Possibly the biggest thing we have realized in this fixer-uppering is that the house is just never going to be DONE. Every single time we finish one thing, we find a hundred more things that still need to happen. It’s nice and encouraging. 😉

But one thing we are really bad at doing is looking at the house and only seeing what still needs to be accomplished rather than what has already been done. So, on cleaning day this week, I decided it was about time to put up some “almost done” pictures. We still have a few little odds and ends and decorations, but most of the big stuff is done!

I absolutely LOVE how it’s turning out. When we discovered our little infestation issue after we bought the house, I was so so sad and I cried constantly over it because I just knew that we’d made the biggest mistake ever buying this giant money pit of a house. But Jon has been quick to remind me that we got it at such a good price because of all the work it needed. A good thing to keep in mind as we take on these projects!!

The biggest transformation of the house has definitely been the kitchen, so I’ll start there. Originally, when we bought the house, the goal was to deep clean the existing kitchen, live with it for a few years and then remodel when we’d saved up for it. We had a pretty big chunk of money in savings that we had already marked for the flooring, painting and backyard. But, like I said, we found an infestation along with a ton of just nastiness and nightmare-inducing grossness and after trying our best, we realized we could never get it clean enough. Plus, we couldn’t figure out where the mice were getting in without ripping out the cabinets.

So, we decided that we could live without a functioning backyard but we couldn’t live without a functioning kitchen, took our backyard budget and stretched and penny-pinched as much as we could. My amazing dad came and helped us measure and install and level cabinets, Mom came and painted and gave us color advice and God was so good. Home Depot had major sales on all of the things we needed, when we needed them, in the order we needed them. We got the cabinets on a 30% off deal, we got the appliances on a major sale and when we went in to order the countertops, the man told us to wait a week and they were also going on a huge sale with free corner rounding AND the one we liked the most was the cheapest option to begin with. We installed almost everything ourselves (except for the countertops and appliances, which were free installation. But the cabinets, hardwood floors, pantry doors, all the cabinet pulls, the blinds, etc. was all us), which also saved us a ton of money.

So. All that to say – it has been stressful, expensive and Jon and I have both (and my poor parents in the beginning, bless their hearts) poured some pretty significant amounts of blood, sweat and tears (mostly mine) into this house. I used to cry all the time from just sheer exhaustion and wish we had just stayed in our last house because we loved it and it didn’t require any work, but I can honestly say that I truly do LOVE this house now. It is such a blessing to us and the space is just such a wonderful thing with all these busy, loud kids around! I love that we have completely made it ours. I love our neighborhood and two dear friends live within a 6 and 7 minute walk from my house. God is so good to us.

Okay. Enough of the sentimental rambling and onto the pictures!! 😉

Just to refresh the memory, here are a couple of before shots of our kitchen the day we bought the house:

And my kitchen now:

I absolutely love how it turned out! I really felt like white cabinets would just brighten the space so much and be such a nice contrast to the new paint color. We cut the wall and shortened the breakfast bar to make it all the same height and it opened the space up so much. We have plans to refinish our  barstools (and likely table and chairs) to match one of these days. 😉 And I’ve slowly been decorating! Most of it are things I already had. My favorite piece is the fence on top of the cabinets – it’s actually our old fence from our old house and I love the memories of it!

Another couple of views:

My pantry doors were my birthday present and I love them. 😉 Funny how your birthday wishes change over the years. Ha!

We still need to add the quarter-round around the bottom of the cabinets and our plan is to add beadboard on the sides of the island and ends of the cabinets, just as a little something extra. Maybe we can tackle that project this summer. 😉

And that’s the kitchen! On to the dining room! Here’s the old view:

And the dining room now:

In this room, the biggest thing we did was take out the nasty appliance garage. It was in the corner where my bulletin board is now and was about 5.5 feet high and just covered in some black, nasty stuff. We took down the old blinds, got rid of the top window coverings altogether and redid the floors, trim, paint and light fixture.

The dining room set was my grandmother’s on my dad’s side. I have SO many memories of this set and I absolutely LOVE that something that was so cherished by my grandmother is now in my home! We had basically zero dining space in our old house, so we have been truly enjoying having so much space for us to gather with friends and family.

When we bought the house, we had no idea what we were going to do with the front living space.

It still amazes me how dark this house was. There is so much natural light in this house!! We knew we would probably do another living area, so we decided to take up the tile and put carpet in here as well. We also decided to carpet the hallway and the area under the stairs. Originally, we were just going to kind of keep this room pretty simple and maybe try to find a used couch somewhere, but we ended up turning it into a playroom.

This was just the best decision!! It gives the kids so much space, all their toys don’t have to constantly be in my family room and they have room to run around. There’s often a fort or fire station or restaurant happening in here. Love seeing their imaginations have room to come to life! Aside from paint, trim, flooring and blinds, we didn’t do a ton in here. I stained the tops of the little short walls to match the staircase, but that’s about it.

The old staircase:

Oh the carpet runner. It was just my fave. And the new:

As I was taking these pictures, all the clouds came in, so I had to turn on some lights. And Kody apparently decided that a few pictures needed a real life model. 😉 I love how this turned out. Originally, we were going to do hardwoods connecting the dining and entry and continuing down the hall, but I’m so glad we went with carpet. Parker sommersaults from the playroom to the family room every day and we’ve had a couple of getting-used-to-stairs accidents that made me REALLY thankful we had carpet and padding at the bottom there. We stained the banister, painted the rails and took off the window coverings again so we could actually have some natural light in here.

Which brings us to the old family room:

SO dark. So depressing. We started by ripping up all the tile and getting rid of all the wires sticking out everywhere – a good plan with kids around, I think. 😉 I stained the beams and painted the trim. We also got rid of all the old blinds.

The family room now:

Kody is just following me around at this point. 😉 First off, it’s amazing how much the carpet, new blinds and paint makes such a HUGE difference!! I love our family room. We still need to put things on the walls, but it’s come such a long way.

I already did a little something on this, but we did a few more fixes, so I’ll just put it in here too. Here’s the old weird closet that is just to the left of that last picture:

Seriously it was just creepy. Here’s what we did with the space:

I LOVE our school room! I’m so thankful that we ended up doing this here. It’s so nice for the kids to have space to work and cut and make a mess and it’s very easy to just clean everything up, shove all the books in the closet and go on with life. 😉 When we are doing school in there, the kids pull their desks out so I can write on the white board and when we are done, it takes no time to just push them right back up against the wall. Those desks are some of the best $6 total (well, not including the paint I used to refinish them) I ever spent. 😉

And that’s it!! You’ve now seen almost all of the downstairs except for my laundry room and downstairs bathroom, but those before and afters will have to come another day. 🙂 If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks for reading this incredibly long post. Ha! So much fun to to go back and remember where this house was and how far we have come. It’s been a TON of work but there has been so much reward in the process. Parker likes to call us the “family team” when we are in the middle of a project and that’s exactly what we’ve become. 🙂

More to come soon!