Home Tour

After much begging from some people (one in particular, you know who you are!), here is a tour of our home.  I must warn you, there are two reasons it has taken me so long to post this. 

Reason 1: It still needs work.  You may notice the banister is awful and not done, and we have no base boards in the living room and kitchen.  And lots of touch up paint (don't look at the ceilings).  I'm sure there's more that I'm not thinking of right now.

Reason 2: I was waiting to take the video until I at least had the house cleaned up a little.  I gave up on that part, so you get to see how we really live, clutter and all.

First, here's the before pictures:

The kitchen.  Yes, it's small.  And yes, that is vinyl lettering on the wall that says "Moosey On In"

Kitchen view 2 (no, the microwave didn't work.  And we discovered the dishwasher was broken, too)

The living room (view from the kitchen).  Yes, that's more vinyl lettering.  It says "Fill a house with love and it becomes a home."  Jaron won't let me put vinyl on the walls.  He's the one that peeled this off.

Living Room View #2 - the front door and coat closet

"Master" bedroom.  This was the kids room.  There was nail polish all over the carpet and food and you don't-want-to-know-what-else way up on the walls.  They had bunk beds.

"Master" Bedroom view #2 - the closets.  I LOVE having 2 closets.  You can see the doors are pretty beat up.  These were in better shape than most other doors and walls.

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The bathroom.  Not too awful, except it smelled like someone missed the toilet a lot and the bathed their dogs (I know that because of the giant hairball I had to get out of the drain to be able to shower).  Oh, and the green sponge paint.  Oh yeah, and the toilet that had a toy in it.  Yikes! 

 

The basement family room.  I don't even want to know what was on the walls, but we scraped a lot of something off.

Basement family room view #2 - looking into the kitchen

Upstairs bedroom - this room was in the best shape of them all.  It's where the parents slept.  Yes, that is a split door.  And yes, it is still there.  One day we'll replace all the doors.

Next, we set off to work painting.  We only had a week to get it done before new carpet was being installed.

Thank you DS games for entertaining at least 2 kids!

My bro-in-law ripping our house apart.  He's good at that.

Lunch is served!  We found this when we took off one of the furnace vents.  Mmmmm.

Comparing paint colors.  Dark = old.  Lighter = new.

Mmmm, new carpet.  Even though it isn't the right weight, it's SOOOOOOOOOO much nicer than what was there!

View from the top of the stairs - still not complete, but the floor is mostly done.  And there's no more vinyl on the wall.

Ok, onto the yard.  We had a TON of work to do on the inside to be able to move in.  This caused the yard to be a bit neglected.  Plus, we didn't have a lawn mower yet.  We were planning to get one the week that Jaron wrecked the van.  The grass was probably almost 3 feet high.  The city should have given us a ticket, but luckily they didn't.  Here's a visual:

This is what the yard looked like before we bought the house (this was taken in March, so nothing was really growing yet).  I'm proud to say the lawn looks a million times better than this, but it still has a long ways to go.  And, for the certain someone who has been begging for this home tour, I added labels to show where we've put stuff in the yard.  Tomorrow I'll try and get a picture of the full backyard.

And finally, if you've actually read this far, here's a video of the whole house, clutter, unfinishedness and all.  I'm not sure if it actually looks better with all our crap in it, but it's more pleasant than it would have been.

Thanks a ton to everyone who helped with this.  Thanks to my awesome brother who came several nights to help paint.  Thanks to my awesome brother-in-law for helping with the laminate floor (despite my small temper tantrum).  Thanks to their awesome wives for sacrificing their husbands to come help, and coming to hang out with us and watch the kids.  Thanks a ton to Jaron's awesome family for helping us move out of our apartment, and to his awesome brother who came to paint a few shelves for us.  We're loving the house, and will love it even more when we can just enjoy it without a million projects (if that is ever possible).