RENOVATE

Up to this point I haven't shared much about the renovation we have been doing in our home but with some VERY exciting newly finished projects, NOW is the time. We have lived in our wonderful home for just over 3 years. Our house is situated in a GORGEOUS neighborhood with big trees, large fenced in yards and big colonial style homes (see above pic). This is what sold us. The inside is big, with a great floor plan and big rooms... the love story stopped there. Our house was built in 1984 and had all the finishes to prove it. Not only that, it was built by a contractor and that contractor used 100% builder grade materials with ZERO upgrades (reason #1 why we could afford our house). Not to mention, we are the sixth owners of our home, yes SIXTH. Resulting in not one previous owner updating the house but all doing a few of their own "projects" resulting in a hodgepodge of flooring, wallpaper borders and appliances (reason #2 why we could afford our house, and reason #3 was moving to Michigan during the economic down swing).

 

Here's the kitchen in progress after we painted the cabinets white and installed our new stainless appliances.

Sorry for the HORRENDOUS before photos. We began renovations WELL before I started blogging and did a very poor job of taking pictures. I guess we decided to take photos of this little guy instead, he arrived late February of 2009.

In December of 2008 in we moved with my big ol' 8 month pregnant belly and all of our stuff. Later that night some cabinets came down, part of the partial spindle wall (seen behind the cabinets in the picture above) and some carpet. We bought new appliances immediately, new carpet and began to work on replacing ALL the flooring (check out that yellow linoleum in the kitchen). In our previous house (we lived in Iowa) my Husband and Dad laid new tile in the kitchen. The Hubs also laid tile in our bathroom and built another bathroom complete with a tile shower and floor. Moving into this house He was a tile EXPERT!! So the kitchen, dining room entry way and half bath on the main floor all got new tile. The front living room, new carpet and our "back room" as we call it, laminate flooring. We replaced all the carpet upstairs as well, outside of the two bathrooms (yes, the bathrooms are partial carpeted, ugh).

We have also removed LOTS of wallpaper boarders, wood paneling, patched some dry wall and have painted about 75% of the house. We are just now getting to some of the really super duper stuff, the finishing details like TRIM!! Replacing all the flooring meant loosing a lot of our VERY cheap and in VERY poor condition baseboard trim. So we have had no trim in the house for a LONG time. A few months ago we decided to fork over the dough and FINALLY get the supplies we needed to finish up some projects, including a miter saw, air compressor and nail gun. We have been busy working away since. 

Our first FINISHED product is the dining room. When we bought the house the dining room was an awful faux painted green on the top half, with a low chair rail (see photo above) and a yellowish cream paint below. Not only that, it featured an awful ceiling fan and CARPET flooring. We removed the chair rail and tried to patch the dry wall but the upper portion of the wall had been painted SO MANY TIMES (six owners) that we couldn't get the top and bottom portion of the wall to smooth out nicely. From the beginning we knew we wanted a board and batten look but that it would be done far off in the future, once we completed more crucial things in the house. This would also be the PERFECT solution to hiding the lumpy bumpy issues we faced due to the LAYERS and LAYERS of paint caked on to top half of the dining room.  Knowing we would eventually add board and batten we choose a dark saturated paint color keeping in mind the white would balance the room out and make it light and airy. It is amazing really how everything came together, I mean it took us three years!! Seeing the finished product has really given us the motivation to get to the details in the rest of the house.

Here's a sneak peak:

I will post tomorrow about the finished dining room, details and pictures. Oh happy day! Finishing projects and taking steps to living in a home that is ours is AMAZING! Do you have any projects in your home you have worked on FOREVER and are finally finished with?

That's my Shiny ~

J