Before Pictures: Outside, Dining Room, Kitchen, Utility Room & Living Room.

In order to fully appreciate what we are doing to turn our house into our home, you really have to understand what it was like before us. We are so grateful that God has provided this wonderful, sturdy home for us, but it will definitely need some updating to reflect our style and really become our home. Hope you can get the full effect of the house from these!

When you hear that a home has established landscaping, usually that is a good thing. Well, in our case, we really didn't like most of the well established trees & bushes that came with our home. Thankfully, we are already well on our way to being able to see the actual house again instead of the bushes & trees! We also plan on removing all of our "zero-scaping" from the side of the house and growing some grass. In addition to this, we plan on painting the entire house, adding shudders and possibly some planter boxes under the windows in front. Unfortunately, the outside of the house will probably wait until next year, both for energy and budget's sake. We're just glad to have the yard mowed for now!

All of the house has carpeting throughout, even the bathrooms, and the carpet definitely reflects the 70's. We will be replacing the carpet in the living room with laminate wood flooring, placing carpet in the bedrooms, and putting tile throughout the rest of the house. The outdated texture on all of the walls will be replaced with new texture and paint to give the house some new life. Unfortunately, the baseboards and trim are all painted the same color as the walls (which in some rooms means pink, peach or blue). All of the woodwork will be painted a crisp white after we sand everything down. My arms already hurt from the little bit we've gotten done! We will be adding new lighting throughout the house using can lights, a chandelier in the dining room (directly above where our table will be placed), and ceiling fans in the bedrooms and living room. I know they're not the most glamorous fixtures, but it gets hot out here!

What was formerly the original living room (the room with the blue curtains) in the house will become our entryway/dining room. The house came with an eat-in kitchen, but it was so small that we could barely fit our little table in there. It also greatly blocked off the flow of traffic to the living room. This change will provide much more entertaining space for us!

The front room (now dining room) leads right into the kitchen, and it is also a reflection of the 70's. The gold kitchen will be gutted, and the cabinets will be re-purposed throughout Tim's workshop on the back of the house and in the utility room/pantry for extra storage. In addition, we will be closing off a door to the back patio from the kitchen (the door sits directly opposite from the stove) as well as the opening to the kitchen from the hall to make room for more cabinets and re-position some of the appliances. The current location of the refrigerator will be moved to where the door currently lives, and that portion of the wall (where the fridge is in the picture) will be torn out to create a more open feel to the room. Since we're tearing out some portions of walls, we figured we'd open up the flow to the living room a bit more and tear out part of the walls dividing the entry to these two rooms. The furdown (sp?) will be torn down to open up the space after the vent work is moved into the ceiling to create a more open feel to the kitchen. We will also be creating a little bar area at the end of the cabinets on the wall with the door, and thankfully, there will be NO cabinet above it!

If you turn around in our kitchen, you look directly into our utility room. This furnished the washer, dryer, hot water heater & water softener for the whole home. Tim has been working his incredible plumbing skills to move the hot water heater & water softener to the garage (just on the other side of the wall). In addition to all of this, he is changing out our water heater to a tankless system and installing a whole house water filter. This will allow us to turn the other side of the room into a pantry by moving the existing storage to the adjacent wall. I'm really excited about this! Much change has already taken place, and I'll try to post pictures later. Tim has been doing some pretty incredible work in there already!

The last room you walk into in this section will be my favorite in the house once it is done...the living room. We have removed all of the wood paneling from the room, taken out the brass fireplace insert, will be scraping all of the popcorn ceiling off, and will give some updates to the window treatments. We are so fortunate to have a HUGE window in the living room that makes quite a statement. However, we're going to have to replace it because it has a crack in some of the glass and isn't energy efficient at all (only one pane of glass...yikes!). We obviously are living in denial about this until we absolutely have to because it is a big window to replace! In addition, Tim has already removed a gas wall heating unit, capped the gas line and patched the hole. The mantle will be sanded and stained a rich espresso color, and the door fronts on the cabinets will be removed to create more of a bookshelf/built-in feel. We haven't figured out if we will stain or paint the shelves, but it will change! I cannot wait for us to get more progress on this room already!

For more pictures, you can check out the album on my facebook page. Hope you enjoy!