Lots and lots of work

I have been helping my parents paint their house for the last few days. As you can see, Annie was excited about helping as well. She had the important job of painting the wall behind the fridge. Painting is a lot of hard work and helping my parents these last few days really had me thinking back on our huge project last summer: remodeling our house. We bought our first house last June. We bought it knowing it would be a fixer-upper, but we didn't realize just how much fixing we were about to do. We closed on our house on June 8th and spent the next five weeks working on it just so we could move in. We were finally able to move in on July 17th. We are quite proud of our little home and all the work we put into it. There is still a lot to do, mainly in the yard, but we are looking forward to it knowing that we are making our home better and better. Here are a few before and after pictures of our house...
This is the living room before. It had green, dirty, wrinkled carpet and a really funky mirror. As you can see, the railing was lovely as well. It had been sitting out in the yard for quite some time I believe. The previous owner and to put it in the house in order for the loan to go through.

This is the living room after. We repainted and recarpeted and defunked the mirror. We also sanded and refinished the railing. I originally wanted a new railing until I found out how expensive they are!

The picture to the right is the entryway before, and the one below is after.

Probably the most drastic change in the whole house was the bathroom remodel. The bathroom was seriously the scariest room in the house. Nobody dared to use it. We called around and got lots of bids for a bathroom remodel and with every bid I became more and more worried that I was going to have to stick with what we had. I had no idea bathrooms were so expensive. Then one day we had the fortune of hearing about a tile guy who does great work and could completely re-do our tile for just a little bit more than what it would cost to regrout the existing tile. So with a phone call and a couple of weeks of showering at the in-laws we had a new beautiful bathroom!