Here is a picture of the living room before it was pretty much gutted. It's a beauty, right? Don't you just love the ugly green carpet, peeling wallpaper and gold ceiling fan?

Here is the living room after.

We opened up the wall between the living room and dining room to make everything more open. If/when we get around to redoing the staircase we want to open it up so that it looks more like this.

The House: Kitchen

Kitchen - Before

Kitchen - Before

Guess what we found behind the wood paneling? More wallpaper. What a surprise.

The kitchen was absolutely terrible and there is no way that we could have lived with it even for a little while. The solution was a complete gutjob. From the disgustingly dirty cabinets and awful wood paneling to the badly faded countertops and vinyl flooring; everything had to go.

The initial plan was to clean and repaint the cabinets, but we needed the kitchen done ASAP and it was just taking too long. Have you ever lived without a kitchen? Being someone who refuses to eat microwave dinners, it was not a fun experience. We ended up buying off the shelf cabinets from Lowes. In hindsight we should have at least priced out some other options but what did I know? I've only ever lived in apartments. We topped it off with summer sage granite and a black tile floor.

No room in this house is completely finished. As you can see there is still a bizarre pendant light remnant from the old kitchen that needs to be replaced. We still need crown molding and painted trim. There are a ton of things I would have done differently had we had more money and time. But it is definitely an improvement over what was here before!

The House: Demo

After closing on the house we had about a two week window until we had to be out of the condo, which turned out to be a godsend. The previous owners loved ugly wallpaper (or maybe that was just their way of disguising the problem) and upon removing some it turned out that the plaster walls were cracked everywhere. If it were me I probably would have just spackled the crap out of them but for whatever reason my boyfriend decided they all had to come down. This created a ton of dust and the need for two dumpsters in order to dispose of around 500 lbs of plaster. I guess in the end it turned out to be a good thing, a couple of walls had water damage and a dining room and kitchen window were about ready to fall out. This of course turned into replacing all of the windows, thank goodness for a boyfriend who knows how to do pretty much anything and the $8k tax credit.

The House

A little over a year ago we moved from a 3rd floor, 1 bedroom condo to a "4 bedroom" (more on that later) Cape. While there are certainly things I miss about the condo, like having a decent closet and non-angled walls in the bedroom. It's definitely nice not having to bring a dog down three flights of stairs multiple times a day and worry about noise and neighbors. It was and still is a fixer upper. We have accomplished a lot during our time here but it is still very much a work in progress. In the coming weeks I will share some of that progress with you and what still needs to be done.