Home Renos

We love to update our home and we do it pretty cheap. It's amazing how a couple of coats of paint, switching out light fixtures, and changing the hardware and light switches makes so much of a difference. My hubby usually does all the painting because, well I'm not very good at it. Our smallest room in the house is our "master" bath. The bathroom in our bedroom is a half bath and thats what makes our room the master I guess. Our three year olds room is the same size as ours she just doesn't have a bathroom and we don't have the room to expand because our room is in the front, so we make the most of it.

Our first project we did was to paint the "formal living room". We painted it a blue and its real calming. You will see we LOVE color. We figure when/if we decide to sale our home we will give a painting allowance, although we do usually try to paint some what of a neutral color. We never use it as a formal living room and don't really understand the point of it so we turned it into our play room/office area. Since we don't have a guest room I also maximize the space and use it as a guest room too. I blow up an air mattress, make it up as a bed, and put up a black curtain in the door way to give our guest some privacy.

Please remember that these pictures are taken after the room is put back together and nicely done and the kids are usually not home or asleep when we tackle these projects. My house really is not this clean, although some people think it stays spotless....IT REALLY DOES NOT!

These wood floor are the ones we laid*.

We updated this room right after we moved in, it was our first summer in the house.

Our second room we did was the full bath I have no pictures because we now need to gut it and so I will do another post when we finally we get it. Its one of the ones we keep putting off.

Then we did the nursery, Doodle Bugs room and we did it twice. We thought she was a boy first and painted the nursery blue. When we found out she was a girl we re-painted.

Her closet was so small and little girls have so much I had to do something. I love HGTV by the way and get tons of ideas from it. Here is a picture of our coat closet and it is exactly what Doodle Bugs looked like and all I did was add a closet rod and put a shoe organizer over the door. A great fix for about ten bucks.

Then we did our bedroom and it made us feel so grown up because we had plain white walls with a grandma border that had flowered hearts on it at the top of the walls. Our closet was so small for a master I added a closet rod in it too and raised our shelf. He got the top and I got the bottom and made a world of a difference.

After doing this we realized Punkin was left out and so she asked her daddy to please paint her room purple. Purple is her favorite color and so thats what her daddy did.

Then she out grew her toddler bed and got a big girl bed. We got her a full so eventually when Doodle Bug is big enough they can bunk together and our guest can sleep in her room.

Then we did our kitchen and its really small so this might help you understand if you ever read me complaining that if I have dishes in my sink or stuff on the kitchen counter it looks dirty.

the hardware was free from my hubby boss who was gutting his kitchen, and the back wall and above cabinets had ugly 70s wallpaper and so did the playroom wall going into the dining room. The paint was $2.50 on a clearance rack at Lowes so we snagged it. I got the new light on clearance too for $20.00.

Then we pulled up all the carpet. We had ugly white dingy carpet through out the whole house. The only rooms that didn't were the bathrooms, kitchen and laundry room. We found real hard woods in the bedrooms and laid down laminate wood floors in the dining room and hall. (see top picture)*

Now for the project my hubby is letting me do by myself. The tiles in the kitchen are in the full bath and the previous owners also left us a couple of boxes and its just enough for our bath. I can't do that by myself though the pics are soon to come:) These pictures are a little out of order.

I hate wall paper by the way but at least it came off pretty easy, I have to put up one more coat of paint and the bottom half will be white but by the time I got done it was after ten and Lowes was no longer open. Hope you enjoy and I will be doing another post of the finish product. I hope he approves!

After this project is done we will be doing our hall and dining room, living room (it has wood paneling that we are painting over), then last but not least the laundry room. We are hoping to have the inside done by the end of the year and then that way next summer we can work on our yard and get it all fixed up too.