Home Improvement Continued...

I looked through our RE/MAX folder that the realtor gave us and I found some before shots of the basement.  The picture quality is terrible (and is a photo of a colour copy), but will give everyone an idea of what the basement looked like before!

This is the wall next to the stairs.  It made for a very narrow hallway to the laundry area and the back door of the basement.

This room was behind that set of book shelves.  Complete with shelving, a de-humidifier and a sump pump.

The Laundry area.  I thought the tile looked cool, until we discovered that it was a vinyl panel on the wall.  The cabinet has become part of the work space in the garage.  Oh, and UNDER the cabinet and the walls we found some great linoleum tile.  I feel like an archaeologist at times in our house as we discover layers of things and try to figure out the reason why things are the way they are.  The house is quirky and we love it!

And again, the after shots.  You can sort of see on the floor where the walls used to be (in an 'L' shape)

Now we can see through this area all the way to the back door!  The basement is definitely not beautiful, but will hopefully be functional!

Home Improvement

I have realized that I am not very good at taking the before photos because I get so excited about a project that I just jump right in!  I thought I'd share some of the work that we've done on our house over the last few weeks.  It is so nice to be able to get things ready at a slow pace before we move in at the beginning of May.

Before: Lacy Curtains.  We had these all over the first floor of the house.  The previous owners had also found some creative ways to hang curtains using pipe and nails.  Needless to say, they've all come down.

After: The curtains from our apartment have made their way over to the house.  They are still in need of hemming but I haven't quite had the motivation to do that yet.

Our bedroom upstairs got curtains as well.

Before: Where there was once snow... 

After: ...there are now daffodils beginning to grow.

Before: In the basement we've torn out some things including part of this wall.

After:

And there used to be two full walls dividing a work/storage area and the laundry area.  Now it is one big room.

And I hung the first pictures on the wall in the kitchen.

And you can see the colour I am thinking about painting the kitchen on the left hand side.

Outside the weeds are growing!  This past week things have sprung up that we had no idea existed.  We've also decided that weeds must actually be the BEST plants since they can survive almost anything and flourish almost anywhere.  They are growing faster than we can keep up with, but this view through the porch makes the yard look nicer than it really is.  :-) 

This was my project this morning.  Since no one has lived in this house for well over a year, things are pretty overgrown.  I found all of these bricks under the grass and dirt in the flower beds, so I thought I'd use them too.  It took me a few hours to clean up, but we are ready for planting in a few spots.

And this is the view from the second floor.  The yard is not finished yet, but you can see where I dug started to define the flower beds again around the garage.  We've bought seeds to start planting some flowers and veggies.

I'll work on taking more before photos in upcoming projects.  We have many ideas, we're just needing to find the time to do them in.