FULL Farmhouse TOUR | Before & After | Cottage Style Decorating

Hey everyone, Shay Elliott here from the Elliott Homestead, and welcome to our cottage. We moved into this house three years ago, and in that time we have devoted ourselves to making it beautiful once again. We really are turning back the clock. This part that we're standing in now was built in the 1960s. The old part of the house was built in the early 1900s. And so we're really trying to marry those two pieces of the house into one unified, old-looking, crusty house in the very best way. So we've spent three years so far making a lot of changes that we wanted to show you. There is still a lot to do, but we gotta celebrate the progress so far. So the piece of the house that I'm standing in right now is the living room. There's just one living room in this house, and it really serves as the social hub. So when we have people over for dinner, or when we're sitting down to read a book as a family, there's a fireplace in here. So especially in the winter, we tend to really gravitate towards this room. But the best feature of this room is the floor-to-ceiling windows that they put in when they made this addition. They are phenomenal and overlook the mountains and the river that run through our little Wenatchee Valley. Stu, what's your favorite part of this room? I love the windows. Yeah. They are awesome. But I also just love all the places to sit. Yes. Because, you know, we do, that's kind of our relaxing thing. We do, we do a lot of sitting. Sit down, find a comfy spot. Yes. In the wintertime, I love the fireplace area. Yeah. And I love, it's just a good family kind of room. It is. A lot of the furniture is old and crusty and from garage sales. We have one new piece of furniture that we bought when we moved in. But the rest is really meant to be inviting. I want people to feel like they can sit down and get comfortable and put their feet up. You know what one of my favorite things is? What? There's no technology in here. That's true. You'll notice there is no television in our main room. We're not a television family. We do watch family movies on Sundays, which is a lot of fun. And the kids occasionally do watch a show, but we keep that downstairs and we keep it to an absolute minimum. So the point of this room is actually to be really centered around creative things. So you'll notice there are stacks of books everywhere. There's a piano because Georgia and I both play the piano. The other kids haven't started yet, but they will. What else? Usually there's a guitar hanging out somewhere. So one of the very first things that we did when we moved into this house was rip out the old blue carpet that was in this living room. And what we found underneath was just particle board that worked well enough. So we painted that white and that has served as our floor for the last three years. But this fall, we're hoping to put wide wood planks down with really rough sawn lumber that we can stain and make it look like a nice old floor. What else do we wanna do in here? Ooh, the fireplace. So the fireplace has served us well and it is beautiful, but we really wanna bring all the stone that we have out in the gardens, we wanna bring that element inside. So we are going to resurface this fireplace in really rough stone that will make it look super old. I'm determined to do that. So the last project that we want to do in this room besides the floor and the fireplace is to put a grid of timbers along the ceiling. The ceiling is really low and really big. It's just a huge unused space. So just to kind of break it up and add some architectural interest, we'll put some beams across and die them to kind of create a really big grid of wood, which it doesn't really sound that pretty, but I think it will be pretty, right? You look through the old cottage books. Yes, you see it, yeah, you see it a lot. So I think that will kind of help this space. Kind of makes like a panel. Yeah, it does. And it'll go really well with the chandeliers that we got wired in. It'll be really pretty. So this is the living room. So now we've moved to the dining room. The living room is just two steps up off the dining room and the dining room really is the heart of the home because everything snakes off this one room. The living room that way, the kitchen that way, the bathroom that way, and all the bedrooms. So this room probably more than any other gets activity, even more so than the kitchen. It's part of the old part of the house. And one of the first things that we did when we moved in, again, was rip up the carpet that was on the floor. And what we discovered were these beautiful fir floors that show the age of time a little bit, but they're very charming in their rustic sort of a way. Wouldn't you say, Stu? Mm-hmm. The other thing that we did was cover the popcorn ceiling, which was put up at some point with tongue and groove plank, what is it? It's from Lowe's. It's just like walling? Paneling, yeah. Paneling, thank you. That's the word I was looking for. And it really kind of gave the room this old school sort of a feel to it. So I'm really happy with how that turned out. Of course, we changed the light fixture. We put in our table that Stu made us that sits 20. Added in a bunch of old furniture, added in our ice box, which serves as our sort of bar in our dining room. What I love about this room is how much character it has. So we replaced old slider doors with French doors that you can open up that go right out into the courtyard. So there's gravel and flowers one step away from the dining room table. And there's just so much character in this room. I think there's been a trend in America to sort of just sterilize our dining rooms, you know? And it's chairs that nobody sits in and furniture that nobody uses because instead we just watch our television shows, you know, and eat our meals on the couches. And that's not the case in this home. Our dining room takes so much wear and tear. This is also the room where we school. And so we hide our homeschool stuff in our little green cabinet over there. And we have to clear the table a hundred times a day. And that's just the name of the game. There's never a tablecloth that's on for more than 12 hours because it gets food spilled on it. The roses or the flowers are constantly having to be replaced, but it's a beautiful space that's so full of life. I don't really think there's a lot to do in this room. Are you happy hearing me say that? Yeah, I'm very happy. I think the only thing I want to do is finish getting the vents in and then trim out the doorways that go into the bedrooms. And I think we need to re-trim the baseboards. And we need to re-do the baseboards. And maybe finish painting all the trim as well. Yeah, well, you know, up some finish work. But for the most part, I mean, this room has just served us so well for the last three years. I'm really pleased with how it's come together. So we're still in the old part of the house here. This is the one and only bathroom that we have in our house for our family of six. And we've adapted pretty well. Everyone sort of knows the rules now. So even though this bathroom looks like it's been here for a while, it did not look like this when we moved in. When we moved in, it was just your standard, you know, plastic shower stall. And wasn't there carpet in here? No, there was linoleum in here. What was on the walls? Drywall? Trying to remember even. Maybe I've blocked it out of my memory. I do remember it was really nasty. And I do remember the boys had ruined it. They busted holes in the plastic and torn handles off the shower within just a few weeks. So we needed to deal with this. Oh, and the toilet was leaking all over the floor. So last summer, I'll tag the post about our bathroom renovation below the video. Last summer, we gutted it. We had to rent a porta potty and use that for two weeks while we totally redid this space. The bonus of gutting the whole bathroom was discovering the wood flooring that was under the linoleum and the shiplap that was behind the drywall. So we were able to expose these really old elements of the house that had just been suffocated beneath layers and layers of linoleum and drywall for years. So we kind of tried to bring the bathroom back with a theme that felt more fitted to the old house. I love how it turned out. It's our one blue room thus far. I'm kind of ashamed to say that our bedroom was one of the very last rooms that we dealt with for about two and a half years. It was half painted and we had busted out a closet. So there was exposed sheet rock. It was just a mess. Again, this house is really old. So the bedrooms are really, really small. And so in order for us to maneuver our queen-size bed in here, we had to take out the closet that was in here and replace it with this shif-a-robe. So the shif-a-robe really forces us to have condensed wardrobes because it only holds so many, obviously, and we share it. So this limits our space. It's very un-American, isn't it? Small bedrooms, no closets, very small storage spaces. It's kind of, it really is dialing back in time almost. But once we did finish our bedroom, we were both so happy with how it turned out. So we replaced the window that was in here with a bigger window and exposed the shiplap that was behind the sheet rock. And we took out the closet, shifted the bed around, brought in the shif-a-robe, and redid the trim and just painted it a very clean white. This bedroom looks out over the gardens. So you get a lot of fragrance coming in from the flowers and you get a lot of daylight that spills in. So it always feels really light and airy and clean. So I'm really happy with how it turned out. So the room that's taken us the most time to get right, and it's still not quite there, has been our farmhouse kitchen. When we came in, this was AstroTurf carpet and 80s cabinets and 80s appliances and metal sinks. And it was a really far cry from what we were hoping it could be. So we dove into this about six months after we moved in and it was a ton of demo that brought up layers and layers of flooring and cabinets and dust and dead mice. And it was pretty bad for quite a while. So we began the transformation by taking down all of the cabinets, taking out all of the old appliances and completely reworking the countertops and counter areas with these custom counters that Stu built from a local mill. Then we reworked the countertops again to accommodate for the La Conche stove that we brought in a few years later. And then we reworked the kitchen again when we built our cooler downstairs so we could get rid of our refrigerator in the kitchen. So this room has kind of gone through this transformation over and over and over again. I think it's roughly the way that it will be now, except we finally got our washer and dryer out of here and put them downstairs, which means we have this big open area. And my dream is to put in a stone fireplace in here so that we can actually cook over, you know, what you cook over, fire. I think what I love most about this kitchen are the really vibrant green cabinets because they always catch people by surprise when they come in, because it's just not a color that you see in our whitewashed world. The floor is also kind of a sweet surprise that we found. So underneath that AstroTurf were layers and layers and layers of flooring. And underneath all of that was this old subfloor that they used, which is actually tongue and groove wood plank. And it just has this really rustic old feel to it because it is. So yes, I have to get out the vacuum and like vacuum between the cracks of the wood planks. And it always looks a little bit scruffy, but that's kind of the feeling that we love in our house. And I love that because people can live here, people can scruff it up, and it doesn't make it look worse. In fact, it makes it look better. So it's a very nice feeling.