Alarm Clock Wars: Remodel Mondays

The official remodel project is finished. (Just ask the bank and our insurance company.) I’m still working on the “minor” things, like curtains, and door mats, and where the stuff should go on the wall, and really where the furniture should end up.

The change from the old house to the new really is pretty dramatic. Let’s take a tour!

You’ve already seen most of the new house, like my new office and the master bedroom. Maybe when I get things organized the way I really want, I’ll show off my closets. For now, the closets are holding all of the “I don’t know what to do with this yet” stuff. Not pretty.

And speaking of not pretty, here was my office in the old house. This room was originally a garage that was made part of the house before we bought it. We pulled up the carpet and installed laminate flooring, but never did anything about the paneling on the walls. (ick) Because it was a garage, it was sunken down 3 steps from the rest of the house.

We raised the floor up to match the rest of the house, and made this part of our eat-in kitchen!

This was my wall of shelves. Way too much stuff crammed in here. And frankly, not pretty.

Now this wall holds our china cabinet, a bulletin board for important paperwork (you know, like checks and coupons), and our pretty new refrigerator.

This project started off as a kitchen remodel. And what a kitchen remodel it was! The old galley kitchen was crowded and cramped, with barely any functional counter space.

Ta da! My dream kitchen! Need I say more?

From the old kitchen, the space used to open up into what we used as a dining room.

We extended the wall to the left of the original photo (that wall used to have a pantry, now it has basement stairs and a pantry). We also pushed back the wall with the picture hanging on it in the original photo, and put in sliding glass doors to the new porch and a half bathroom.

This was the other side of the dining room. This held the china cabinet and a small dresser for some extra storage.

The space where the dresser was sitting is now inside the pantry, and we made the arch into the living room bigger.

This was the living room. And, wow, as I’m looking at this picture now, this was a bad room!

We took out the fireplace and moved that entire wall back a few feet, and made the window a little bigger. We did salvage the original hardwood floors in the room. Then with the bigger footprint, we rearranged the furniture.

This used to be our master bedroom. I am amazed at how tiny it looks now!

This room really didn’t change very much. We kept it as a guest bedroom. (And even put the same ceiling fan back in here – don’t tell anyone!) We also salvaged the original hardwood floors in this room. The biggest change was the closet.

This closet used to open directly into the other bedroom. We ended up using the second bedroom as our clothes storage and using the “closet” as a pass-through to the other room. Bad, bad, bad use of space.

So we closed off the other “entrance” to the closet, and made it actually useful.

This was the guest bedroom. We put in these wardrobes for our clothes, since we had minimal storage in our actual bedroom, and a non-functional closet.

Now, this is my laundry room. A much better use of space!

This used to be the only bathroom in our house. Functional, but small. And cramped. And small.

Now? Well, now it’s a wall. Actually, the space you can see in the original photo is now a half bathroom, but we moved the door. So the same view in the new house is just a wall. Sorry, that’s pretty boring.