Then and Now

Here is what a little TLC, a lot of time, and oh yeah a lot of checks made payable to a guy name Lance have done for our house. There are so many things not pictured, like all the work in the crawl space, and I wish I had a picture of the room called by many different names, but the one with all the windows shown in an earlier post that I mentioned you could still see siding on the house on the walls. It was an addition by the former owner.
Here is the master bathroom. Look in the mirror to see the reflection of what the rest of the bathroom looked like.

Here it is now. . . . the paint color looked good with the tile when I was holding one square and a paint sample at Lowe's. They're not my favorite together now, but oh well live and learn and hope it won't turn off future renters while we're in Moscow.
It is still a work in progress, hence the tools. I take pictures and email them to Levin and just decided to put some on the blog. I don't clean up Lance's messes just to make the picture look better. Heck, I don't clean up my own messes to make the picture look better. As you can see, our toilet is a little more "private" now. We had to lose the second door into the bathroom to make this bath tub fit, but I didn't want a hall entrance into the master bath anyway. We still have to paint that mirror frame white and get a new window covering, caulk, hang towel bars, etc.

This is our master bedroom. I've never seen a master bedroom so big! The former owner added it on and I guess they liked their space. We're not sure what they were going for with these holes in the wall. Windows? Big screens? Windows??

Also, you can't see it here, but you had to walk through the old master bedroom to get to this bedroom which kind of made the old master worthless. We closed up the old master with a wall and a door and it is now Leah's room.

Bye bye holes!!

Someday maybe we'll get a few more decorations. I haven't even bought all of the pillows to fill the shams this comforter set came with.

This is the before picture of the kitchen. Notice, no oven, just a range. The oven is further to the right and can't be seen in this picture. It was built into the cupboards and was not big enough to put a cookie sheet into and was a million years old. Oh and you could barely open it without hitting the wall and a new one would never be that small so we couldn't replace it where it was. Also, notice the fake brick wall as a backsplash behind the oven. Hated it! The formica had some problems too.

This is how it looks now - sorry this is too close, but I took the picture to show Levin that I finally had an oven and could stop living on microwavable food. And no, we didn't do granite, we're not that rich. We did get a new refrigerator since the old one smelled like rotten fish every time you opened it. Every time we went to the house we had to beg my niece and nephews not to open it. The dishwasher is new too, but don't get me started on that thing because I'm angry about it. Yes, I know the microwave sticks out like a sore thumb because it's black, but we had to stop spending money somewhere and it works very very well.

We've replaced a lot of ugly fans, a lot of tacky light fixtures, painted all the walls, etc. One quick fix tip I learned is that by just changing the knobbies on the kitchen and hall bathroom cupboards it made them look a lot nicer. We still need the knobbies put on our master bath cabinets. We had the doors re-finished in there.

If you know anyone that in July 2011 wants to rent a really long house (all one story, but many square feet) in southern Maryland, let us know! After we get our fence built you can keep horses here and we live just a few blocks from an awesome horse park.