Before and After

We moved into our new home 20 days ago.  I've been working hard to arrange and unpack so we can finally feel settled.  It's not totally finished, but it's finally at a point that I feel I can relax.  Phew!  Here's hoping life can go back to normal again.  (We'll work on our many little house projects, and unpacking the boxes in the attic gradually.)

I've shown some of the work we did on the house in previous posts.  The next few pictures show some of the unpacking work.

I was pretty fried from four weeks of nonstop work towards our move, so when this was my view on Monday morning after the move I was quite discouraged.  

Still that Monday morning...

Another angle...

Another room, same morning...

I finally began on the kitchen and the kids watched.  The ladder continued indoors (with no purpose) for at least a week.

There was no turning back at this point!

By Friday (which was the day after Thanksgiving) I'd made some progress, but not as much as I hoped.  I just told myself to be patient.  Jim helped me with the books this day.  It felt so good to have our books out again!

Book mess...

More book mess...

More book mess...

Sometime in the next week I unburied the office.

I also had a rather ironic fortune cookie.

 

NOW, it's time for the before and after pictures.

Kitchen: BEFORE

AFTER: The walls are a slightly different color, but otherwise it looks about the same.  What you can't see are the hours I spent scrubbing grease off of the cupboards/ counters, black grime off of the fridge, and dirt off of the ceiling fixtures.

 Dining room: BEFORE

AFTER:  I love this room.  We were afraid the paint color would be too dark, but it ended up being my favorite.  

 Living room: BEFORE

AFTER: As predicted, paint and carpet went a long way in this room.

 

 Behind the living room radiator: BEFORE

AFTER: Our couch sits here now.

 Behind the parlor radiator: BEFORE

AFTER: We're going to build some shelves in the corner.

 Parlor: BEFORE

AFTER: This room isn't finished.  The big piano and I are parting ways soon, the closet needs doors, and I have a lot of boxes to unpack in that closet still.

 Our bedroom: BEFORE

AFTER:  I'm not satisfied with this room yet, but for now it's clean and functional.

 Boys' bedroom: BEFORE

 AFTER:  This room has the best contrast.  Paint and carpet are awesome!

  Girls' room: BEFORE

AFTER:  My camera made the walls look sort of blue, but they are a lighter shade of the purple in the girls' bedding.  This room is totally cute; now I just need to find some cute butterflies for the walls.

s.

 Upstairs bathroom: BEFORE

AFTER: All we did in here was give it a good scrub and a different shower curtain.

Extra bedroom: AFTER.  I failed to take a before picture of this one, but it looked a lot like the other rooms.  It had the worst walls, though.

Office: AFTER and still in progress.  It's functional for now.

 To be complete I wanted to include some outdoor pictures.  BEFORE (ha ha)

AFTER:  It's been a crazy three months since we first saw this place.  The first time we entered the house we were suffering from super hot weather.  Now we're experiencing snow and freezing temperatures.  The snow really is beautiful.  I didn't want to actually go outside to take a picture, though.  :)

Home Improvement

For the last three weeks we have worked constantly on our new house.  We spent the first week just repairing wall and ceiling cracks.  Originally we planned to just repair a few of the biggest ones, but once we started changed our minds.  

These pictures show some of the repair work we did.  The cracks were everywhere!

Abby didn't like being in our new house at all that first week. I think she could tell it was uncomfortable and dirty.  It's the only time she's ever needed to be held constantly.  So Jim and I took turns with her, and some wonderful friends babysat for periods of time.  We brought a rocking chair over to the house just for her.

The kids have enjoyed the freedom to run wild indoor and outdoor.

Here is a look at a few more cracks.

Our living room ceiling looked the worst and was the biggest headache.  There were several cracks going through it, and one in particular that looked really bad.  We thought the ceiling was falling apart there, but it turned out that it was just the popcorn texture coming off in a big chunk near a good sized crack.  So we repaired that crack, re-textured that spot, and started painting the ceiling.  When we'd painted most of it, the newly moistened popcorn texture started falling off in chunks all over the place!  So we scraped the whole thing and started all over.  This time we repaired ALL of the cracks, sanded the whole thing, and applied stone texture in paint.  Then we painted it a second time.  After the paint dried, we were very frustrated to see that it was peeling all over the place!  So Jim spent half a day sanding those spots, and then painted a third time.  The next day it was peeling again, but worse!  At this point, we determined that the previous layer of paint must have been oil based, so our water based latex paint wasn't sticking well.  Grr...  We should have primed it first, but thought paint on paint would be fine.  By this point, we'd lost three days just working on the ceiling and didn't have time to scrape and sand the whole thing again.  So, I loosely sanded the peeling areas, applied primer, and painted a fourth time.  Thankfully it didn't peel again.  It's far from perfect though!

Here are pictures of the mess we made working on the ceiling.

In the meantime, we had lots of cloudy weather (which made it difficult to see well for painting) and our maple tree turned a beautiful color and lost its leaves.

After repairing cracks and painting ceilings, we spent a couple of days just taping everything.

The kids ran wild, and Alex had pants on occasionally. 

I found some nastiness underneath the refrigerator when I set out to paint the kitchen.  

I personally painted almost every room in the house while Jim was at work.  I was so excited to finally paint these two rooms!  My camera made this blue look a lot brighter than it really is.

Again the camera distorted the color of the room.  Logan was curious how long our house was one day, so he measured it.

I moved on to the bedrooms next.  Again it's hard to see the color, but I love this green we put in our room.

The girls' room is now purple.

The boys' room required a primer coat to cover the dark brown panelling.

The blue really improved their room.

While I painted we had a new heating and cooling system installed.  Once our new furnace was operating, we cut these massive radiators loose and hauled them out.  These things were several hundred pounds each.

Jim actually dropped one on his foot.  It took two guys to lift it off of him.  Thankfully he was wearing his hard toe shoes, so he wasn't hurt.  It dented the toe of his shoe though!

We found lots of garbage behind those radiators.  This corner filled a whole garbage bag by itself.  Do you see the men's underwear there?  YUCK!

How hard can it be to throw your dirty tissues in a garbage can?  I had the pleasure of cleaning these messes up.

After the radiators were out, I worked late into the night (almost 1am) doing touch up paint and cleaning things up because the carpet guys were coming the next morning.  Another evening, Annie and I went back over to start deep cleaning the kitchen (another nasty situation) after they'd ripped the old carpet out and starting installing the new.  The first thing she did was lay down on the new carpet.  The boys did the same thing when they first saw it.  I walked around and around barefoot enjoying it.  It's so soft and nice!

So now the new carpet is fully installed, the walls are mostly crack free and freshly painted, there is a new heating and cooling system, and I've made progress cleaning.  It looks and smells like a different house!  All that remains is to finish cleaning and packing.  We move in on Saturday!  The after pictures will be coming soon I hope.

A Couple of Milestones

Abby has learned a new trick.  She's sitting up!  She's also become curious about EVERYTHING.  She grabs at everything and gets upset if you take something away from her.  She jabbers all the time now too.  She seriously couldn't be cuter or sweeter.

A couple of weeks ago Logan lost one of his top teeth.  He was just a little late to be a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. 

Jim and I had a fun date night at the adult session of stake conference.  Some friends arranged for combined babysitting, so we dropped the older three kids off and went to dinner with friends beforehand.  The session was excellent and so uplifting.  It was just what I needed.  I enjoyed holding Abby without having to manage the other kids, too.  She fell asleep in Jim's arms toward the end.

We had some Saturday morning fun on the bed.

Last night Logan lost his other front tooth.  The tooth fairy paid him extra because he sang 'All I Want For Christmas Are My Two Front Teeth' for the video camera.  It was extremely awesome.

I made several attempts to take a picture of Abby's cuteness today.  If I used my phone, the pictures were blurry.  If I used my camera she closed her eyes.  I just can't win.

This is the 'Mommy took my pacifier out to take a picture' face.

This is the 'all better' face.

Alex actually let me take his picture.  *gasp*  It's too bad I didn't have my real camera out for this rare opportunity.

 

Halloween

We had a fun little Halloween this year.  The night before we went to a Trunk or Treat at the church.  Logan was Nathaniel Bowditch.  We read an amazing and fun book about him this year, so Logan was excited to be someone so neat.  The book we read is 'Carry On Mr. Bowditch, and the book Logan was holding for his costume is the one he wrote: 'The American Practical Navigator'.  Annie was a princess.  Alex put our Thomas costume to good use again; this was this fifth year in a row that one of our boys wore it.  Abby is a sweet pumpkin.

On Halloween the kids thought it'd be fun to try Annie's princess hat on Abby.  

The dog had good timing here.

I can always tell when I've taken a picture with my real camera vs. my phone lately because Abby always closes her eyes for the flash.

The kids put long sleeved shirts underneath their costumes and we headed out to trick or treat.  After two houses they were cold, so we walked home again and stuffed coats underneath.