Our "new" house

We've really been enjoying the look and feel of our recent home improvements over the past few weeks! It feels like we've been thinking about them most of 2013. For a while, we knew that we wanted to make some updates to our home, but we were a little overwhelmed knowing where to start.

In January, we had realtors from our church come by to give us some suggestions. They narrowed it down to a few areas: replacing the bathroom carpet with tile, removing all wallpaper in our bathrooms, and updating our kitchen. After having some direction, we had three contractors come out to give us bids. Then we spent a few weeks doing lots of research -- looking both on line and at home improvement stores and talking to lots of people to discover what sorts of things we really liked. Finally, in April the actual renovations began. We had workers in our home for about half of the days in April, and they finished on April 29 -- just in time for us to host our boys' birthday parties. :)

We didn't remember to take "before" pictures of everything in our house, but here are two "before" pictures of our kitchen. Notice the blue countertops, the yellow walls, and the ugly lighting. :)

 Here's an in-process picture of some renovations. The painters moved all of our furniture (and toys!) to the middle of the living room so they could better access the walls. Needless to say, it was a little crazy having workers in our house for so many days. In one way, it was fun. Ian was always VERY interested to watch what the workers were doing and to see what tools they were using. The workers seemed to take a special interest in Ian -- as well as Ryan -- and didn't seem to mind having us nearby. Watching what the workers were doing made me (Kim) VERY happy that Matt and I hadn't tried to tackle any of the work on our own, with help from our two little ones. :)

But, the other side of the coin was that it was pretty chaotic in our house. We needed to be at our house to answer questions the workers had (how high they should hang the lights, if the paint color looked right, etc.), but it was hard to find out-of-the-way places to play with the boys. Especially since many of the days were rainy, it was a little challenging keep the boys entertained inside and to keep random debris out of Ryan's mouth.

 Especially when our kitchen was torn up, we had to get a little creative at lunch time. When it was nice outside, we had picnics in the backyard. When it was rainy, we ate on our entry way floor. Ian loved eating on the breakfast-in-bed tray. One day, Kim's dear friend Kati brought us lunch from Subway and ate with us in our backyard.

 Overall, though, it was such a blessing to have the home renovation work done by people that we trusted! And now we are so, so happy to be done and to get to enjoy the updates!

Here are some pictures of the finished work ...

 In our powder room bathroom, we replaced the carpet with ceramic tile that looks like rustic wood planks. The workers removed the wallpaper, placed a trowel texture on the walls, and painted the walls a terra cotta orange color.

 We got a new light fixture and are still shopping for a framed mirror to hang on the walls. (any suggestions of places to look for one?)

 The common areas and living room used to be a blue-gray color. Awesome friends Kyle and Aliceson helped steer us to the color we chose for our common areas, living room, and upstairs bathroom (Nomadic Desert). We like the tan color SO much better and appreciate how it makes the white trim stand out so much more.

 Kyle and Aliceson also helped us with the paint color for our master bath -- Latte. The workers also added some texture to the walls.

 Here's a better view of the new tile in the master bathroom -- 20" Cometstone ceramic tile.

And (drum roll, please) .... our new kitchen!

 We love the lights we found on line at Lowe's.com. It has been awesome having our kitchen island about 2.5 feet longer! There's probably no such thing as an island that's "too big," huh? We're still deciding what we want to do with our extra storage space (any thoughts?). We have also liked the 4" Nocce travertine tile the workers installed as our backsplash.

 The walls are newly textured and painted -- about one shade darker than the common areas (since the kitchen gets lots of natural light). We chose St. Cecilia granite -- and have really appreciated having an undermounted sink, too.

We're out of home renovation money for this year, but we're already dreaming of getting new carpet in January. For now, we're just enjoying the feel of our "new" house, and we think that you should come see it soon (if you haven't already!). :)