Our First Home

Finally, I have a chance to blog again! It’s been a while, life got busy, and well blogging became something in the past. This is our “Friend Beach Trip” week and I actually have some time to write again. 8 adults and 9 kids in one house means we have lots of extra hands and a lot of extra noise 😉

I been looking forward to a little time to sit down and write a post about our house that we have lived in for the last 8 years. We are selling it and should be all moved in to the new house in about a month! It’s exciting, emotional and MAJORLY stressful all wrapped up together. I feel like that kinda describes adult life.

Before we move, I want to remember all the projects we have done to make our home ours. I noticed something about myself this go round of “house shopping”  …I rarely find a house I don’t like. It makes it hard to find “the one” BUT it gets my creative juices flowing and the possibilities becomes endless. Dave is my anchor and reminds me we have three kids and don’t have an HGTV show 😉

I was awful at taking before pictures of the projects we completed in our house but Dave found the listing ad of it way back in 2009 so I saved those! Anyways, here is my scrapbook of before and after pictures from our first home. There have been many adventures, a lot of sweat and major popcorn removal from this house….

Look at those hunter green shutters and the killer bushes….

You can’t see it in this picture, but Dave replaced the overgrown bushes with a flower bed. I also spray painted the shutters about 7 years ago – I am so surprised how well they have held up. Most recently, I painted the door Wythe Blue by Benjamin Moore.

Here is our living room before…

And after…

About two years ago, Dave installed our flooring that I am so sad to leave behind. He did an AMAZING job (although I never want to re-live installing new flooring with 2 toddler boys running around). Soon after, we put in the built-ins. They are a combination of IKEA billy bookshelves and unfinished kitchen cabinets from Home Depot. We had to add a lot of decorative wood to make it about “built-in-ish” and painted it all white. My favorite part is the decorative area behind the T.V. – we used pieces of wood to actually hide the T.V. cords. the outlets are inside the cabinets and the cords are inside the horizontal pieces of wood. Awww I will miss the set up but we are planning to do something similar in the new house!

Here is the dining room before…

And the dining room after. We did the wainscoting and painted all the walls downstairs Pewter Tankard by Sherwin Williams.

And out kitchen before (this was my least favorite room in our house and the first one we renovated)…

We made the cabinets appear higher by adding a 1×8 and some crown molding. I painted the cabinets Alabaster White by Sherwin Williams and spray painted the hinges with Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint. The light fixtures were a combination of Amazon and yard sale finds. Even though the back splash isn’t really my style now, it was one of my favorite, and surprisingly easiest, projects. I hope to jump on the subway tile bandwagon and install one in the new house as well. The kitchen island used to be much smaller and we extended it to make a shelf on one side and a little opening for the trash can on the other. The butcher block counter top is from IKEA and we had the granite counter tops installed by professionals.

And here is Landon and Max’s room before…

We added the bead board and crown molding.

And Lyla’s room before…

And after….

And here is our room (master) before…

And well…after. Although all we did in this room was remove the popcorn ceiling and paint right when we moved it. It was in need of a little makeover and was the next room we were planning on tackling.

And our master bath before…

And after. We painted it Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams, painted the cabinets, installed new light fixtures and medicine cabinets. Dave did some demo on the bathtub and we had someone come and install the new shower we bought from Lowe’s. He also tiled our shower and flooring. The flooring is ceramic tile that looks like wood. I love the feel of it.

And last but not least the backyard before…

And after. We had several trees removed, planted some grass and put in the swing set.

We are going to miss this house but look forward to the adventures in the new one! There are several DIY projects I already have whirling around in my head now…hopefully Dave will soon be on board 😉