The HOUSE

A little behind, but we finally have some house pictures. In July we had an eye infection (me), ear infection and Roseola (Poor Caroline. Nothing says Happy Birthday like a 104 fever and having blood drawn.), MUCH needed girls trip to Santa Fe (me), and a trip to OKC, and Back-to-School stuff (Camden). We are now re-booting Operation: Renovation and have a half-painted hallway this week, and NO door for the hallway bathroom.


The HOUSE
We had less than 24 hours to find a house when we were in Bville in February. Those 24 hours were cut short when an impending snow storm threatened our drive back to Houston, so technically we spent a total of five hours searching for our home. We thought we had one picked out, put in an offer, and then headed out of town ahead of the snow. We found out that there was already a contract on the house, so we went with our second choice. I had only spent about ten minutes in the second choice house, so I was a little nervous about buying a house and spending so little time looking through it. I knew there were several things that would have to be changed for us to live in it. We spent a week negotiating over the phone trying to get the house. I'm not going to lie... I was getting nervous. We had no third choice house, AND Aaron's company only pays for one house hunting trip. We just didn't have the time or money to go back up there and look again. We finally reached an agreement, set a closing date, and prepared for the renovations.

Between the closing date and move-in date, we had only two weeks to do a LOT of renovations. The people working on our house were literally standing around waiting for Aaron to get out of the closing and hand over the keys to my dad (who brought up his workers). Within a few hours, the ceilings were getting scraped, floors pulled, walls knocked out, etc. (Can you just imagine the mess after 3,400 sq feet of popcorn ceilings have been scraped?) After all of the floors and walls were done, floor people came in to knock out some tile, replace tile, and re-carpet.

After we moved in, we continued with painting a lot of the woodwork, changing out hardware, re-doing the front door, etc. Here's where we are in the process...

I didn't get to take 'before' pics of the house because 1.) we didn't know it was going to be our house when we looked at it. 2.) The demo started within an hour of owning the house and there wasn't time for before pics, SO what I do have is the pictures the realtor gave me in order to help me pick out paint colors and decide what renovations I wanted before we moved in. All of my decisions were based on a few pics... piece of cake, right? The Before pictures include the furniture from the sweet home owners who lived there before us. They were COP employees too, and the company bought the house from them a few months before we made an offer. They helped us out by informing us about possible issues with the house, which made us more informed when counter-offering.

Okay... now on to the pictures....

Family Room


Before



After


This room was a bit of a headache. If you look at the before pictures, you can see that there is paneling on the walls that has been painted. We asked the carpenter to pull off a bit of the paneling to see what was underneath because surely there was drywall behind it, right? Well there wasn't (it was original to the house), and it was too late to go back, so they took out all of the paneling and rebuilt the walls from scratch. This hurt my heart... and the decorator's allowance budget, but in the end, I think it was worth it. Our painters textured the entire room and painted it. I told them to hold off on the bookcases, mantle, etc. because I wasn't sure what accent color I wanted for the room. I chose black and Aaron obliged and painted the bookcases, mantle, and door. We sanded and spray-painted the fireplace grill and replaced the hardware to match.
We replaced the laminate floor with carpet because I wanted a warmer feel and we knew Caroline would take a lot of hard hits when she learned how to crawl and walk. In Katy our carpet and pad were so thin, you could feel those little nails through the carpet pad. Aaron and I agreed we wanted the thickest carpet and the thickest pad for this house. The carpet layer delivered because our carpet is like buttah!



Kitchen/Breakfast Room


Before



After

Another view...



I knew the kitchen would be an issue the first (only) time we walked through the house. The previous owners had done an amazing job remodeling the kitchen, but it was still small. I make pasta, roll out dough for cinnamon rolls, can goods, etc, and I needed a large amount of counter space. It was actually the realtor's idea to knock out the wall and add more cabinet/counter space. We found out it was a load-bearing wall, but my dad is awesome and had his carpenter come up and knock out the low ceiling and wall, re-distribute the weight from the load-bearing wall, and then build a custom cabinet for us. We decided to make it a little more fun and paint the cabinet black (Again, thanks Dad!) and ordered the granite countertop to match the rest of the kitchen. Our painter textured and painted the kitchen from ceiling to woodwork.


Playroom

Before


After

and the room keeps going...

This room was the least amount of work. The ceilings were scraped and textured, and the walls were painted. This paint color was the one I was MOST questioned on when I picked them all out. Even the painter admitted he wasn't sure when he opened up the paint can. I knew with the windows I could get by with something a little darker, and I LOVED this color. It works with the room and is most people's favorite now. The wood floors were already here, and they are fabulous for the play room. The size of this room is ridiculous, but we are really enjoying it. I love that Camden can make crazy noises in here and not have to worry if it's going to wake up Caroline on the other side of the house.



Formal Dining Room


Before


After
We re-painted everything (walls and trim), new carpet, and I chose to take off the molding on the walls. We brought our dining room light fixture with us from Katy.


Attached to the formal dining is the formal living room...

This room is one of the reasons we didn't initially make an offer on this house. There's was just too much room already, and I didn't want a formal living area because... well... there is just nothing formal about my life right now. We bought the couch before we left Katy, and we found the two chairs and side tables at a garage sale in the neighborhood. I bought some material, and Aaron recovered the chairs. This is my 'adult' room. In my 'adult' dreams, I can come in here, enjoy the silence, and read a book. It's a very relaxing room until Camden storms in, knocks my chairs down to the floor, and pretends they are his pirate ships.


Entry Hall

Before


After

We re-tiled, painted everything, and changed out the hardware. We still have three rooms of wood trim and a few brown wood doors to paint, but we are making progress!

More pics to come as the renovation continues!