Changes Around the House

Many of you have seen the changes around our house, but I thought I'd post some in-progress pictures to give the full effect of what's really happened around our house! We feel so lucky to have been able to do what we've done lately. We've waited a long time to do some of these things and know they have only made our house better and more lovely to live in!

The first thing we did was to change up the kitchen...here is the before:

And here is the after:

We changed the paint color but the big change happened with the counter tops. We had an application called Granicrete done. It is an interesting process where you get to help with the coloring as it is being done. There are 4 layers of concrete that go right over your existing counter top. Yes-right on top! It's incredible, really!

We had LOVELY (do you sense the sarcasm?) powder-blue laminate counter tops and they used a watered down mix of concrete to cover and make texture right over the top.

It's a bit hard to describe, but really neat.

When that is all done then they mix up various colors in spray bottles to give the counter top the color. No two counter tops are the same. We did a bit of gray, brown, black and white on ours. It was fun being able to color it however we wanted to adding a bit here and a bit there. It's like an art, really.

We love our new counter tops and the color as well. We couldn't be happier with how the kitchen turned out!

Then it was on to the bathroom downstairs. Now if you have been to our house before, you know that the bathroom downstairs was great when we moved in, but ended up not so great in the last year or so. We noticed it first with water leaking out from the shower. Then tiles began crumbling off of a step to the shower. Then there was the black mold growing up the sides. Needless to say, something needed to be done. We were finally in a position to do something this fall, so we hired Darr Construction, Inc. to do the job that we knew was way to big for us to handle ourselves. Here are some before and after pictures:

and...

Can you see the transformation?!?! We just LOVE it! The main thing in the bathroom was to get the shower OUT. It was horrible and probably not doing good things for our health. So that was the first thing to go.

Then they had to figure out where everything had to go for the new shower. One day I came home to this

where they had to jackhammer a hole in the concrete to re-work the plumbing underground. That wasn't the only plumbing work that was done. If you look in the before pictures you might be able to see that there isn't a ceiling so all of the pipes are exposed. You can even see J's shower towel hanging on one of them! The people before us had done the bathroom themselves (this was clear...) and used PVC piping to "get by." Well that in combination with original (I'm convinced!) piping from 1946 meant it was time for a change. So now we have brand new pipes and a ceiling too! It feels so much more like a real bathroom and a finished space. I have to say, as much as I love the ceiling, that's not my very favorite thing. This is...

Yes, it's a floor. But it's not just a floor. It's a HEATED tile floor. Just a little step up from the stick down tiles that were there before. I'm a bit bummed because this bathroom isn't technically my bathroom. It's really J's bathroom, but after having the before for the last 7 years, I think he deserves it!

We are blessed to be able to do these things to our house. Thank you to those who helped make it so beautiful over the last few months! We love everything about it!