Yay! No more red brick!

So the previous owners had interesting taste, to say the least. :-) We're not sure what they were thinking as we look at various "decorative" projects throughout the house. I have to admit, when we bought the house, the upstairs bathroom was my least favorite room. I didn't see much hope for it and figured I would just have to grin and bear it. These original pics testify to the former hideousness:




Terrible, just terrible. At night it was really creepy, using the toilet in that dark little hovel was just... terrible. :-) Oh, and the tile looks clean in these pictures but I decided after five hours of scrubbing this bathroom that it had, in fact, never been cleaned. Anyways, here's a couple of pics of the makeover process,

and here's the final product!!! Isn't it just beautiful? It is such an improvement on what we started with. For those who are curious; we removed the flourescent light fixture and the surrounding brick and dark wood, painted the walls with a beige granite paint, painted the brick white, removed the shower doors, scrubbed everything (did I mention that?) replaced the drawer pulls on the vanity and got a new mirror and light fixture. Oh, and it doesn't show in the picture, but Luke fixed the fan/exhaust so it doesn't sound like a woman being tortured in the Spanish Inquisition any more. :-D yay for that. So yes, we're proud of our little project. Yes, we want a pat on the back. :-)

Spa'Oom

If you've ever read The Chronicles of Narnia, you know that Mr. Tumnus says to Lucy, "Well Lucy, from the land of Spa'Oom (spare room), let's go have tea, shall we?" Back at our little apartment, we affectionately dubbed the half bedroom "spa'oom" and it stuck. Now, in our new house, our guest bedroom has appropriated the same title, seemingly of its own volition. We keep trying to refer to it as the "guest bedroom", but it's just not working. Anyways, here's a picture of the Spa'Ooom in its original "glory". Keep in mind that this is the former owner's decorative taste, not ours. :-)

The first thing we did was remove the grass green carpet, and right after that went the black wallpaper. It came off fairly easily, but the paste was still quite goopy. Although I am not a fan of white walls, it was such an improvement over the black paper!Although the bunkbeds were beautiful, we finally decided they had to go in order to make the room more comfortable and welcoming to guests. So here's Luke destroying the bunkbeds. There wasn't any way to salvage them as they were literally bolted into the wall. Ah well, at least the destruction was fun!

We're going with, ironically, a black and white theme for this room and I'll update once we have some pics of the room with new paint and decorations. The good part is we'll be able to re-use the black blinds that the previous owners left us! Yay!

Helpers

So many people have helped us out with our house projects already, it has been such a blessing! The first week that we did intense work on the house my brother Jon came over almost every day to work on projects with us. On Monday his girlfriend Steph helped remove all of the hideous wallpaper that was throughout the upstairs, which really improved things. Here they are removing wallpaper. (Steph's the pretty one)

We had a great turnout with our move... so many people came to help us it was amazing. Completely painless and easy, hands down our easiest move ever, and trust me, we have moved A LOT between the two of us. Here's a pic of our helpers. Thanks everyone!

Progress so far...

We've been in our new home for almost a month now, and we've made lots of progress. The first thing we did (Friday evening after we closed) was start ripping out the carpets. We tore our brown carpet in the living room, red carpet in the bedroom, formerly beige carpet on the landing and in the closets, and bright green carpeting in the guest bedroom. Who knew that removing carpeting was so much work! First you have to tear out the carpets, then the padding, then the tack strips and then you pull up all the staples. Our hands and muscles were so sore! The pile of carpet, etc. on our porch was ridiculous. We forgot to take a picture of it, but here's one of us tearing out the living room carpet.
And here's one of the finished product, please pardon our dust.
One of the other things we did first off was to take pictures of every part of the house so we can track our progress. It's encouraging to look back at them when we're really tired and see how much we've accomplished just in this short time. Next time I post I hope to have some pictures of the bathroom, as we are almost done with that. Yay!