Hello World!

It has been forever since I updated my blog. In my defense when we were in New York we worked 18 hours a day and 6 days a week. Wow. So Sundays we just pretty much were lazy bums and slept all day long! So this year so far has been pretty interesting. We finished the upstairs remodel of our living room. Which I have to say it turned out pretty neat. I wanted to paint one of the walls orange, but after thinking about it I realized that it would clash terribly with my red kitchen. So I went with blue. We love it. James was sure he was going to hate it, but admitted that I was right and he should always listen to me. I think that last part was actually me telling him that he should always listen to me. I'm slowly working on decorating my home, but man it's hard! I don't want to put up anything I don't love and I never have time to look or make the things I want. So it's slowly coming along. I was looking at some of the pictures I took during the demolition and I was so confused what part of the house I was looking at. I remember it was so hard to take any pictures because there are walls everywhere and so I could never get a good shot. Plus I'm an awful photographer. I really need to take some lessons.  

Since I was having trouble remembering what our house was like before I made a floor plan. It looks so spacious here, but trust me it wasn't. This is not to scale.

So this was the bookshelf that was just left of the front door. I'm not a fan of homes that when you open the door you can see right into the dining area or into the kitchen. So to try to counter it we tore down the bookshelf and instead put up a wall and made a little entry way for me.  

This is the closet you see right when you walk into the home. So we were in the middle of demo when we remembered we wanted to take before and after pictures. Oops.

Here's the side of the closet. You can see the wood laminate which was actually on all of the walls. Earlier we had taken off most of the laminate in the kitchen and dining area and instead textured and painted the areas.

Like I said earlier I am not a good photography. But this was actually taken inside the living room. The wall juts back so the washer can fit right in the corner outside the wall. You can kind of see the cabinets that are on the other side of the wall.

So here is the other side of the living room. The blue tarp in the back was actually to keep the dust and mess out of our kitchen and dining room. You can see the little hall here separating the living room from the cabinets and washer. The problem we were having with this is that this wall that separates the two is a bearing wall. We really didn't want to have to keep the wall up and have two hallways. So we ended up cutting down some of the ceiling and putting a beam up in the attic. It worked perfectly and we were able to take down that wall.

So here is a view from our laundry room. As you can see the stairway is enclosed. James wanted a banister and an open stairway so we started to tear out these walls as well.

So from the front door you can now see clear back to the laundry room. The closet is gone, the counter tops are gone, and most of the wall enclosing the stairway is gone.

Here's the man that did most of the work. He's pretty much amazing.

All the demo is done! Yay! So here you can see that where the bookcase used to be we put up a wall. We are also starting to build our banister and mud the walls.

Just another view. No more counter tops or hallway just the living room.

 

Here's the finished product. We love our new living room. I still need to decorate it. I'm only done a few things.

The banister. I love the open stairway! I think it makes the room feel larger.

The only bad thing is you can see straight into my laundry room if I forget to shut the door!

Onto the next project...the basement.

So here's a shot of the basement from the family room. You can see that the rooms start right after the stairs. There's a long hallway you have to go to the first room and then the second room was huge.

We decided to take the rooms back so there wouldn't be so much of a hallway and it would make the family room larger. Here's James slaving away.

There's so much dust in the air, but I wanted to show you what the first room looked like. You can see the very lovely orange carpet. And the barn wood on the walls. James and I actually loved the barn wood on the walls, but it made the room too dark. You can also see the really small windows here. They are only 3 x 1.

So this is after the windows were enlarged. Our basement had so much water and mud in it afterwards. It was a huge mess to clean up.

The windows were 3x1 before and now they are 3x4.

I'm so glad we put in the bigger windows. So much more light! It looks less like a scary dungeon.

The windows were not fun to cut. As you can see here there is actually a shelf of concrete that we have to drill out so the window well can sit flush to the foundation. The family room window was the worst.

Just filling in the holes now.

Framing and all new electrical are done. Now the next step is putting in the duct work for our new propane furnace. After that sheet rocking, mudding, painting, and carpet. We are almost there!