Amazing, Before and After Pictures

Hello everybody,

This is Tony this time, posting pictures about our 3 year house renovation. The renovation consisted of completely changing the size, layout, and location of the kitchen. Consequently the size and location of the dining room, family room, and laundry room had to change as well. The layout was originally cramped and inconvenient; now it is spacious and quite nice to live in.

I will be showing many pictures this post so I will go ahead and explain now. I will start each series of pictures with the before and after shots. Next will be one or many pictures of what the view looked like during the 3 years of destruction and construction.


Ok, first we will look at the old kitchen and notice how it disappears.

Before:

After:During:

Amazing; it is gone without a trace. Now we will look at were it went. We took out a bunch of walls and put the new kitchen in place of the old laundry room.

Before:

After:

During:

Here is another series of the laundry room/kitchen from the perspective of the family room. The before and after pictures have absolutely nothing in common except that they were taken from the same location.

Before:

After:

During:
Notice Rachel on the fridge. She is so cute, and a good sander.

Now on to the family room. We moved the laundry room into the family room and refinished the rest of the room. You can't see it in the pictures, but there is now ductwork and a 4 speed furnace fan to move heat from the wood stove to the rest of the house. we have primarily used the wood stove to heat during the winter for the last few years. It saves a lot of money.

Before:

After:

During:
All our kitchen things were in the family room for about a year while we moved the kitchen. The wife got a little tired of that. ell, so did I.



Before and After:



Bedroom Before and After:



Upstairs Before, After, and the new Bathroom:




Last But certainly not least, here is a series of pictures taken from the living room pointed into the family room. The whole series is in chronological order. Have fun.

Work Day

Since I'm slowly updating this blog concerning what's been accomplished over the past few months, I want to mention the Work Day we had with people from our church. This occured on Memorial Day weekend, but dispite being a holiday, many people from our church came together to help us out. Plus, of those who couldn't come on the Saturday work day, many came later on during the week. Sadly, we didn't take any pictures doing that time, so I can't show you all the doors, trim, etc. that was painted, or the window trim that was nailed up, or the wonderful lawn work done, or the general cleaning I received help with, or the many windows that were scrubbed. Thank you very much to all of you! I won't put up the names of everyone who helped because I know some people would prefer not having thier information on the internet, and I will respect their privacy, but you know who you are. Blessings on you!

So, I apologize that this posting lacks pictures, but I wanted to testify to how incredibly supportive and helpful our church has been - many thanks to our church family!

Stay tuned for the next posting: before and after pictures...

The Third Superman

I've been delaying publishing this post because I wanted a few more pictures, but I'll just give you what I have. First of all, after my dad came up to help on the floors, we had another incredible offer (which we immediately accepted) of Tony's younger brother, Micah, also coming up for a week to help on the house. So you'll eventually see a picture of him in here. I think of him as The Energizer of the group - he was a great motivater for all of us.
While Micah was here, the men worked upstairs drywalling, mudding, etc. and of course putting a second bathroom in. Here is one of the upstairs bedrooms
during the drywalling stage.

Here is the second bathroom being put in.

Micah in the other upstairs bedroom.

Another project I'd been working on for a while was the downstairs bathroom. When we moved it, the lower four feet of the walls were covering in ugly green fake tiles. It took me months to chip off all the tiles and glue, then Tony had to repair the walls with gallons of drywall mud. The square patch you see above the toilet is where the bathroom used to have a window. Yeah, we took that out, saying as the view was just of the inside of the family room.

Sorry I don't have more for now. I have one more work day to write about next post, then eventually we'll do an entry with before and after pictures. It'll blow your mind! Enjoy these few pics. for now. Thanks!

The Start of Finishing

Greetings! First, I must apologize for my two month blog absence. However, those two months can be easily summarized in this phrase: working on the house. It was pretty crazy for a while, but now the house is finally on the market (and we have had a couple showings), so mostly we focus on keeping things clean and doing the last minor, less visible repairs.

So, to fill you in on all the house work we did, I'm going to be posting pictures of various places around the house; however, I don't want to post everything at once, so I'll spread the blog entries out over the next few days. Today is wood floor day.

The specs: 710 sq. ft., much of it about 70 years old.

The characters: Two Supermen, plus me.

The time: About four days.

It all started with a trip to TN. Tony and I drove down for his sister Rose's wedding, but Tony rode back up with his grandparents while I stayed a few days longer in TN. While I was gone, Tony moved everything we owned off the wood floor and onto the tile floor in the wood stove room. By that time, I got back to MI, but I was home barely an hour before I got a very wonderful phone call. My dad called to say he was coming up for the week to help us on the house!!! So, the following pictures are of the floor project; more later of the many other projects we accomplished that week.

Our bedroom at the beginning of the project.

Trying to showing some of the scratches and overall worn out aspects of the floor.


The drum sander, for the largest areas.

The edger. For, well, the edges!

After an initial drum sanding

Haven't edged it yet.

Contrast between sanded and unsanded floor.

An old, closed off vent Tony had to fix.

No more vent!

Resting after about three days of sanding.

Putting on the first coat (out of three) of polyurethane.

Applied with lambs wool on a stick.


GORGEOUS! Smelly, but BEAUTIFUL! Want to buy a house?