First Floor Before & After!

Are you ready for a photo heavy post?! This post has been almost five years in the making! I can't even believe that. A lot of the work was finished just months after we moved in, but it's taken a while to get some finishing touches done and I didn't want to post after pictures with all those unfinishes....

So here is the main half of our first floor. What a trip it has been looking back at these before pictures - eek! Makes me wonder why we picked this house!

Entrance before:

Entrance after: We knocked out a part of the wall to open it up a little more.

And one from the other angle!

Front room before:

Front room after:

Full view before: This is a really awful shot, but it's the only one I have!

Full view after: We knocked out the main wall (load bearing, so we had to put up the beam), replaced all the flooring, installed recessed lighting, and basically changed everything...!

Dining room before:

Dining room after:

Front room corner before:

Front room corner after:

Front room corner before:

Front room corner after:

Kitchen before:

Kitchen after: We still have some things to do in the kitchen, but here it is so far.

And one more after just for good measure!

If you have any questions on specifics, let me know and I'll try to answer them...if I remember!

Decorating with Maps

I LOVE maps.

On our recent road trip, I packed the map book. Jason said, "What do we need that for? We have GPS." Well, I can't tell you how many times I looked at the map book. They are just filled with cool facts, and they give me the BIG picture when we are crossing five states, 1 province and one country border.

Anyway...I decided a while back that I wanted to decorate with an antique map of Russia. I bought one on ebay for around $16, I think. I made sure that it was written in Russian and that I could see the island where I lived while studying for a summer. Now the map is pretty big, so custom framing was out of the question. It would have been way too costly. So I decided to cut the map into 3 sections and frame each one individually using IKEA Ribba frames. I LOVE the way it turned out!

Any other ideas for how to decorate with maps?

Finally!

We're finally back in business...! Here are a few pictures from the last few weeks. Melissa, you asked for a belly picture-now you have it: "My two tons of fun fat keep me plenty warm." This was from a trip to the Brookfield Zoo.
Cameron's favorite animal: Snakes. Nothing is quite as interesting as snakes and spiders for this kid. We spent the most time in the reptile house which was very interesting for him..."Uncle Jason I have to show you something..."
Josh started T-Ball. He loves it! We went to watch them on their first day. There is only one team out on the field at a time, everyone hits, everyone runs the bases. That's the tricky part-running the bases. Most of the kids run for the ball or run to their parents or run backwards.

Moving Day! Leaving Gaylord for the last time. I don't think we're too sad about it. We've got such a project ahead of us that we have no time to miss the old place. The move went really well and we have begun frequenting Home Depot more often than we go to the bathroom-that's saying a lot for a prego lady.

Here are a few pictures of the demolition. I didn't get really great before pictures because it just happened too fast. They weren't moved out and we were halfway moved in. You get the idea though. We are taking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room as well as the wall between the kitchen and the living room. The catch: It's a load bearing wall, so we had a structural engineer come take a look to give us some pointers on the beam that we will need to replace the wall. Demolition comes easy-its the putting it back together that can be a little trickier.