the house ptoject

I figure our epic house project deserves an epic entry. We've been asked for over two years when we think we'll be in our house, and now I am happy to announce we've been living in it for two weeks and it's awesome. I miss the open fields and the nearness to grandparents where we used to live, but this house does feel like our home.

A big huge thank you to Ben's parents who installed the windows, hung all of the doors (and even rehung a few per my specifications) who painted the walls and cut, caulked and painted all the trim and baseboard for us. Thank you to my dad who spent hours on his knees tiling with Ben and who painted all of the doors and my many salvaged cabinets (and my mom who played with Joachim on her many visits). They all made it possible for me to moved into a finished house. Following are our before and after pictures.

This is the living room, in most of the house Ben and I scraped the popcorn ceiling off except in the living room and the laundry room were we actually took down an additional ceiling. Ben and Chris rewired the entire house (hence the hole along the floor). Ben plumbed the sinks, tub, dishwasher and washing machine...and he now detests plumbing. He also refinished all the floors and even laid new wood floor where someone had cut a crawl hole in the middle of the hall.
When opened the entry to the kitchen and took out the arches. We put insulation in the wall as a sound barrier to the bedroom behind.
This is the kitchen, it was the first of many tiling projects. We were blessed that one of Ben's friends recently bought a house and gave us the stove and dishwasher which are both the nicest I've ever used. This is the steps down to the laundry room, another tiling feat. I bought the kitchen and laundry room tile on super discontinued sale more than a year before we put it in... and we were a few tiles short so I had to get a different color, I think it turned out well.It's a huge laundry room.
This is Joachim's bedroom, the two bedrooms are mirror image of each other with a walk through closet between.
Walk through closet on the right, we wired it to be two closets if someone wants to do that someday, but I really like it this way.
And the bathroom, my pride and joy. I spent days cutting and hanging tile in this room, around the window and on the shelf. I had Ben change the height of the shelf three times... fortunately I got it right the third time because I was out of chances. I want to take this bathroom with me to every house we ever live in.
The floor was completely rotted out to the crawl space below, Ben cut the entire floor out and it was very hard for me to imagine this room put back together again. When you opened the door you stepped straight down to the dirt.
The vanity was a freebie from someone at church, we painted it white and salvaged the sink from Chris' field. We literally walked out back from his house project and pulled it out of the mud... his yard's not really that bad, it's just under construction. The sink cleaned up nicely.