This room was a disaster when we moved in. It had a lovely bright pinkish-red stained carpet and dirty off white walls. Luckily, we found hardwood floors under it. Shawn did the sanding & finishing of the floor this summer. We painted, put our furniture in and it turned into a living room! Wow, that seems like it should be pretty easy and fast….
We love the wood burning stove, it’s one of our favorite things. The pillows my grandmother made for us from a patterned fabric I found and fell in love with. Our custom made coffee table I stole out of a magazine. It’s actually two palettes on wheels. Shawn made it when we were living in our apartment. I got a lot of grief when I wanted to make it..it’s blocky, and very heavy… but I LOVE my coffee table.
Very thankful to have a workspace! I worked hard to make my office exactly how I wanted it. I even claimed this room as my office before we bought the house!
Here’s the progress & finished product. Yes, inside all my closets and cabinets are BRIGHT yellow = )
This house has been a labor of love. We became “first time homebuyers” with an idea and order of everything we were going to do… and in a timeline. (those of you that have owned a house will probably laugh at that..) Let’s just say that list order hasn’t quite been followed. Shawn works every night after work late to make progress every day. I look back & can’t believe we have accomplished so much in 6 months. Most of it is behind the walls, but necessary. We are also SO THANKFUL for all the help we have received.
Over the next week I’m going to post a few updates on the *finished* projects.
Below is our mud room. ( It wasn’t really on the list to COMPLETELY re-do this year…)
However, it has our washer & dryer in it & when we learned there was no heat… well, that became an issue! When we starting to poke around to put electric heat in, we learned termites had destroyed the entire porch. (We don’t have active termites, and thank goodness we got treatment the week we moved in!) We have no idea how the walls & roof were even staying up. The wood was literally like paper and crumbled when you touched it. We LOVED our windows (and was one reason we fell in love with this house) but they are really the worst windows to be energy efficient. So around Halloween we started “our porch” project. Shawn (with much help from both our Dads!) did everything from demo, framing, pouring cement, installing new windows, new door, new siding, new stone, sheathing, installation, drywall, tile floor, heat, painting, electric, trim, you name it!
Oh, AND when we moved our old washer & dryer, the washer somehow broke & started smoking.
So… you know what that means….
Right before everything went into the dumpster…
100% finished…
(I fought to keep one original item! the light over the washer/dryer)
This picture is a little crooked… but believe me, the floors are level & flat!
Old View From Outside
The Current View:
Merry Christmas! Can you guess what we got each other?
Shawn & I tease each other that he bought me the dryer and I bought him the washer. However, I’m just excited to have a VERY useful gift. (Regardless of whether it was a surprise or not!). I’ve very thankful…
I hope everyone enjoys their Christmas!
Can you believe that I could only find less than 10 pictures of Shawn & I in 2010?? How did that happen!
So my personal posts have been a little MIA lately. I’ve been behind with everything else, and somehow my “weekly house updates” turned into “no updates…” So I am going to try and play catch-up!
A lot has been going on with our house. Mainly because of Shawn.. I have to admit, I haven’t done too much except make things messy. (especially my office– see proof of that in the last picture)
He’s been working on putting new trim coil, soffits, gutters and downspouts around our house. (Motivated from when we found out that the crown molding was torn down to hang gutters and the person never filled in the gap between the roof line & fascia. This made rodents (and bats) very happy to find an easily accessible home to live in. Unfortunately, that made us very unhappy home owners. Everything is sealed now- and he has one last piece of gutter to hang. Does it look pretty? (Someday, maybe early next year the pink will be gone 
)
AFTER PICTURE BELOW:
BEFORE PICTURE BELOW: Notice the gutter downspouts are actually PVC pipe– and the gutters are falling off the house.
BELOW PICTURE: Progress on the soffit, 3rd story. (You can see Shawn behind a tree on the right ladder )
We have also been discussing plans and ideas just about every night. This is Shawn’s idea for landscaping the driveway. We want to stone the entire circle, build a retaining wall around the back with a fence and put a garden walkway through the center. We also want to fence the front of the house where the road is, take down all the trees and bushes and plant something more charming. (see sketch in top right corner)
We tested out our woodburning stove last night and can I say that I LOVE IT! It’s just about the only thing in this house that has worked on the first attempt. It kept us cozy all night.
We kept this close… the odds were against us for something to go wrong!
Shawn’s also been tackling a few other projects, that I know little details on. Our next big project is gutting the 3rd floor and our side porch. Both need major help. He’s been preparing for that!
And here are 2 pictures from this summer- just for fun
And this picture is just to prove that I’m staying busy! This picture is actually from August– but it’s the last picture I took of my office. I’m hoping to post a finished room update for both my office & the living room sometime soon! But I have to say, I do love having alot of workroom space!
Shawn has been slaving over our living room floor for the past 72 hours. I gave up after I got a HUGE blister pulling out the last of the staples Sunday morning.
So happy we decided to re-finish the original oak wood floors. Even happier that Shawn’s a hard worker Here’s the progress so far!
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