that dinning room in the Booth house. In this new house we had all the sleeves in place so that it was at the maximum size and it was very comfortable in the dining room space.

In the formal living room we went all out to really give this house an English Tutor look by opening up the ceiling and exposing the rafters. This really heighten this room and really looks cool. The office which sat just off of the kitchen and behind the family room we opened it up and put plantation shutters in. This way I could be working in the office and Mary could be in the kitchen or the family room and we could still talk to each other. It really looked like the house that we both imagined it could be.