Since June I've been meaning to post a few before & after pictures of our house so I can track our progress and all the work we've done on our cute old house. But June ended up being too busy.... and apparently so did July, August, September and October! :) But now that we officially have snow outside and it's too cold to be out much I am going to do some house before and afters! Up first is the most used and probably my most favorite room, which was not part of the original house, but added on sometime in the 80's. And thank goodness it was added on or we wouldn't fit in this house!
Here it is the week we moved in. It was all white paneling with brown wood trim (in this picture my mom had already primed the trim). It also had an extra door to the bathroom by the lamp in the above picture, which was really lame. Our awesome friends the Johnson's came for Thanksgiving last year and Timmy and Brian took out the door and filled it in. Hooray!
During Christmas break last year my mom and step dad John came and he and Brian tiled the dining portion of this room. This was spectacular because who wants to have white carpet underneath their dining room table? No one. Well, not anyone with kids anyway. Brian also changed the ceiling light in here after Sophie broke the one in the kitchen with a bouncy ball. We moved the one that was in here to the kitchen and got a chandelier for the dining room.
Brian put in this ceiling fan (we paid an electrician to run the wires to the location) and it definitely is a great addition to the room as well. I spray painted our stove in the corner black. It was a dark green and looked horrible so I found some high heat black spray paint and it's held up really well.
This is the newest addition to the family room (this is where the 2nd bathroom door was). It's just a giant piece of pegboard with some old wood I had framed around it (I also attached some 1x1 boards around the back of the pegboard to make it more sturdy... pegboard is pretty flimsy). This holds all the kids school paperwork and their clipboards hold any charts, homework, etc. that need to be done or signed. Wesley's is holding an empty potty chart, since he still has zero desire for potty training! It also has our Family Home Evening chart and the kids' weekly schedule. That white trunk holds our games (still looking for a cute/fun latch to add to the front) and that small box on the trunk holds the kids' math fact stuff like flash cards, dice, etc. that they all have to do after school. Having kids in school is so much work!
This is the "drop zone" where the coats, backpacks, shoes, etc. get put after school. And our current chore chart system (which we've now been using for over 2 years). Basically they each have a list of responsibilities and a chore to do and I mark off at the end of the day if they did their chore. They earn an allowance based on how many days they did their chore and how well they did their responsibilities. I circle the days if they didn't do it that day. I always thought giving kids an allowance wasn't a good idea. I figured they should expect to help without getting paid for it. But then I realized they also need to learn to use money wisely and pay their tithing, how can they do that without getting money? The kids (except Wesley) are really good about not asking for things at the store because they have a way to earn money and buy things themselves.
I had to show Miles' chart so I could save his cute handwriting that says "Miles is amazng" :)
We just had this new patio door installed last month, the one we had broke so although we didn't want to pay for a new one we just had to do it! It's a very nice door. That red dresser holds legos and puzzles in the drawers and our scriptures in the basket. We read scriptures here in the morning by the fireplace. We've found it's easier for us to do this in the morning rather than at night, the kids are too tired but do anything more than lay there :)
Next on our list of updates for this room will be new carpet and staining the kitchen table darker.
Of course this room is often littered with toys, has kids jumping on the furniture, coloring and game playing, doing homework, or having a snack at the table. And daily it has two superheroes wrestling, but that's when it's the funnest place to be!
The Saturday after Thanksgiving we went to get our tree! Growing up both Brian and I always went up the mountains and cut our trees down. In Michigan we found a tree farm and we knew we wanted to find another tree farm here. The last 2 years here we haven't loved where we got our trees so Brian and I looked on-line and found two Tree farm options that we were debating between. I wanted to go to the one that had the fancier website but Brian thought this other one would be more up our alley. So I agreed to try this one out and we were so glad we did. It was on a beautiful farm out in the countryside of Wisconsin and it was perfect.
