Tour de Homes

Whew!  It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m just sitting down to write!  Such a busy weekend!  As I mentioned earlier this week, our house was selected to be on this year’s 12th South Tour of Homes. It was such an honor to be selected to be part of this and we had so much fun meeting our neighbors and seeing the other homes on the tour!

By request, I’m making today’s post a before-and-after photo gallery of photos of our house.  Our house has had quite an evolution over the past few years…we started simple, a paint job in most of the rooms and some new furniture…and then we realized that to really get the house the way we wanted it, we needed to pull out the big guns.  So last spring, we gutted our entire home.  I’m talking new floor joists, turned the stairs around, raised the ceilings a foot and half, etc. etc.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but here are a few fun photos that show where we’ve been….and where we are now.

The front of our house with it's jazzy #2 sign for the home tour!

I’ll start with the outside which actually hasn’t changed much…except for lots of landscaping TLC that husband has spent hours on….mowing, mulching, trimming bushes and trees, planting potted flowers, powerwashing the porch, hanging a new porch light…he gave it the works!  Our dream down the road is to get a new front door (a nice wooden one that fits the style of our neighborhood) and to swap out the vinyl siding for some nice hardy-plank to look like the original wood.  But for now, a little sprucing made The Yellow Barn look pretty!

BEFORE - KITCHEN 1

BEFORE - KITCHEN 2

Yikes.  There was so much we didn’t love about this.  Cabinet color, appliances that didn’t work or look nice, tacky counter tops, tiny window to the backyard.  So when we renovated, we actually made this space a dining room, tore down a wall adjacent to it and moved the kitchen into what had been the laundry room.  So now, this space looks like this:  in case you’re wondering,  the photo frame wall is exactly where our old stove and microwave used to be and the double doors leading into the back yard is where the tiny window over the sink used to be.  Yeah.  Crazy.  We know!

AFTER - DINING ROOM 1

Here’s another angle….the new kitchen is to the left if you’re getting spacialy confused.

AFTER - DINING ROOM 2

So I know you must be dying to see what our new kitchen looks like.   So here’s a before shot…

BEFORE - LAUNDRY ROOM

(Obviously, some work had been done in here by the time I got this photo taken.)  And here’s what the new kitchen looks like now.  Same space.  The door in the picture above is where the coffee maker on the right side of the photo below is.

AFTER - KITCHEN 1

Pretty dramatic, eh?

Another space that has changed a great deal is the living room.  The right side of our house has gone from being 3 tiny rooms (the old kitchen was  one of them, then I’ll show you the others below) to one huge room that includes the new dining room space and the new living room.  First look at the before shots, then keep on scrolling and you’ll see the new living room space.

BEFORE - FRONT OF LIVING ROOM

AFTER - LIVING ROOM

Crazy huh?  We love curling up in our new space and reading, visiting with friends or watching TV.

And finally, I’ll show you one more space so as not to bore you with a tour of our entire home.  Below you’ll see a photo of two angles of the room before or in process and then four of our finally finished front room as it looked yesterday for the tour!  This room has many names, but we usually call it the “Library” or the “Music Room.”  We use it mostly to read books or our Bible reading, plus I teach violin lessons in this room and presently, I’m sitting at my desk blogging.  🙂

BEFORE - LIBRARY 1

BEFORE - LIBRARY 2

Then during renovation, we found this awesome fireplace!  Can you believe someone had put dry-wall over this beauty?  (And she’s three sided!)

BEFORE - LIBRARY 3

It was in terrible shape, but after some love, it looks pretty great now.

AFTER - LIBRARY 1

AFTER - LIBRARY 2

AFTER- LIBRARY 3

AFTER - LIBRARY 4

Whew!  So there you have it!  We’ve been busy bees the past year!  Yes, we have an upstairs, but that’s not quite as dramatic.  And I’ve made you look at 99 pictures already, so I’ll save the upstairs for later.
P.S.  Did you know that among other things, Mary-Hall and her husband built their own kitchen cabinets?  I stand in amazement.  What would you most love to do to your home?