A pretty package

I've always loved wrapping presents. When I was a kid, I'd beg my mom to let me wrap all the Christmas presents, and I'd wrap and then re-wrap something until I declared it to be perfect. I have only one gift to wrap this year, so I put extra effort into it.

Have I mentioned how much I love the the purl bee blog? I got the idea to use kraft paper, fabric and ribbon from here and the gift tag here.

Projects finished...

Office
We still need to hang crown molding and pictures and get things sorted out, but this is a huge improvement over the old dance room.





Family room
The family room took us over a year to finish because we got sick of dealing with it and started another huge project. We tore down a closet and another wall, put up new drywall, painted the trim white, got a new door, put new tile by the door and who knows what else. It's finally done! Woohoo!

Before... (I forgot to take an official before picture so I had to use the MLS one with the seller's furniture)


During: I got bored waiting for mud to dry one day so I painted a little mural.


Taadaaa!

This is the other side of the room before:


...and after! My father-in-law built the black cabinet to hide the electrical panel. The couch hidden in the back is my dog's couch. Yep, she's spoiled.


That pretty door does go to the paver patio that we spent the previous summer putting in.


I've never worked so hard on something before in my life. The patio literally took us most weekends and evenings of an entire summer to finish. We started Memorial day weekend and finished just in time for a Labor Day BBQ.

Flooring installed!

We finished installing the floor over the weekend! It's shaping up to be a nice cozy room and it's hard to imagine what it used to look like.

Next up: crown molding, baseboard trim and quarter round.

Progress on the home front

We're making some good progress on Jason's new office. We finished the ceiling and painted over the hideous yellow. Jason picked a manly shade of gray-beige-green called Knitting Needles. I went to Sherwin Williams to get the paint where I'm known as the lady who gets the Harmony paint (their no-VOC line). How sad is it that the local paint store knows us because we're in there so often? We -- well, mainly I -- really need to break my painting addiction! Um, but not before I re-paint the living room. I'm a bit sick of the color we've had for 2 years, I found the PERFECT gray-beige color and SW is having a 20% off sale this weekend. :)


We got the laminate floor at Lumber Liquidators. We had a fairly small selection to choose from since we're installing it over concrete so we ended up with Dream Home Nirvana in mohagony. The floor is fairly quick to put down, once you figure out the first couple rows. We finished half the 10' x 10' room in a couple hours. Not too bad for our first time.

House projects

House projects never end. We have 3 unfinished projects and we're starting a 4th.


We're turning this hideous dance room into Jason's office.

The room had a tile ceiling that was falling down, old records glued to the walls and ceiling and 3 huge mirrors along one wall. Oh yes, and the light cover was made out of a colander and beads.

We hung drywall on the ceiling yesterday. Up this week: finish mudding/taping and paint so we can put down the new flooring on Saturday.