The House of Christmas Past (and Present)

This is an update on one year in the progress of completely gutting and remodeling our home after having catastrophic water damage ruin e.v.e.r.y. inch of it. Click here to read the whole story of what happened.

As I was going through pictures from Christmas last year, I was astounded at the pictures of our house. Whoa! It was a lllloooonnnggg way from done then. Now...we're just a tiny ways from being done! It was a crazy long year of house projects but always encouraging to look back and see how much we accomplished in just 12 short months. (since 12 months of working on the house for us boils down to about 30 weekends and a 80-100 evenings after work) Here are a few examples:

Kitchen:
We only had studs around the peninsula and were just beginning to add the drywall. There also was no trim in the kitchen so we added that.

And this is pretty much what the kitchen looks like now. Not done...but much further along than last year at this time! (bar top progress post can be found here)

Doors:
We had NO doors on anything last year! Since we kept our old doors (and didn't buy any new ones) we had to cut some of them to make them fit. Next year we plan on sanding them all down and refinishing them so they don't look dented up and old...but this year great progress was made in putting doors on each room!

Master Bathroom:
Our master bathroom had no shower, storage, or even a mirror!

Now we have a mirror and a gorgeous shower (finished in this post)! (plus lots of other updates that have been done in this bathroom in the past month or so...posts on that coming soon)

  
Stairs:
The staircase looked like this last December:

During 2012 we added a runner and are still in love!

  
Exterior:
It looked rough...to say the least.

We still have several things to do on the outside, but we've come a long way baby!

I'm particularly happy that there's no longer a toilet sitting in our backyard! (some exterior progress posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here)

In addition to the major stuff that was done this past year on the house, we also did many, many, many minor things. Like getting our washer and dryer hooked up (ok...that was a major one), putting pictures (and antlers) on the walls, hanging curtains and window shutters, hanging shower curtains, getting rid of trees and more trees, putting a swing set together, updating the entryway, plugging away at the basement, and much more.

Phew. We had hoped to be done with the renovation by the end of 2012 and we are not going to make it. But we are close...and if all goes well...should be done by Spring! 'Done' is kind of a loose word - we'll at least be done with the stuff we 'have' to do to get the house appraised or to sell it if we ever wanted to...but there are plenty of projects we want to do that we'll keep plugging away at. I mean seriously...the back of the house is begging for a big beautiful deck. Don't ya think?