The House

The first wave of projects are complete. The contractor has left and gone home. I hope he comes back soon-we've a lot still to do here.

This is our personal contractor a.k.a. Terry Mason. He flew out here about 2 weeks ago just to lay our new wood floors. He worked tirelessly everyday on the floors, but he also taught us many valuable things we needed to know about this house. We're sad he's gone, but I'm sure he's happy to be home and getting a break.

Here is our kitchen before the remodeling.

Here it is after. We refinished the cabinets, refinished the floors, bought new appliances and new counter tops are coming soon.--this was a lot of work for us. Our last 2 homes were new construction, but we wanted a home with a little more character this time, which we discovered thrives in older homes. But with older homes comes a lot of work and all the different styles of all the previous owners. This home we bought, had a hodgepodge of different themes going on, but hopefully we'll be able to change that, and make it more of our style. We love the location, less then a block from the coast of Lake Erie. Our back yard boarders Federally Reserved marsh lands and is absolutely gorgeous with the cattails and indigenous flowers.

This is the finished dining room, I somehow deleted the before picture(sometimes I hate Blogger) with the awesome carpet(pink roses and forest green leaves) Seriously it's a big change just removing that carpet and laying new floors.

Before-front entry, oh if you look real close at the top of the picture you get a glimpse of the awesome carpet that had to go.

After

This is the bathroom that I first practiced the refinishing on

Here it is finished. The pictures don't do it justice. Thank you so much to my sisters neighbor Amy for answering all my questions, and showing me how to do this to my cabinets.

This is the sun room-my favorite room, not really any furniture in there, but it will come someday. It's a three season room, so it doesn't get much use right now, but when spring comes I have big plans of reading and relaxing out there, just soaking up the sun that shines about once every 5 days (hence the term Dreary Erie).

The family room-I have shelf space I don't quite know what to do with, give me some suggestions please. I thought of books, but all the books are in the living room bookshelves and also most of our pictures are also in the living room. I could be like my mom and fill it with nick knacks, and that is probable whats going to happen-unless someone has a great idea. Also I need interesting, mismatched frames for very old pictures. The photos are all odd shapes, not standard photo sizes. If anyone knows of a place that sells frames like that I'd love to get their name.

So those are some highlights from the new house. Next project is changing the shutters and moldings on the outside, from a faded red (actually more like reds ugly sister pink) to black.

Thank you Terry so much again for all your hard work, we really, really appreciate it.,