Landscaping

On one recent weekend, my dear husband didn't have anything to do. So this is what he did.


He decided that the bushes in the front of the house were too large. Our house was built in 1992, so it's 20 years old now and they were probably original to the house.

He chopped them all done.

Once they were all out, he dug up the roots and stumps. Then he borrowed a rototiller from a friend and mixed in some new dirt.

Then we planted some annuals and perennials. We're not really good with plants and such, so it will be interesting to see how they do.

New Flooring

We have almost finished replacing all of the original flooring in our house. In February, we had laminate flooring installed in a couple of the rooms in our basement. We have 1 more room in the basement and then the flooring in the bonus room and we'll be done!

Here are some pictures of our new floors.


The larger room shown here was a combination of craft room/office for me and office for the husband. The smaller room on the right was my scrapbooking room.

Here's a view of the now empty scrapbooking room. Since we had to completely empty the room, I decided that this was the perfect time to paint it. I'm not really good at picking out colors, so I just used left over paint from the kids' bathroom that we redid over the summer.

View of the larger room.

Larger room from the other angle. The stairs are to the right of the dog.

It was a huge deal to completely remove everything! We decided to switch things up a bit when we brought everything back in, but I'm saving that for another blog.

Dining Room Re-Do

We moved into our house in 2000. We took pictures of each room in the house so we could share it with our out of town family and friends. However, we did not have a digital camera then, so I'm not sure where those pictures are now.

One of the last rooms to get re-done was the dining room. Here is a picture from 2001 of James celebrating an early 4th birthday. Notice the Amish country wallpaper border and the pink trim. The table was a hand me down from my parents. 

We removed the border only to find another border underneath. The second border was too difficult to remove, so we just painted over it. This picture of the kids with Chris' mom was taken in 2004. You can see the Amish border has been removed and this is the border we discovered underneath.

Here we are in 2008 with the white walls. Chris just painted everything white, including the wallpaper border that couldn't be removed.

 

Somewhere along the way, Chris replaced the light hardwood flooring with cherry hardwood. Then a couple of years ago we hired a friend to paint the room. We gave her complete reign over choosing the color, the drapes, and even some wall decorations. Chris replaced the lighting and blinds.

And today, we finally got new furniture. I can't believe it has taken us 11 years to finish the dining room.

As you can see, we have a small dining room and were limited to what we could do. Plus, our "eat in kitchen" isn't big enough to hold anything other than a small bistro table, if even that, so we eat all of our meals in the dining room. We couldn't really do a formal dining room even if we wanted one.

I am so happy with how it has turned out. Definitely worth the wait!

New Carpet

Our house was constructed in 1992. We have gradually replaced most of the carpet with hardwood flooring.  We spent a few years debating what to do with the stairs and hallway upstairs. We finally decided that it was going to be too costly to put hardwoods there. This week we finally got around to replacing the original, nearly 20 year old worn carpet.

I forgot to take "before" pictures, but here is Hannah with her new socks that I blogged about recently.

And here is the new carpeting.

It has made such a big difference! We are very happy with it and wonder why we waited so long to replace it.

Bathroom Re-Do

Our house was built in 1992 and is approaching 20 years. We have done some major home improvement over the last few years such as granite counters, hardwood floors and updated fixtures, but one room that was still looking a bit worse for the wear was the kids' bathroom.

It's a small room as far as bathrooms are concerned. There are no drawers on the vanity, so the kids just leave everything out on the counter.

The yellow just doesn't work for me.


The first step was to remove everything. It's easier to work in an empty room.


Chris tiled the bathroom floor and I painted the walls.

We installed new lighting fixtures. I believe the light that we took out was the last of the brass fixtures! This picture makes the wall color look a bit off - the picture above is pretty accurate.


And now for the big reveal!


We got the new vanity at Lowe's. We needed drawers to keep the counter tidy. We were limited with our choices because our pipes came out of the floor, not the wall. Most of the vanities that we saw were designed for wall pipes. As it was, Chris had to cut out a couple of spots for the pipes to fit through.

I wanted a medicine cabinet for extra storage. The kids don't have too many toiletries yet, but I expect more to come as they get older. Just planning ahead!


It's hard to tell, but the shower rod (from Home Depot) is one of those curved "hotel" ones. It's also a double rod. The outer rod is for hanging wet clothes or towels. We're hoping that the kids actually use it.

The baseboards and quarter round pieces are made from pvc. We also replaced the toilet seat which was requested by Hannah.

I didn't keep precise track of the expenses, but it was close to $1000 for the whole project. We did all of the work ourselves. (Mostly the husband, though I did hold things in place and hang up the shower curtain.)Eventually I will want to replace all of the towels - I'm not happy with the colors of the existing towels against the newly painted wall.

And now Chris can put the door back on. He had hung it back on the day before, but I told him that I couldn't get a picture of the whole bathroom because the door was in the way. Being the sweet husband that he is, he removed it again so I could take my pictures.