New House!

The long awaited pictures of our house! Yipee! We LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE our house! We love it more and more each day. We love our neighborhood. We love our view of the mountains, the sunrises, the sunsets. We love our backyard that we get to share with 2 horses. We love that we are only 3 minutes from the freeway. We love our garage. We love having a place of our own.
Here are some before and after pics
This is our kitchen. It did not originally have a stove or fridge. We bought them. In fact, they wouldn't finish the appraisal (meaning we couldn't go further in our house buying process) without a stove. They said the house was "unlivable." Whatever.
The stone had not been grouted. The stone is very porous with many holes. Our realtor said we would have to tear the floor up and that we couldn't keep it. I love my Dad! He said we could keep the floor, we just had to grout and seal it. So that's what we did. First I vacuumed out each hole and each tile joint. Then I steamed them with my mom's steamer. Then we grouted it - a 12 hour, 3 man project. We put 4 coats of heavy duty sealer on it. It's so beautiful now! I love our floor!!!! Thanks Dad and Matthew! We painted all the walls in the kitchen. The faucet was leaking, so we replaced it. The shelves above the fridge were too low, so my Dad sanded them down so our fridge would fit. I replaced 2 lightbulbs.
This room is our guest bedroom. Don't you love the tree theme? Just wait - it gets better!!! We painted the walls in this room.
This is the rainbow room. Matthew's Grandma came in this room and said she was getting dizzy! Each wall was a different color - red, yellow, blue, green. We painted it. it's now our exercise room.

The bathrooms (2 1/2) were all orange. The bathroom cabinet vents vented into the cabinet, meaning they would heat or cool just inside the cabinet and not the room. My dad installed channeling, so they would vent into the room. He also adhered the counter to the cabinets (which we found were unattached). He adhered the backsplash and caulked it. We painted each of the bathrooms. The master bathroom didn't have the stone baseboards like the other bathrooms, so my dad installed them. We grouted and sealed the bathrooms in the same process as the kitchen. I put new toilet seats on each of the toilets.
This is our patriotic room - red, white, and blue. It is now our office. We painted it.

This is our hallway. Gotta love the corners of this one! Red, yellow and orange all combine in the same spot. What an eye buster! The crazy/sad thing is the people here before us had just painted everything. There was still some painter's tape up. They were so excited about their paint. Painting over all the hideousness of it was the first thing on the list! We have a 20 foot ceiling in our entryway, so my dad brought over his scaffolding, so we could paint all the way to the top. I replaced our air filters. One air filter I had to screw into the wall, because it hadn't been screwed in when we moved in. We have a ceiling fan in our entryway that had literally 3 inches of dust on it. The dust was hanging over the sides! So I cleaned that right up while we had the scaffolding up. One of our neighbors came inside and asked us if our fan was new it looked that good after I cleaned it! We had bird poop on every windowsill and down numerous walls. We're not sure if they had birds before us. We do know there was a bird that had gotten trapped in our house. Shortly after we bought the home we found it dead in the vent. Awesome! We also had a nest of baby birds and momma bird in our dryer vent. We sucked out all the junk then replaced the dryer vent cover on the outside of our house.
This is the master bedroom. Lovely red and yellow. We painted it and the closet.
Here's the front of our house. We have green grass! Once the rain stopped, it was time to figure out our sprinklers. We spent a number of hours trying to figure them out. We had my brother, my dad, and a neighbor help us try to locate our main water turn on/shut off valve. I had a sprinkler guy come, and he found it within minutes! After 10 trips to the sprinkler store, $75, many hours, replacing a sprinkler valve, replacing a sprinkler diaphragm, replacing 8 sprinkler heads, and many, many hours - we have green grass!!! What a project! We've had a few neighbors comment on our grass. They said it hasn't been green for 3-4 years. I love our green grass! I've picked many dandelions, we pulled out a dead tree in the front and dead growth in the front.
I cleaned all the windows inside and out along with the window tracks. I cleaned out our rain gutters. I deep cleaned every part of the house. After all this I told Matthew I had literally touched every part of our house! I put a cage around the lightbulb in our storage space under our stairs. I fixed a leaky pipe in our kitchen. I installed our washer and dryer. I had to get a new dryer cord and new washer washers in order to install those. I installed a new lightbulb socket in our garage.
Our garage had tons of junk and remodeling stuff in it. Most of which did not go with our house. I took all the stuff to "Restore" store. They took almost all of it! They were excited to get it, and I was excited to get rid of it! The rest I took to DI. I cleaned the cabinets in our garage. I swept out our garage. I organized everything in our garage so that we can now fit both of our cars in our garage! I'm so proud of that!

So there you have it. That's most of the work we did in a nutshell. There are still many things we could do, but you homeowners know the list is never ending when you own a home!

Matthew and I all through May would go to work, then come to our house and work on our house for another few hours. It was a TON of work! I don't want to do that again. Whew! Most of my June was spent working on it and moving. I'm so happy now that it's done! Now you can see why I LOVE LOVE LOVE our house! It has my heart, soul, sweat and work in it! Here are a few after pictures. I didn't do very many because the paint is the same throughout the house. Downstairs and the guest bedroom have the two tone color because of the chair rail. All the other rooms have the lighter color. A huge improvement over the multi colored paint! You are welcome to come check it out if you want - we love visitors, and I love to show it off!
This is our kitchen now. I have to show off our canvas collage. Matthew got this for me for my birthday last year. These are all pictures we have taken with our camera on our adventures. I love this collage!!! This is our living room. We bought the couch shortly after we moved in. A day before we got it I told Matthew I wanted a couch that was kind of in a half circle, but I had never seen anything like that before. I didn't think they made it. Matthew considered making a couch the way I wanted. The next day we went to the old I.M. Home store and found this! Perfect! It was really close to what I had in mind!