Our 4th Home

In June of 2013 we had to move due to John's change in employment (his previous job included a house).  A few months before our lease was up, we started to look into buying a home.  We got pre-approved and started looking at homes on the market, only to be pretty disappointed in what we saw.  Every time we looked at a home and went back home we realized that the home we were renting was in better condition than those that we looked at.  So we finally got the courage up to ask the landlords if they would be interested in selling the house.  To our surprise, they said they were considering asking us the same thing.  Long story short, a few weeks later it was a done deal and the house was ours.  This is the 4th house we have owned over the last 17 years.

We knew that we wanted to do some remodeling, but we were going to do it little by little.   But when we went to get an estimate on remodeling the kitchen, there was a pretty significant sale coming up that would save us thousands, so we decided to do the remodel sooner rather than later and since the living room, dining room, and kitchen along with the hallway, are kind of all one big attached area, that meant we had to do it all at once; and of course the girls were ready to decorate their rooms too, so we started working on their rooms the weeks prior to the "big" remodel.

Note: During this whole process John took most of the pictures on his phone.  Needless to say, the last day of the remodel, his phone crashed and we lost almost all of the pictures.  Here is what we have.

THE BEFORE PICTURES:

Ashlee's Room

 Fireplace Area before

 Dinning Room

 Living Room

 The Kitchen Before (this was taken on Valentines Day, the only picture we had of the kitchen before).

The process involved scraping the popcorn ceiling off every remodeled room, peeling paint off the walls in two bedrooms for countless hours, peeling off painted over wallpaper, patching drywall, replacing moldy sheet rock, re-texturing, sanding, priming, painting, removing carpet, installing hand scraped laminate flooring, redoing some of the electrical, installing ceiling fans, installing recessed LED lighting, replacing and rerouting some of the plumbing, taring out tile floors and counter tops, removing kitchen cabinets that were nailed instead of screwed to the wall, etc. 

John worked 12 hours or more a day for two weeks straight to get everything done, and it was over a 100 degrees everyday in a house with no air conditioning.  My grandpa, brother and mom all helped us too, and we did hire someone to help John for a few days with the re-texturing process, but overall John worked countless hours non-stop to get the job done and he did a fantastic job.

The Process:

This is the paint peeling off the wall in Ashlee's room.  

Framing in the wall that had three ugly windows in it, in between the living room and dining room.  We wanted to tare the whole wall out, but it was load bearing so we couldn't do that.

Mikayla's ceiling after the popcorn texture was removed.

The mess that peeling paint makes and peeling it off is not fun!

Carpet out of living room area.  We also took out the boards they had along wall and ceiling.  Apparently that use to be a wall too, and instead of re-patching and re-texturing the wall and ceiling, they decided it would be easier to put those boards there.

Installing hand scraped laminate flooring

Installing kitchen cabinets

Installing appliances, counter top, back splash, sink and faucet

The ugly wall with three windows in it that was between the living room and dining room.

The After Pictures

The long awaited after pictures, please note that they are not the completely finished after pictures; but they are pictures of what things look like now.  I still have some decorating that I would like to do, and we eventually want to do something with the ugly brick fireplace, but for now this is what it looks like.

Living Room

Dinning Room 

Living room/kitchen

Hallway

Mikayla's Room

Ashlee's Room

Mikayla's room

The Kitchen

 We still have our bedroom and two bathrooms to do, along with some work on the outside.  But for now the rest of that will wait.  The house feels so much bigger and open.