Our Forever House

As I mentioned earlier we sold our Townhouse a year ago and bought a house in a cute little neighborhood just 2 miles North of where we were.  We have fallen in love with our house and feel like we will be here the rest of our lives.  Our house was built in the 1970's so we wanted to do a few fix ups before we moved in.  So I thought I'd share some of our before and after pictures of what we did.  But as I'm looking at our before pictures apparently a child was in charge of taking pictures that day.  I don't have as many as I thought we did.

Here is what the outside of the house looked before and after.  We removed the white thingys on the front even though they were one of Mark's mom's favorite accents to the house!  And as I posted before we have painted the shutters and door to remove the baby blue.

The biggest change we made was removing all the old carpeting, stripping wallpaper and painting EVERY wall in the house.  Don't you just love the Teal carpet and the 80s wallpaper that was here!

And the baby blue bedroom with rose carpet!  Trust me when I say NONE of the wallpaper was easy to strip.  Lori S can testify to that.  She was such a gem and helped with so many hours of stripping.    And I now realize we never got pictures of the half walls in the living room that we took down.  I think that was one of Mark's favorite projects.  Who knew he had so much pent up aggression in him?  Of course that project was not as easy as we had hoped and required an Electrician to come in and move the light switches to the wall.  But we do not regret that choice.  It really opened up the living room.

And here are some pictures of our house today, literally!

We have so many compliments on the color of the living room.  I'm no decorator, but I do really love this room.  And someone else did pick out the colors for me.

And our kitchen is just a little bigger than the townhouse kitchen, by about about 3 times.  We took out the light over the table and installed the ceiling fan which was great during the summer months.

I'm not good at visualizing things that aren't there so I was really excited when I came up with this idea.  The bathroom off the laundry room and kitchen had this not so beautiful tub in it (picture on the left)  Since we had two other tubs and another shower we didn't see much use for it.  So we ripped out the tub and installed these lockers on the right.  You can't see in the picture, but there are 3 lockers where the tub used to be so each child has their own spot.  It has turned the bathroom into a great mud room for the kids.  We were able to customize the insides with shelves and baskets.  Don't look closely, they all need cleaning out.  But you have no idea when the doors are closed how messy they are inside.  I LOVE it!

And I love my yellow office on the main floor.  Especially the built in shelves in the closet left from the last owner.

And we don't miss the blue master bedroom.  We think ours is a little more calming.

And if you have ever toured the house with John you know about his Captain Midnight bedroom.  We were at the paint store and I was trying to convince him he did not want a black wall and when I told him this color was called Captain Midnight he fell in love with it.  I think I had to put 4 layers of paint on the wall.  And I'm sure the day I want to paint it lighter I will have to put another 4 layers, but for now it is a fun accent wall in a little boys room.

And the girls have a fun Lilac room.  One day they may have doors on their closets (but don't ask Mark about it).

We didn't do much with the basement besides adding our hand me down couches to the family room.  

But you can't tour the house without seeing our incredible food storage room.  We are grateful for the rolling shelves for cans on the one side and narrow shelves on the other side of the room.  We only pray the toilet above this room never breaks and floods the house.

I hope you enjoyed the tour.  We love our little piece of heaven on earth.  And I'm glad the pictures don't show ALL the projects still waiting to be done on the house.