House Pictures: Before and After

Here are a few before and after pictures of the house. Some of the pictures are from before we moved in because we forgot to take pictures of it empty. Now we still have a lot of work to do, even in these rooms that we've worked on. In the dining room for instance, we are going to recover the chairs; in the living room there's stuff everywhere sitting in places other than where they will end up; in Jeremy and Emma's room there's still some work to do there with touching up paint and whatnot.

Jeremy and Emma's room before (complete with previous owner's stuff).



During the process of getting the laminate off the floor.


Laminate off, now on to wood sanding, polishing, and polyurethane.


And the (nearly) end result. We still need to put dressers in and clothes, books, etc. We're leaving the funky light because it isn't nearly as bad as the rest of them.


Dinning room before.


Process of getting wallpaper off.


Painted, carpet removed, wood sanded, stained, and polyurethaned.

Nasty curtains down, ones that match wall colors up.
Living room. You can see where we left the carpet, Nathan and our friend Ryan did that.



Living room before.

Living room front windows and walls after.



Our room which we haven't done much with other than take down those pink drapes and that pink light. Without them the nasty pink haze is gone.

The Retro House Updated

I know it's been about a week since I blogged, but hey, I warned you that it would be a while, right? Things have been crazy here with trying to get the house in order and out of its 1950s shell. For example:

Here's me trying to get the linoleum off the floor in Jeremy and Emma's room.

Jeremy's been sleeping on his mattress in the living room or on our bed (it just has depended on where we've been working while they're asleep). Emma's been sleeping in the portable crib. Megan is the lucky one who has a bed and who's room isn't really covered in boxes.

We've also been taking down wallpaper. Lots of it. Here's the living room wallpaper coming down and you can kinda get a peek at a dining room wall in its new bareness. We almost finished painting last night. As we were off to bed Nathan noticed two or three little spots near the ceiling that need touch ups, so we should be done with this sometime this morning.
And here's me mowing our yard. This is my very first time EVER mowing a yard. We decided against the traditional mower that uses gas since it's so expensive, stinky, and loud and opted for the old school push mower. It was actually a lot of fun and did a good job cutting the grass. I had my doubts, but it worked well.
We've also been hard at play.

I loved this shot of the tricycle next to Nathan's bike. But here you see we've done sidewalk chalk, something we weren't allowed to do at the apartment complex.
Water gun fights while waiting for the Memorial Day Parade to begin.

This one's for you, Leanne! There were two bagpipe bands in the parade and this one was really good (in my I-know-nothing-about-pipe-bands opinion).
And Dad, this one's for you. There were a bunch of these little "Korvettes" (sorry if the "" are unnecessary, I don't know if that's the real name or not). These guys were really cool. They drove around really fast and did all kinds of formation work.


I've also started working on the front yard, pulling out weeds and the wild plants that were growing around the trees in front and planting new ones. I've been working on the front yard for three days and I'm nowhere near done with the area around just one of the trees. Some of our good friends gave us a flat of flowers after they bought too many and that sparked my drive to get it done. So at our tri-weekly trip to Home Depot we bought a few more flats and now I'm hard at work on another project.

So in addition to those things we've been trying to put away everything, get the basement in a condition ready for the kids to take over (it's going to be a play room for them), ripping up carpet in the dining room to reveal beautiful hardwood floors that need only a little bit of help to make them ready, and I'm still babysitting among all this mess and craziness. Fun times!

We love being in a house, we are extremely grateful to have it, to have our own space, and have a chance to make it our own. Even if it means things aren't being put away immediately.