Our First House: The Remodel, part 2

So, you’ve seen the demolition, now for the exciting part.
It’s getting to pick out the colors, materials, patterns, and style of your own house that is so fun. With the help of my mother in law and some attempts to be frugal, we ended up with what I think is a pretty nice place.

I started by finding a decent tile on sale at Home Depot and then tried to match everything with that. It wasn’t the tile I would have picked if I had all the money I wanted, but it worked! Then I picked out accent tiles, wall colors, and cabinets.

Here are some before and afters:

The kitchen, with the lovely white cabinets with door knockers as knobs.

The new kitchen, with updated cabinets and appliances. We opened up one wall into the dining area and put in a breakfast bar, which you can’t see in the picture and was probably the most labor intensive part of the house.

The guest bathroom. The shower was lined with the same faux marble that the counter top is made out of and had a lovely mauve tub to match the toilet.

We added a second sink and redid the cabinets and the shower.

The master bathroom was small and drab. And there is that lovely faux marble again. We couldn’t do anything to make it bigger, but I thought that the wood paneling in white would open up the space and make it bright! Plus, we had the shower redone. Look how ever just changing the faucet in the sink updates it so much.

We also redid the fireplace. The brick seemed to really date the house and the family room. Rubicon Homes, my husband’s company, had used something called concrete designs for lots of fireplaces in the homes they’ve built. It is pre-formed concrete pieces that come in many different designs and colors. I picked something simple and decided to paint it with one of my accent colors. The concrete pieces were placed over the bricks and update the fireplace as well as add to the size of my hearth and mantle. Charlie also changed the fireplace over to gas.

We did other things that pictures of just aren’t very exciting like got new carpet, repainted the walls, and got new window coverings. We also changed a storage closet that was accessible only from the backyard into the laundry room as part of a walk-in master closet. Doing laundry out on the back porch just didn’t seem like fun to me. Now I do it in my own closet, two feet away from where I have to put it all away. It’s fabulous. I highly recommend it.

But now, after a little over a year since finishing, we are ready to take on a new project. We get a little antsy without a lot to do. So, we are out looking for our next house and hoping to sell this one to some lucky buyer. So… if you know anyone looking, send them our way!

Posted by Amber at Monday, June 21, 2010 4:24 PM
Categories: Just Another Day