Time to Open Our Doors!
Rebuilding a Vacant, Historic Detroit Home (Episode 67)
Open Doors, Open House!
After much ado about everything, we are excited to announce that we will once again be opening up our home to visitors for our community University District Home Tour this year on September 14th! We are thankful to be a part of such a lovely group of homes on the tour this year, and we can’t wait to meet all of the visitors to our community!
But first, a teaser of the work we’ve been doing since our last update in September of last year!
Solarium
After finally figuring out our painting challenges out in this space (see our last post), we finally began to bring out all the details and furniture into this space. It started with our seating and some plants, which quickly livened up the space. Aja’s window sill spot is getting put to use as she’s essentially out sunbathing in this room every. single. day. After a hunt for more details, and in particular a rug that worked with our checker tile floor and I think we finally have this space how we want it for now.
The final touch was a painting of a garden snake above our doors by artist R.A. Miller, a legally blind folk artist from Georgia. My mother acquired the painted tin roofing when I was a child and the piece has been in my childhood home for my entire life. After receiving it from my mother, it has needed the right spot for some time to call home, and I think it suits our solarium perfectly.
Garage
Out in the garage, we finally focused on getting things organized! Starting with our floors, we hired a local company to polish the concrete floors. This would expose some of the natural stone in the concrete, shine things up a little bit, and allow us to make the garage functional as not only a working space, but even a secondary outdoor entertaining space.
Cabinets
After the floors were finished, Brandon and his father Mike quickly got to work installing our shop cabinets which had been patiently waiting in the attic for well over a year. Our New Age Cabinets allow us to move all of our basement tools out to the garage with a nice counter space to work on, and gives us a place to store everything from lawn equipment to a nice charging station for all our battery powered tools, lawn equipment, ebikes and mopeds.
Once cabinets were up, I took it upon myself to bring in a little art for the walls from a fellow moped enthusiast. I then finally took the time to paint our windows and doors in the garage, which have been sitting primer white for some time now.
Attic Storage
With the cabinets out of the garage attic, we took to tackling some shelving for the garage attic space as well. This space is so massive, and so IKEA saved the day with some simple, inexpensive shelving. While we havent fully organized this space yet (it’s a little hot to be organizing up there right now), we are at least well on our way to having a very useful space for storing everything from my Halloween decorations, to our Summer/Winter yard tools, ladders and the rest! The lift has been such an amazing asset in the garage to really help this space be optimized and convenient for daily storage and use! Of all of our strange side ideas, the lift is one of our least regretted decisions of the entire project.
Front Door
Another project we tackled was regarding our front door and porch. I’d spent so much time in years past refinishing our front door, but was never 100% happy with the result. The many under layers of paint and complex woodwork made completely stripping quite difficult. But the failure to strip entirely meant that we experienced bubbling and chipping paint just a few short years after putting so many woman-hours into it. We finally bit the bullet and paid for a professional to take our door and take it completely down to wood again. The inside of the door we were able to determine was stain-grade wood initially and so we have returned it to stained! The outside was repainted with a high gloss enamel paint that should hopefully last a long time this time.
Detroit Design Magazine
Once furnishing in this room was complete, our architect Elise DeChard of END Studio requested a shoot for some magazine features they were applying for. The photos ended up getting picked up by Detroit Design Magazine, a local interior design publication in their Summer 2024 issue. It was at that point we leaked the news about our upcoming Home Tour to the Metro Detroit area.
We Can’t Wait to See You!
We are now working on other small projects to get ready for the tour in this last month. Power washing, painting, cleaning, organizing, and all the final touches preparing for hundreds of visitors on September 14th. If you want to purchase tickets to the tour, they can be found on Eventbrite.com here.
On the tour, we plan to feature all of these new spaces, our lovely completed garden and finally, our vintage vehicles as well! Brandon’s Great-Grandfather’s 1954 Chevrolet 210 coupe and my vintage 1950s German mopeds will be on display.
Thanks so much for following along with us on this journey! We look forward to meeting you in person in September!
Our journey isn’t over
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