The House: Before and After...

Last night we hosted our first large group in our home. The life group we meet with on Sunday nights from church came to our house for dinner, games, and a devotional lesson. It was a great evening. In preparation, Jack and I cleaned and cleaned so today, as promised, I have pictures of the inside of our house: before and after the renovations! (Please excuse the picture layout. Inserting this many pictures through blogger was more challenging and time consuming than I expected.)

Keep in mind, all of the before pictures were taken before the previous owner was completely moved out so the furniture was moved out when they left.

Let's start with the utility room:

Before:

Notice the green paint, green vinyl valances, and unpainted wood paneling....

After:

Now, it is a utility room so pardon the hangers and slight mess, but notice the beautiful tan and white paint, lovely new valance and new floor. There is also a new light fixture in here but you can't see that from this picture.

Now to the kitchen! Before:

There's that green paint again. And how about those saloon doors?

After:

So the changes in here include painted cabinets, new hardware, new light fixtures (again not pictured), new floors, new window treatments, new blinds, and new paint.

Some of the biggest changes occurred in the living room. So...here is the before:

The living room was originally two rooms: a den and formal living room. The formal living room was red with white carpet and a flowery border that was triple-glued (rrrrrgh)! The den was green (again) paneling and because of the fireplace the room was very narrow and offered few options for furniture set-up. So...we began to think about taking down the wall between the two rooms and creating one large living room for ourselves.

After:

Now we have a large living room and 18 people sat comfortably around last night during our life group meeting. As you can see, we also have new carpet, paint, window treatments, and light fixtures in this room too.

Guest bedroom and guest bathroom. Before:

The guest bathroom had gold lantern light fixtures that cast a yellow light all over the room, not to mention that they were hung low in mirror. Furthermore, there was no shower in the guest bathroom, just the (wonderful) jacuzzi tub. The guest bedroom was fine. The biggest problem with it was a ceiling fan that was improperly hung and no carpet. (Jack and I like carpet...don't judge us.)

After:

In the guest bathroom, we changed light fixtures, added a vent/light fixture, added the shower and marble around the jacuzzi tub, painted, and put in a new toilet. In the guest bedroom, we painted, added carpet, and changed the light fixture.

Finally, our bedroom and bathroom. Before:

Our bedroom had wall paper and no carpet. Our bathroom was green (again) and the shower tiles were falling off the walls. We ended up having to take the shower completely out and re-doing the entire thing. That was one of the largest projects we tackled.

After:

In our bedroom we added carpet, painted (after stripping wallpaper), changed the light fixture, and bought new bedroom furniture (which I love!). In the bathroom, we painted and completely gutted and changed out the shower. We put in marble instead of tile. Hopefully it will serve us well for years to come.

There are other rooms in the house not pictured here (the dining room, office, garage, and outside storage building) but these are the ones that are 1. clean and 2. the most changed. This project took up a large part of our summer and we are very thankful to our wonderful family who helped us with all the work and also friends and family who helped us move.

We feel truly blessed to be in our home. It is great for us and we have learned alot from the renovations (as you may have read if you keep up with this blog). Thanks for your prayers and support!

Finally moved in....kinda!

Well this past weekend was a big weekend for our family. On Saturday we moved the rest of the stuff from the house we were renting to our new house. There are still somethings in the garage at the old place and the house needs to be cleaned before we turn it back over to the family member we were renting it from. However, for all practical purposes we are totally in our new house!!! YAY!!! Nearly 3 months after we took possesion, we are finally living in OUR house. It's kinda weird though. For the first time I can remember, I kept myself awake last night (not for too terribly long) worrying about everything else that has to be done. AUGH!!!! We haven't even unboxed everything....heck we haven't even unboxed 70% of our stuff, but I'm already worried and thinking about what has to be done NEXT!! DANG IT!

However, I eventually fell asleep and everything that needs to be done will eventually get done. God will provide. While I had a moment I wanted to stop and thank EVERYONE for helping (physically or financially) us during this process. I would try to name those that helped, however I am affraid that I would leave someone out. To everyone that did help we owe you a huge debt of gratitude. Without your help we would not be in the house as early as we were. Heck we may not be in the house at Christmas if it was just us working on it!!

Again thanks for keeping up with us on this blog. We hope that you have enjoyed the frustrations, joys, and lessons learned during the process of getting the house done. More will come as we work on the other projects that are keeping me up at night! ;)

Here a year...

It hit us this past weekend that we have been in the town that we now live in for a whole year (Saturday, June 20th was actually exactly one year). It's amazing how things change and yet how things stay the same. When we left the town we were living in we were very excited about moving, while at the same time very sad about leaving some of our dear friends behind. But here we are a year later and it's funny how things have changed. We are glad to be moving where we were, but as the saying goes "You can never move back 'home'." How true this has been. We are excited about being close to family, however this presents unique challenges (in SO many ways). We are excited about our jobs, however this past year has been very, very, very stressful on both of us (and unfortunately this doesn't look to be getting any better). We are excited about working with a ministry that has a leader and a church that strongly supports it, however the "perfect" situation really isn't all that "perfect". We are excited about buying a house, but the jobs that we (and everyone else) think that we should do before we move-in never seem to cease. We miss our lives in the town we left. We really miss some of the people we left. We miss the smiling faces of the students we left.

Will the other saying of "time heals all wounds" fix these problems that we seem to have? Who knows. Stay tuned! ;)

The Work Continues...

Demolition continues at our house. We officially have a hole where the master bedroom shower used to be, but we also have a new shower head where there previously wasn't one in the guest bathroom. Tiles have been removed and I think I saw a little smile on Jack's face when he got to take a sledge hammer to the shower floor this past weekend. It is fun to work with tools and tear stuff up, no matter what it looks like when you are through.

The wallpaper removal is a whole different story. Whoever put up the border in the living room and dining room loved wallpaper paste. LOVED wallpaper paste. I think they must have found a good sale on it somewhere and just hated not to use it all because they double or triple pasted this border on this wall. It was going no where. This border had to be removed in layers-- the top layer, the backing, and then the sticky residue left behind kind of like when you remove a price tag from an item and the residue is left, but worse. My mom, Jack's mom, and I, along with my cousin, and a few others from time to time have worked on it for days and we have about a wall and a half left to remove.

We are beginning to consider paint colors and floor coverings so everything is moving along nicely. We are rather boring when it comes to paint, so that choice shouldn't be too difficult for us. And when it comes to floor coverings, we prefer carpet. I know, I know...hardwood is beautiful. Hardwood is THE thing to do. Hardwood is easy to care for (sort of). We've heard all of the arguments and seen all of the eye rolling when it comes to floor covering. We do have some original hardwood in the house, but we just prefer carpet. So, we will protect that hardwood by choosing a carpet that we like and enjoying the comfort of nice, soft, warm carpet. Thank you.

Between all the work at the house and all the work I'm doing for my summer teaching, I completely forgot that this past weekend was a holiday weekend until last Friday. So while I enjoyed having the day off yesterday and spending some restful time with our families, I now have to be mindful of the shorter work week in completing what I need to do for my summer class. I am trying very hard to focus on enjoying each process that I am dealing with this summer, from the house, to teaching, to all of the other work I am having to do. I know how quickly this summer is going to pass me by and if I spend all my time worrying about how quickly it's going to go or wishing the house was done and I was moved I'm not going to enjoy any of it. So instead I'm trying to learn as I go, take pictures, and enjoy the processes I'm involved in. I hope that will help me make the most of this summer.