The Beginning

We closed on our house on February 14, 2020, a valentine's gift to each other. We found the house through our good friend Christine (it's a very "St. Louis story") after going to various open houses for about 6 months, and when we were just starting to get discouraged.

The house was built in 1905, and is on a 1/3 acre lot, which is uncommonly large for the area. The previous owner, Ed, seemed like really remarkable man. As we learned from Christine, he was a teacher-traveler-gardener who lived simply in the house for 40 years, and made very few updates on the interior of the house. The outside is a whole different story: he was an avid gardener who was passionate about native plants and had planted up the entire front and back yards with the exact kinds of native plants that we would have planted ourselves.

Here are some pictures of the house, before we began any of our work. There's one more room not pictured here, a large dining room off of the kitchen, that we forgot to take pictures of. Oops! It has the same footprint as the master bedroom, but without the small sunroom.