Anyone who has ever lived through a house renovation knows just how frustrating it can be.
And if you plan to do the renovating yourself, well, some people might just call you crazy.
Peter Larson of Lansing, New York, however, decided he wanted to be the one to fix up his ancestral home.
Peter and his new wife, Hilarie, inherited the house after Peter’s grandfather died and the pair knew they wanted it to be their family home.
It had been built in the 1860s by Peter’s great great grandfather and had been passed down through the generations.
There were about 20 years, from the 70s to the early 90s, when the house was unoccupied and had slowly fallen into disrepair.
As young newlyweds, Peter and Hilarie didn’t have much extra money to hire contractors and so Peter decided to do it himself.
The couple bought a small trailer and parked it on the empty foundation of an old barn and they lived there while Peter fixed up the house.
He didn’t have much construction knowledge other than what he learned in a high school shop class, so a lot of the early stages of the reno were all about research.
Peter’s first task was to remove the entirety of the old kitchen area, and to fix the houses foundation.
The foundation of the kitchen area had been made with old stones and, instead of getting rid of them completely, Peter pulled each one up by hand and brought them to the border of his property where he built a low stone perimeter wall.
The rest of the houses foundation was made of a lime/sand mix and had eroded away with the passage of time.
Peter, therefore, had to redo the entirety of the foundation, and he add a bit of concrete to the lime and sand mix he used in order to improve erosion.
As well as the foundation, Peter also replaced the mudsills which were originally made of chestnut but had rotted quite badly.
Once the foundation was completed, it was time to move onto the roof.
Peter built his own scaffolding to get to the roof and quickly realized that almost the whole things would have to be replaced.
He made his way slowly around the building, fixing one section at a time before moving onto the next one.
After the roof was time to fix the siding and add a porch.
Working the same way as he had with the roof, Peter slowly made his way around the exterior of the house and adding the siding one portion at a time.
Peter says that adding on a new porch was one of his favorite parts of the project as it was completely his own idea and design.
When it came to doing the inside of the house, Peter felt a little out of his depth, so he hired a general contractor to help him.
Together they built all the partition walls and added insulation and drywall, as well as radiant heating throughout the floors of the entire house.
Soon enough, with the help of the contractor and his sub contractors doing all the electrical and plumbing work, the house was finished.
From 1860 to today, the Larson home has looked very much the same, surely Peter’s ancestors are appreciative of the amazing work he did.
Check out the incredible renovation in the video below!
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