"Before" House Pictures

So, these are some before pictures. The first picture is our living room/office. The wall color wasn't bad, but it was a horrible paint job. We repainted this room a little darker green. Sean's office is against the far wall, and eventually we'll put up a partition wall to separate it. This is also the room my baby grand will eventually go into!

The second picture is our family room and dining room. We are going to paint these walls a khaki color. We'll resurface the fire place with black slate tiles, recarpet the family room, and tile the dining room. The wall you can see on the right of the picture, "L's" around to the dining room. We are going to make that a half wall and turn it into a bar, with cabinet space on the other side. (This is the project I'm looking forward to the most!

The third picture is the spare bedroom. We painted all of these walls the same green as the living room (after removing about 100 staples from the walls.) We painted all of the brown, so the window trimmings, the closet doors, the hallway door and frame etc all white. We will replace the baseboards once we replace the carpet.

The next picture is Josh's bedroom that we painted blue and white. We did the white trimmings in this room too. We had to do 5-7 coats of primer over those ugly sunflowers. They wouldn't go away!!

The next picture is the master bedroom. We painted these walls a Creme Brulee brown. It is really pretty! I'll post the "after" pictures soon. We just need to get the house more organized first!

The last picture is our ugly kitchen wall. Yes, it's bright Salmon! We primed over it so we wouldn't have to look at it anymore, but we still don't know what color we are painting it! The kitchen is pretty nice though. Behind where I took the picture is the kitchen. It's hard to keep clean. That seems to be the central point of all the mess for some reason, but I'm sure we'll feel a sense of order someday soon!

House Update

So to start out, this is one of the bedrooms. Before and after. (We are going to replace the base boards after we carpet.) We have been consistantly and constantly working on our house! We have had so much help from family and friends. Thank you! It has been a lot of hard work, but a lot of fun as well!! We got the living room painted as well as all of the bedrooms, including closets, doors, and window and door framings. We have primed the kitchen and family room and hallway. We put in lots of new lighting and have trimmed the bushes and trees in the front yard.
We are completely moved out of our rental, but not necessarily moved into our house. Most everything is in the garage still. We just put the doorknobs on our doors yesterday. We have redone the hinges, shelving, electrical outlets, light switches, and basically every possible thing that we can do ourselves. We are moved into our room and the bathrooms and kitchen are done but we still have so much chaos! Thank you so much Mom and Dad for coming down on such short notice that first weekend! You're help was appreciated more than you know! Thanks to Tim and Danika for helping us edge and letting us use your painting supplies and skills. Thanks Caitlin for helping us move out and move in and paint etc. etc. and thanks to everyone else that has helped in the slightest sense!

Our neighborhood seems really cool. We have had 4 different neighbors come say hi to us and welcome us in. There are a lot of kids in the neighborhood and it seems really close knit, which is nice. It is about 10 or 15 minutes closer to work for me, which is probably my favorite part. I get to leave at 7:30 now! Yay!! Anyway, we are just thouroughly excited about this part of our lives and the projects that we have ahead of us. It is exhausting but it is worth it to see all of the progress! (I'll post more pictures soon...)

Fourth of July Weekend!

For the 4th of July weekend, we were able to go visit my family up in Washington. My mom’s sister and her family of 8 kids were in town. I hadn’t seen them in over 5 years, and Sean hadn’t met them at all! We were in Washington Friday night through Tuesday morning. We played on the zip-line my dad set up, we made tons of desserts and played lots of games! On Monday, 34 of us went to the lake and hung out all day! We got there around 8:30 in the morning and it was overcast and cold. We were all bummed and considering going home. Because it has been so warm for the past two weeks, the water was 75 degrees (warmer than the air!) It was insane! We decided to wait it out and we were glad we did! The clouds burned off and we had a gorgeous day at the lake. We went wake boarding, water skiing, tubing, swimming and sight seeing. We brought tons of food and the barbecue so we had hamburgers for dinner. Everyone got sunburned and everyone had so much fun! We saw huge fish in the swimming area and took lots of pictures. Some of us left the lake around 3 and some stayed until after 8! Because it was an overcast morning, we had the lake to ourselves until about 4:30. It was so awesome to be able to go tubing and stuff on the smooth water. We took tons of pictures and just had a blast!

Tuesday morning, the 4th of July, we went to the church for the flag raising ceremony, and a delicious cinnamon roll breakfast. After we ate, Sean and I went home and packed. We said goodbye to everyone and drove the three hours back to Portland. We were home for about an hour before we got in the car again, this time with his family, and drove the hour to Seaside. We set up camp on the beach, had steaks and hamburgers for dinner, and had a campfire. We walked around a little bit and got ice cream and elephant ears from the shops then went back to the beach. We lounged around and chatted until it got dark. Then we watched the fireworks. It was an awesome show! It is supposed to be the biggest show on the Pacific Coasts of Washington and Oregon. It was good! We got home around 12:30 and passed out. We were exhausted from all of the driving and long days.

This weekend was awesome. It was good to see family that we hadn’t seen in a long time and it was fun to just be able to hang out. It was great to be able to go up to WA for a little longer than just Friday night through Sunday which is how long we usually get to go. I love the Fourth of July!!

We Closed!

We closed on our house yesterday! Now we just have to paint, then move in! Once we are moved in, there is still a lot of work to be done on it, but finally our monthly payment is going towards our mortgage instead of rent! I'm really excited about this and I'm sure I'll post more as the projects move a long!