"Before" and "After"

All right Stephanie, I'm finally posting "before" and "after" photos! This isn't just for Stephanie actually (I just like to give her a hard time)...I've had a lot of people commenting that I never got around to posting "after" pictures since I started showing all our projects.

So, without further adieu...here is the kitchen when we purchased the house. Phase one of the demolition...we ripped out the ceiling and I don't think either one of us slept that night, we were both a little overwhelmed at what we had got ourselves into. There was a lot of electrical and duct issues that we hadn't anticipated...but we were committed at this point.
Ripping out the floor...a few layers of linoleum, nails, staples, and glue.
Working on rerouting the electrical and the copper piping for the refrigerator (we moved it to a new wall)...amongst other things.
And, skipping ahead to the after pictures...I'll forgo the inbetween steps. Here is the (almost) finished product.

We were able to raise the ceiling over a foot which opened up the room a lot. We changed all the electrical as a result and were also able to install taller kitchen cabinets. Moving the refrigerator also allowed us to create a "home office" area on the one wall and changing the "U" shaped counter allowed us to put in a large island that opens to the eating area.



The family room "before"...we had rotted drywall around the fireplace so we had to rip it out and reframe the wall. This actually allowed us to prep the wall for the TV with studs, electrical, and speakers.
The "after"...we're still working out a few electrical kinks. There is one wire remaining out of the TV that Brad has promised me will eventually be hidden in the wall. In the meantime I have a plant hiding the wires.
We went into the crawl space above the family room and added lights in the family room ceiling.
Here is the "before" of the lovely 1987 Waverly themed master bedroom. It had a coordinating border and then a large print paper in the "bonus area" (now the laundry) and the coordinating small print paper is in the master bath.
Here is the "after" master bedroom. I absolutely love how the blue/grey paint turned out...the room is very warm and relaxing.

This was a bonus area off the master bedroom.
...we ripped out the wallpaper, removed the lovely brass chandelier (one of 10 in the house), had plumbing run from the master bath, built a wall and voila...an upstairs laundry room!

Here is the view from the bedroom, the doors on the tan wall are new (as is the wall) and they lead into the laundry room. The master bath doorway is on the other side of the laundry (through the door you can barely see in the distance). Essentially we created a hallway to our mastbath. But it's about 10 feet wide and on the left hand side (across from the laundry room doors) are two sets of double doors, like you see in these pictures, that have two closets in addition to the one in the actual bedroom which is in this picture on the right hand side.
These are the double doors on the tan wall in the previous picture with the washer and dryer now on the previously flowered wall. The room goes equally far to the right where Brad is installing a rod to hang clothes as well as some linen closet type shelving.
The dining room was really just cosmetic changes. New paint, new drapes, fresh paint on the crown and chair and a new chandelier.
The "after" dining room. We christened it last night with Thanksgiving dinner!
I already posted the 1/2 bath photos earlier this month. Our large remaining projects are building a wall downstairs to create a guest bedroom and the two upstairs bathrooms. I think we're going to tackle either the wall downstairs or the kid's bathroom and perhaps next summer work on the master bathroom which will probably take a month...I think we need some down time before then so we're just wrapping up small projects during the holidays and trying to relax before the baby arrives in March!

So that is the tour, via photos. Thanks for all the interest and encouragement over the past months. It has been a lot of work (especially for Brad!) but I think we're glad we tackled it all up front instead of waiting until we've lived here a few years. We've done 90% of the work ourselves, so hopefully if we ride out the housing market a few years we'll see some appreciation for all our hard work when it is time to move.