House Update

It has been awhile since I have blogged about my house.

When my husband was little, his dad would tell him the story of Thor. This isn't the comic book version. Thor originated from Norse mythology. There is a story about how he had to prove himself by drinking mead from a horn of some kind. He drank and drank and when he couldn't drink anymore he was told he had actually been drinking from the sea, and had changed the tides with the quantity he had swallowed.

We talk about this story a lot with our house. It is the reason I haven't posted. We have so far to go, its hard to see that we have really transformed the home since we moved in.

Little things, like

The wall outlets used to look like this:

My handy hubby has almost finished changing them out, and almost all of them now look like this:

The air vents were NASTY. Dirty and yellowing. Pet hair and dust all over the place.

I took them down and washed them, then spray painted them with Rustoleum Semi-Gloss white.

The hallway was originally very broken linoleum and concrete. I don't have a photo of the hall (ugh) but the floor in this room was the same, but the hallway was really torn up.

This is what the hallway looks like now after my husband installed our $50 hand-scraped engineered wood flooring from CL!

The door hardware used to look like this:

Then we removed the security doors (no small feat) and cleaned and painted the doors, then added this beautiful wrought iron hardware that my friend Molly helped me get for FREE. You can see that the door trim still needs to be replaced, and my husband insisted on the NRA sticker for security :). But much better, right? Someday I am going to paint the door a deep rusty red. An excellent backdrop for a wreath of any season!

Soon Danjee from Moser's Valley View Glass (you can check out their website here) is coming to change the horrific windows on the front of the house. I literally can't wait.  But in the meantime I made curtains for the inside.  

This is what they looked like before from the inside:

And here is what it looks like now:

This was a fun project.  I wanted some antique looking ruffle curtains, but it would have cost me $80- $100 to buy them.  So I dug through dozens of Goodwill stores and bought bed skirts from the bedding section.  I think I ended up spending $20.  Molly helped me sew them all together and VOILA... they look great in the family room.  (Also note the amazing off-white leather couches we bought on CL and discovered the girl who was selling them lives less than a mile away and goes to my church!)

The lawn was a mess. From garbage to doggy doo to dead dried out bermuda, this yard was a serious project. It's still not even close to being done, but we raked and made countless trips to the dump, and then planted winter rye.

Here are some before pictures:

Here is what it looks like now:

Last but not least, the kitchen.

We have a LONG WAY to go in this room.
Here is the before:

Here it is now. Believe it or not... this is AS CLEAN AS IT GETS. With limited counter space, a big family who uses a lot of dishes and no dishwasher, this is clean.

But we have done quite a bit. I taped a piece of the future back-splash to the wall, and soon Newell will be installing it.

Thanks for watching... much much more to come!