New Life, Old House: Before and After Roundup

I started this blog as a way to look back over our house accomplishments and appreciate the progress we've made. I think the best way to do that is a good old fashioned before and after. Let's do a check in and see how far we've come in seven months, shall we? I'm going to pretend as if we're walking through the house, so starting from the front porch, as it was seven months ago:

Classy. I managed to not show the indoor/outdoor carpeting in this shot, but you can see the boxes piled up next to the settee. The settee didn't have any cushions on it, so mid-renovation it got some, straight from the going-to-Goodwill pile. Then it looked like this:

Yum. Klassy with a K. Last week, I finally put my sewing skills to work, and now the settee looks like this!

Yay cushions! It's amazing what a little canvas and Joann's piping will do for you. The settee still needs a refresher on the ol' paint, but we'll get to that soon. At least for now, our porch looks like this:

The potted geraniums were inspired by my Croatia trip where they have potted geraniums tucked into every nook and cranny. Aren't they cute? The other part of the front entry that used to be awesome was this:

It's a little hard to see, but the whole bottom window was cracked by a dear friend who got a little too close with a rocking chair. The husband patched it with duct tape, which worked pretty well but had a real Hillbilly Holler effect. While I was gone in Croatia the husband decided to surprise me and he fixed that window all by himself! (He's so crafty!) Now it looks like this:

Next, the living room. Way back in the day, it looked like this:

Heeey olive green carpet. Lookin' foxy. Bargain bin purple chair, I'm so glad to be rid of you. Now it looks like this:

So much better, right? That short wall with no drywall is where the 1900 newspaper lives. We still haven't figured out how to deal with it. But the room itself looks good, right? From the other side, it used to look like this:

Nice pile o crap. I'm not even sure who the bike rack in the middle of the floor belongs to. But now it looks like this!

Except for the spot where I zealously stripped about 12" of molding and then got bored, it's like a whole new place! Into the kitchen! It used to be this:

Now it looks like this! Walking into the kitchen to cook and seeing the glinting counter and giant welcoming sink makes me feel like Christmas on an ordinary Tuesday.

Upstairs for a while we had this:

That's what a wedding and moving will do to you. Now we have this!

The craft room might be my favorite room in the house. (And I really do try to keep it that clean all the time, for no other reason than the sweet glee it gives me to see it looking like that!) The guest room was briefly cleaned and set up like this for some guests from out of town:

And that was the cleaned version. Lest we forget my favorite part of the old guest room:

Pahaha! Oh old iron burn on the carpet, I kinda miss you! Last time my story was Fred's old housemate had to go make a ham sandwich. This time I'm envisioning she had to go talk to her momma, long distance. Whatever it was, that was a humdinger of a burn. Anyway the guest room now looks like this:

OK, it's still got some wedding boxes, but it has seen a lot of progress and it has some bright spots like the wonderful built-in bookshelf the hubby made:

And the cute bedside table

My favorite before and after in the house has to be the bedroom. I'm going to do a couple of before shots because they're just so good and...raw. So, before:

And after!

It's so amazing! Let's do another. Before:

And after!

I think this must be the nicest place in Seattle to wake up. It's hard to tell from pictures, but it is like waking up in a treehouse. In the photo below, you can see our screen arrangement which keeps the breeze blowing over the bed all night long. It's like being at summer camp.