Afters and Before

We've been busy, huh?  

Just kidding, these pictures aren't real.  Pretty cool though, right?  Seeing an "after" picture before you've actually done any work is like eating dessert before dinner! We were lucky enough to meet a man named Dan Doughtie who works at a plant nursery in Hendersonville called "A Growing Concern."  Using Photoshop, he designs a landscape for your house and that's exactly what these pictures are.  Now we'll be able to take our design back to the nursery, buy our plants and plant them at our own pace.

Here are a few pictures of what our house actually looks like as of this afternoon:

Goodbye hunter green!  What's that?  You don't remember the hunter green?  Let me refresh your memory...

Before

After

Before

After

Now if landscaping were only as easy as Photoshop. Here's a close-up of our front porch with a new lantern and a bench:

The molding around the door is still unpainted and the rest of the trim needs to be painted too.  Let's take a look at what the back of our house looked like just 6 months ago:

Before

After

The paint made a huge difference, and check out our new light fixture!  It's still not glamorous by any means, but we have some pretty awesome plans in the works that will completely transform this space!  But for now there are more pressing matters, such as that sad looking roof.  We're in the process of choosing shingles right now (who knew picking a shingle color could be such an arduous task??) and Eric will be installing those along with some help from a friend at church who owns a siding/roofing business.

Happy Memorial Day!

Sal

Half a Bathroom, Whole Lot of Awesome

Why is it so much harder to manage your time the less you have to do? Example:  When we were gutting our bathrooms, not only were we working full time, doing our part with the renovation, and running to Lowe's every 5 seconds, but I managed to update the blog four times within that same week.  Up until today however, we have made a point to take a break from home projects and all I want to do is watch re-runs of "The Office."  Subsequently, I haven't shared any pictures of the finished half bathroom.  So here they are!

This is a far cry from where we started:

Bleck.  Let's get back to the "after" pictures.

Here's a close up of our (free) pedestal sink that we got from Craigslist and the Mother of Pearl mirror.

Like the full bathroom, we still have a few finishing touches including painting the baseboards, framing the window (not pictured) and add shelving.  

There are so many reasons we are in love with our new bathrooms:

1)  They're awesome and they look fantastic.

2)  They're clean, structurally sound and are not leaking!

3)  We can actually use the half-bathroom in our bedroom, so our house has essentially gained a bathroom.

Today we painted the house! We got 2 sides done today, and we're going to attempt to finish it up tomorrow.  I'll post some pictures when we're done, I promise!

Sal