A New Year in a New Home

So I haven't been posting at all lately as I've been literally buried in new home renovations. My refrigerator was in the dining room, my stove in the living room and piles of tile and boxes covered the floor. But FINALLY we have gotten to a point where we have some clean rooms and I can begin to get back to some sense of normalcy - which means some time for blogging. So I thought I'd start by showing you what kept me away from the keyboard.

Here are some of the pictures of our renovation.  The before and current after are at the end side by side. I say current cause we still have a lot of finishing touches to make.

Reno Pictures:

Breaking out the old tile

Painted spindles

Walls painted, ugly carpet gone, wainscoting installed

hardwood up, trim primed

Oh no! A second layer of ugly floor!

My sister in law keeping me safe

OK - all the floors are up and walls are painted! 

And the first tile goes down

Four days later and we only made it down the hall!

And here we are now 3 months later. For fun: see if you can find my pups, Webber, who somehow managed to get into every after picture.

 In the kitchen, we changed the floor from laminate hardwood to porcelain tile, painted the trim white, changed all the light fixtures and brought in our furniture.

Since I posted, we added a new back splash to the kitchen. 

We didn't do too much in the den.  Just painted the trim, spindles, and walls. Added our furniture, mounted the TV and of course our Christmas tree.

 

Originally we were going to leave the title and put darker hardwood in the kitchen, but as time went on so did my hatred for the cream tile. I am so glad we decided on the tile for hallway and kitchen. 

The dining room is definitely my favorite room in the house. It turned out exactly as I imagined! I can't wait to get some artwork on the walls and the chandelier up. I ended up spray painting the gold one that is in the before picture stainless steel. It came out so good! Now I just need to get hubby to hang it. It will be a bit of a job because we need to move it over as our table isn't in the center of the room like theirs was. 

And finally, my office is the most "work in progress" on the first floor. I plan on painting the desk black and all my artwork still needs to go on the walls and I need to put the window panels back in. I literally just unpacked my boxes this week!

So there it is, the last 3 months of my life! Hopefully now that we have reached a little bit of a stopping point I will be better about posting what I am doing in the classroom. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!