The "Before" Post

Every fixer upper has one, right? I could probably wax philosophic here and start talking about how we are like this house and how God sees beyond the grossness to what we can be, but I'll refrain. ;)

Here are a bunch of our "before" shots! I missed getting pictures of a few rooms before we started working on them. We're still living with Mom and Dad while we do the bigger remodeling projects. :)

Our lovely kitchen. ;) This is the room of the house that I pretty much despised the most. BUT, it has great space and one of the things that we wanted the most was a kitchen that was big enough to hold a lot of people, since our last house was so tiny.

 Another view. The high bar to the right is something that I both like and hate - I wanted a breakfast bar but not necessarily that tall of one.

The dining nook and a cute little guy helping us disinfect. ;) This part I love - not the colors, but I love that it's an eat-in kitchen and the nook is HUGE. We basically only had a corner of the kitchen for eating in our old house and all five us couldn't fit around the table at the same time. We should all be able to fit here!

Directly off the kitchen is the family room. We are ripping up the tile first thing and putting down carpet so we can try and keep Parker's head intact. ;) There are these giant beams that go through the room, which I foresee a lot of goose eggs from those beams. And I'm not a fan of the orange stain through the whole house. But the beams are growing on me. 

Inside the closet doors. WEIRDEST space in the whole house. There's another closet inside that closet. So odd.

More of the family room. Here are the beams. And see all the wires sticking out of the wall everywhere? There are seriously wires EVERYWHERE through this WHOLE house. It's the weirdest thing ever.

The front living room. Such great space. Not sure what we will do with this yet. But we love that we have two living areas so we can someday have a kid space and an adult space for community groups from church or when we have friends over. :)

Dining room. This whole house has every single window covered. There's lots of natural light that is not being accessed here.

Here's the staircase and the hallway. The kitchen is on the other side of that wall on the right, the front door is on the left. The carpet runner is my favorite and will probably stay. #nowayeverEVER

All of the bedrooms are upstairs. There are two good sized ones that we are going to put the kids in - the boys will share a room. And then there's a smaller room that is obviously supposed to be an office that we will use for an office/guest room. And the master is up there too. I really like that all the bedrooms are on the same level. We are looking at replacing most, if not all, of the interior doors. Lots of holes. :(

 Here we go. This house is just leaking trash. It wasn't a foreclosure, but it was in foreclosure shape. The whole house is disgusting. We put the kids down at Mom and Dad's and drive over and clean. Every night. We've got through two huge bottles of cleaner mixed with bleach so far. My lungs and sinuses might be permanently damaged. ;) Jon and I put on our masks and our grossest clothes and get to work every night at 8pm.

Bleaching even the high walls. Like I said, it's all disgusting. There was huge pillows of dust mixed with grease and who knows what all over the landings.

Oh friends. My heart just stopped on this night. We thought we could clean the kitchen in one night (bless our hearts). We opened this drawer that was under the cabinet (who ever thought that was a good place for extra drawers was not the brightest) and there was just tons of candy wrappers and mice droppings. And then we started finding the mice droppings throughout the house. Under the master vanity. In the master closet. ALL through the kitchen.

There are precious few things in this life that I CANNOT stand, but mice are at the very top of that list. I do NOT DO MICE. We left that night after finding this drawer and I just cried the whole way back to Mom and Dad's.

Big decisions ahead. We knew we were going to have to remodel the kitchen at some point, but we just didn't think it would be this soon. Ugh.

LOTS of prayers for financial wisdom happening now.