Home Improvements

I've been really busy the last few months doing home improvements on the house.  I've been waiting to get some good pictures when the house is nice and clean, but that never happens.  So I'm just going to post the pictures I have and you can all pretend that the house looks perfect.  

Two of the reasons we bought our house were the lot and the fact that there was minimal updating that needed to be done.  Obviously, we wanted to paint and change a few things, but our house is almost 10 years old and, even though that's not very old, I can tell you that a lot of the houses in our neighborhood are already a little outdated-- can we say brass fixtures everywhere?  Anyway, from the start we knew there were a few projects that need to be done and a few improvements that we wanted to make.  

The first, biggest project was our yard.  I LOVE our yard.  Frisco is known for having tiny lots and alleys.  We had a tiny lot and an alley in our old house.  I hated the alley.  We were determined to avoid that in this house.  We really lucked out on our lot size, though, and what's even better is that our yard was already wonderfully landscaped and for the most part all we have to do is trim plants back in the fall and it all comes back in the spring.  I have a terrible black thumb, so I've been really glad that I haven't killed anything, yet.   This spring we had a patio, arbor, and playset installed.  We've been very happy with the results and we have been loving having a functional yard!!

Here's the back of our house before:

And here's the view of the rest of the yard.

Here's the patio and arbor:

Here's the play area.  If you look at the before picture you can see that we had an overgrown herb garden in this corner, which I am too clueless to take care of, so when we had the patio built we had them rip out the herb garden and extend the play area.  It's been wonderful:

Major project #2 has been the kitchen.  Our kitchen before wasn't terrible.  But it was very earth toned.  Browns and beiges everywhere.  I would really like to repaint the cabinets and replace the granite, but that's a project down the road, since it'll be pricey.  For now my goal was to make the kitchen brighter and get it to a point where I could live with it for a few years until we are ready to sink some money into it.  

Before:

The first step was to rip out those stupid cement grapes.  I hate them.  And they made the kitchen look outdated.  There was that big one on the wall above the stove

and four little ones like this under the cabinets.  

After consulting Youtube I got brave and just smashed them right off the wall.  It was actually kind of fun!  You can see the big hole behind Madison.  (Obviously Madison spends a lot of time in the kitchen baking, since all my pics include her and the KitchenAid.)

I was really lucky and I found tile at Home Depot that matched almost perfectly.  The tile is really close together on our backsplash, so I didn't have to stress about spacing.  I just put the cement stuff on the back and stuck the tile right up there.  

Then I put in new grout around the new tile and you can't even tell that those ugly grapes every existed!

Step number two was to paint the wall a non-brownish color.  Painting a kitchen is hard because you have to match the cabinets, floors, backsplash, and countertops.  My kitchen looked like this for a couple of weeks while I was agonizing over paint colors.  

Here's the final result!  I feel like the kitchen looks a lot more updated and cheerful now.    

I've also added these plates above the doors since I took the picture above!  Like I said, still a lot to do, but much better.  

Project #3 was the office.  We have never had a very functional office, and I have been determined to change that in this house.   I've put a lot of work into organizing the office in the last couple of months.  This picture was taken right before I painted and the furniture was pushed to the side.  I promise our office wasn't a pile of junk for the last year!

And here's the after.  We got new desks and a shelf at IKEA.  We kept our big brown shelf from the picture above, it's on the other wall.  I put shelves in the closet for my sewing/craft stuff and sorted through all my fabric etc.  I'm praying that it stays functional!

I also got a new rug, the one in the picture above was from the piano room and not good for a room that would have lots of pins and scraps falling into the carpet!  We got an indoor/outdoor rug so it wouldn't hide "pokey things". 

Project #4 was the bathroom.  You may notice that the previous owners of our home really liked yellow.  When we moved in Madison's room,  the office, and three of the four bathrooms were all yellow.  Obviously we like blue, since all the rooms have ended up blue.  Not on purpose, but whatever.  Here's the bathroom before:

And after.  I painted the mirror white.  It used to be kind of a light teal color.  It was really hard to find rugs that matched and I didn't like it with the yellow.  The bathroom is the same color as the office because we liked the color in the office.  I'm still trying to figure out what to put up on the wall above the toilet.  

I got an indoor/door runner for the bathroom because it's long and skinny.  There are actually two doors to this bathroom, one to the hall and one to the office.

Finally, project #5.  I painted our old, old kitchen table, that was then our desk in the office.  Now it is a study/game/puzzle/play desk in the game room.  I still need to figure out seating.  The top is chalkboard paint.  The kids love it!