Halloween

We decided to make this year our first official trick or treating with the girls.  We felt like they were both old enough to actively participate.  I wasn't sure what they were going to be until a week ago and we came across some good costumes at a consignment sale for really cheap that we could not pass up.  First we took them this afternoon to the Fayetteville square where all the square merchants, other city businesses, and city officials were handing out candy, prizes, and more. The girls did great and really enjoyed it.  Then for the evening we met up at a friend's house and had dinner and then all went trick or treating together.  It was a lot of fun.  It took a few houses but the girls got into the swing of things pretty quickly.  The first house Esther rang the doorbell and then started to open the door to go inside.  The girls got lots of candy and we had them each pick out six pieces to eat over the next few days and the rest mommy and daddy will eat, or give away.  The were thrilled because they hardly ever get candy.  All in all it was a successful Halloween and lots of fun. 

Clara's spaceship costume was the hit of the day.

Esther was a dinosaur but was not a big fan of getting her picture taken.

Friends

Super cute girls

Fun Fall Weekend

We have been enjoying the nice weather and decided to get our Fall on this weekend. Saturday we went to a local farm pumpkin patch. We walked around the patch and searched for the perfect pumpkins. The girls had a great time helping pull the wagon, trying to lift huge pumpkins, and picking out their pumpkins.

We also invited some friends over Sunday afternoon for pumpkin carving and chili. The adults carved while the kids "helped." 

This kids were actually more interested in playing on the big pile of dirt for the future garden than carving pumpkins.

The girls enjoyed lighting our jack-o-lantern tonight. 

Before and After

This is going to be a long post because I am going to try to do all the before and after pictures in one post. We did a lot of things to this place to change it into being ours.  A quick recap of the major stuff before pictures:  We took down wallpaper and paneling from every room, had the walls textured, and then painted. We put in a new back door where there wasn't one and a new dishwasher where there wasn't one. Replaced the carpet and linoleum. Painted the cabinets, altered the cabinets, and did new countertops. Put in new light fixtures and fans.  And we did lots and lots of little stuff.

 Here are all the before and after pictures of our house.  I will also try to talk about what I did in each one.

Before Kitchen

The kitchen dining, and living area are all one big room.  The kitchen has the old school cabinets that hang down so you can not see into the rest of the room unless you bend down which is kind of ridiculous.  My idea was to take these out and make some hanging shelves.  I ran into some problems with removing these so I ended up just altering these into hanging shelves which turned out pretty good and was a lot easier.  We also ended up painting the cabinets which we did not originally plan but we are happy we did.  We were really excited about having open shelves because we have lots of antique kitchen wares to display. And now you can see into the rest of the big room and the kitchen feels a lot more open

After Kitchen




Before Kitchen

This picture is after I had already put in the dishwasher. Notice the big breadbox also.

After Kitchen

Before Kitchen

So, I removed the doors, panels, and some supports to make the cabinets into shelves

After

Before

This was the dining area but we changed the dining area to a different spot so the kitchen flowed better into the dining area.

 After

This is now the computer desk and play area for the girls

Before

This was a random area in the main room.  The fireplace is a propane fake fireplace that they took out the back door to put in which makes no sense to me.  I would much rather have a back door so we put one back in. 

After

Before Living Room Area

After Living

Before bathroom

I painted the cabinet and put a new counter top on.  Installed a new medicine cabinet and light.  Also had to install an exhaust fan because there was not one before. We also replaced the flooring in here.  There was carpet in this bathroom which is gross.

 After

We also remodeled the bedrooms which I did not really get good pictures of but you can imagine bad wallpaper and paneling and now they are nicely painted. 

Here are a few of my favorite things I did with the remodel. Some of these are ideas I had but was not sure how they would turn out but ended up pretty good. 

New back door where we took out the fake fireplace.

This is a little entry wall by the front door. It was covered with...you guessed it...wallpaper and crappy paneling. I recycled the cedar strips that were between paneling wainscoting and wallpaper in every room and covered this wall with it.  It turned out really cool looking (even better in person). This is also a great place to display our antique and interesting books. 

Here is a close up of the hanging shelves made by altering the old hanging cabinets.  I love being able to display our antique kitchen stuff, cool glassware, and my granny's dishes. 

I came up with an idea to do horizontal boards in the kitchen as a back splash. I used pvc boards so water won't affect them and they are super uniform. I also put a small gap in them. I am happy with how it turned out, it is a really clean/cool look. 

I decided to do horizontal boards on the bottom outside of the cabinets.  I used different sized boards pieced together with different sized gaps and painted them

The Remodel: Episode 1

    Well, I am finally getting around to writing a blog about the remodel of our new place.  There is so much to talk about and we did so many things that I am going to break it up into multiple posts, otherwise I might win an award from Guinness for the longest blog post.
    We finished the interior remodel a few weeks ago.  It took about 6 weeks to do it. Our last house I remodeled in under three weeks.  This one took longer because I wanted to do it better since it is our long term house, we were living in it while remodeling, and we have two very young girls that require lots of attention and like to get into everything.
    This house had not been updated since it was built which was 1988. It was super 80's, and not the cool 80's.  There was brown swirl sculpted carpet, wood paneling wainscoting in every room with wallpaper above, old school linoleum, old brown colored cabinets and vanities with ugly countertops, super ugly light fixtures and chandelier, lots of lace curtains, etc. Just think of your grandma's house. There was even carpet in the bathroom which is gross and I don't understand why anyone would do that.  Old people lived here so there was no dishwasher. There was also not a back door because the owners took it out to put in a propane fake fireplace a few years ago.
      Overall the remodel went good but it did not go without hitches (and maybe a little cussing). One of the things that took the longest to do was to remove wallpaper from every room. We had never done that before and it was not fun.  We discovered that the previous owners did not prime the drywall before putting on the wallpaper (fyi, you should never do that).  Some of the wallpaper did come down ok but a lot of it took lots of steam, water, and scraping.  We discovered that every wallpaper comes off differently.  We are now experts if anyone needs advice.  We discovered the cabinets were custom built so changing the tops was not as easy as I hoped because it was not standard sized.  We also discovered the best way for removing linoleum from concrete, which involves boiling water. It sucked pretty bad living in the house while remodeling but luckily it did not take terribly long. It drove me crazy living in a complete dirty mess for that time, I am happy it is over.  One thing I discovered though.  I think if I had the money I would flip houses for a living.  I really enjoy remodeling a house (just not living in it while I do it) and I think I am good at it.
     We are happy with how it turned out. I hope we continue to be happy with it for years to come. It is amazing to see the before and after pictures (which I will be posting in the following posts). For this post I will put up some pictures from during the remodel.

First piece of wood paneling to come off the wall. 

First piece of wallpaper to come off.  The first room the wallpaper came off super easy so we thought it was not going to be too bad but we were very very wrong

Wall after removing paneling and wallpaper.

Adding a back door with my dad.  It went pretty fast because he had done it before. 

Altering the 80's hang down cabinets into hanging shelves.  It was a crazy idea I had. 

Laying vinyl tile in the kitchen.

Painting cabinets.  We did not plan to do this but after altering the upper hanging cabinets we felt like it really need to be done.  And we are super happy we did it even though painting cabinets sucks big time.