Home Improvements Part 4: Finishing Touches

Of course finishing touches are never really "finished," but here are a few additions that have sneaked their way in on my motivation wave.  My cousin was getting rid of this great couch that worked great with the new direction we were going.  This picture also shows off new windows and the newly divided room with the wood flooring and carpet in the context.

 

 For Christmas we replaced my broken sewing machine, so I've been busy with sewing projects as well.  I've been collecting fabric for curtains in several rooms for years as each fabric has called to me to be included in the complete picture in my mind.  Below are the living room and Katie's room.

 

JoAnna's room is not only rocking some new curtains, but also some pillows to fill in the look.

 

 More than three and a half years seems to have finally been enough for me to actually use our vast collection of picture frames. 

 And speaking of pictures, the following three and their accompanying plaques were Jason's Christmas gift to me.  Two of the three messages come from talks by Elder Holland, a shared favorite of Jason and mine.

 

Home Improvements Part 3: Carpet

A week later we were at it again.  Again, we got to shuffle the house around to accommodate the next round of workers.  

 As much as we've enjoyed the thirty-year-old stained carpet, it was time for something new.  This living room carpet as well as the green carpet in the family room are now only a memory with pictures as proof. 

 Most of the furniture ended up on and around the table.  This picture gives a decent preview of the floor Jason and I put down for the dining room.  I never seem to remember to take pictures of what I'm working on  myself.  Before and after are going to have to do. 

 Some more furniture landed in the kitchen.  The piano spent the day in there, too, but not until after the kids had managed breakfast first.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Carpet in the family room, living room, hall and stairs gives me some blank canvas to work with.

Home Improvements Part 2: Kitchen Floor

 The next project was the kitchen floor.  The kids thought it was crazy having the fridge in the living room for a couple of days.  

This shows the old floor, complete with some stained spots that were there when we moved in.

 

He lay down the underlay floor so the new vinyl wouldn't mold onto the shape and grooves of the old floor.   

 

  Mudding to fill in the seams...

In place, but not yet cut in.

Voila!  Our installer was very skilled and knowledgeable on all kinds of flooring.  He even gave me several tips for the laminate flooring Jason and I would lay two days later.  I would recommend him to anyone. 

 While the stove and fridge were out of the way, I also took the chance to replace our microwave that had given up it's electronic ghost awhile back.

Home Improvements Part 1: Windows

As my schooling has come to a close for awhile, we've used some of my new-found "free time" to make some home improvements.  The first change was new windows.  As seen in this post, our windows didn't always keep the elements out as they were meant to, so I was so excited to upgrade them!

They started in the basement.  Now that I can see through the window, I'm going to have to pay some attention to the state of the window wells....

 In addition to replacing all the existing windows, we had one added to our dining/family room.

We were committed by this point.  :)

 

I've been dreaming about this window's existence since the day we moved in.   I was so right! It adds so much light to the room!  I love eating at the table without turning the light on.  (You can see that it's not turned on here.)

 

This picture shows a good contrast to the wall layout, but it was dark, so you can't see the light difference.

 

This one doesn't show the whole wall, (and is several years old, so you can disregard the people and the event for the purpose of this post), but it shows how much darker the table area was than the rest of the room.  I'm sure we had the light overhead turned on during this event.