Home Improvement

Five years ago we bought our current home. Here are a few pictures of what it looked like then:

Lovely pink bathroom. That is carpet on the floor. With really cool roses on it, actually. :)
Wall-O-Mirrors. When I first walked through the house the thing that shocked me was how many mirrors there were. EVERYWHERE. I don't like to see how bedraggled I look at every moment of the day, so I took most of them down. This wall was actually a little harder then some of the others, because each mirror tile was attached with adhesive. I used heavy gloves and safety goggles and a painter's putty knife to pry each one off the wall. After they were off it really only needed minor touching up and was ready to paint.
The wall in this picture of wooden paneling came down one day while my hubby was at work. I decided I was done with the paneling and I thought, 'This can't be all that hard' so I pried off a section and hauled it out, then the next, then the next. It wasn't hard at all. AND, lucky me, the wall behind the paneling only needed minor touch-ups as well. (It also needed us to frame in a window opening that opens into the garage, but you get the idea).
Ah, the kitchen. A friend of mine recently admitted that she refused to eat at our house when we first moved in because the kitchen was so gross. I don't blame her, I hated the kitchen as well. We have known that we wanted to change the kitchen quite a bit, but we needed a band-aid job to make the kitchen livable (and hopefully make it less gross so that our friends would come play). I did some sewing for a friend of Hubby that makes cabinets. He graciously accepted the sewing as payment for the labor of making new cabinet faces for all of our kitchen cabinets. We covered the old formica with new. We pulled out the carpet. Yes, carpet in the kitchen as well. I sewed curtains for the windows and we purchased new appliances. So, here is our band-aid job and pics of the other rooms as well.

This is the once-pink bathroom. Right now, we are in the middle of this room's renovating, so you can't see the finished product just yet, but trust me it will be improved. :)

Living Room, wood paneling gone.
Kitchen. Improved. For now. In the next twelve months we will be doing a lot of projects around this old house of ours and I will post occasionally to let you know how we did certain aspects of the projects, and maybe Hubby can do a guest post about painting--he's pretty sure he has it figured out. ;)