Adventures of Charlotte, Henry & Eloise: Our house….

Well, amazingly, tomorrow (May 24th) marks one year from the date we closed on the house. Hard to believe we have been homeowners for a year! Granted, we didn’t move in then…there was far too much work to be done before it was inhabitable, haha. But I thought it would be fun to see how far we’ve come in a year—clearly, there is still a significant amount of work still left. I mean, we still have to renovate the entire kitchen (which involves taking down walls), 3 baths…and we have to figure out what to do with the guest room. Oh, and we have to put SOMETHING on the walls. But still, I find looking back at the pictures pretty amazing.

Here is our house…the outside was never really a problem at all. In fact, I think that is probably the only thing we haven’t touched! I still love our house every day when I pull up :)

Here it is after a big snowstorm this winter…Jon had A LOT of shoveling to do!

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I WISH I had pictures of the back yard when we moved in…it was an absolute disaster. There was a stone patio, brick BBQ, a large tree with roots growing under the patio (as a result, the patio was all broken/uprooted), ivy all over the place…no grass. Just a mess. We got estimates from landscaping companies to “fix” our backyard, and it was going to be up to $6K with the tree removal. So, we had the large tree removed, and then Jon went to work with a few workers from HB…and I should mention that all of this took place during the longest/hottest heat wave in New York. Literally, the days Jon worked back there, it was about 100 degrees and as humid as can be. Terrible. But, as a result, we now have a nice little backyard where the kids can play!

Great job on that grass, honey! :)

We still have to assemble Charlotte’s playhouse back there (thanks Uncle Ray!), and maybe eventually get a swing set. Long term, we will have a patio and some nice landscaping, but that is all going to have to wait until we figure out exactly how extensive our renovation will be.

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When we bought the house, literally every. single. inch. of the house was covered in wallpaper…I mean, the inside of drawers were lined with wallpaper. So that was one of the first things that had to go. We had it all removed, had our plaster walls restored/fixed up, and painted the house. We also had to rip up the horrendous carpet throughout the house, which thankfully was covering amazingly beautiful wood floors. So we had those restored and stained. We replaced all of the windows. We did environmental testing and treatments. We replaced the floor in the kitchen, and got a new stainless steel stove and dishwasher. We replaced the HVAC system and switched to gas (which was a problem not known to us when we bought the house).

And all this time I was on bedrest, and Charlotte and I were living in HB, so Jon was on his own (not that I typically do that much physical labor anyway!). He was doing shoe molding, ripping down structures, painting, cleaning/wiping down the entire utility room, painting dry lock, etc. etc. etc.…every night he would come home from work at 6:30pm and would work until 11pm at night in the brutal heat (this is before we had the AC fixed). There was certainly a lot of blood, sweat and tears on his part :)

THEN…once we moved in, and all of the preliminary work was completed, we were able to start ordering furniture and decorating. Thanks to the help of many people—our parents, my Aunt, my decorator friend Melissa in Canada, the interior designer in Garden City—we have made a significant amount of progress. We still don’t have much up on our walls, and some rooms are very much in need of an update, but I love what we’ve done so far. Here are a few pictures…

Here is the entry before (a lot of these pictures are the pictures from the real estate listings, which is why the quality of some of these before pictures are better than my after)…

Check out the wallpaper and pea green carpet!

And here is the after…again, it looks a lot smaller because of the magic lenses the real estate agents use, but it really isn’t :)

This is our staging area…we have to hang that frame, but the bench comes in handy when we are all getting ready and running out the door. It also is a great place for our shoes :)

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Now, the living room and dining room situation was in flux for quite a few months...when the kids and I moved back to the house, and Henry was a newborn, I hated not being able to see them from the kitchen. I couldn’t leave the room with the kids, because I didn’t really trust Charlotte with Henry at this point…so it was difficult to do ANYTHING (get food for them, make dinner, go to the bathroom, etc.). So I thought that it might be best for our family/living area to be in what was the formal dining room, which was connected to the kitchen, and then to move the dining room table to the large room, which was to be a combined dining room and formal living room.

Here are some before pictures of the living room…

And some before pictures of the dining room…

And here are some pictures of when we were using the dining room as our living area…

And here was the combined dining area/formal living area…

Dining area on one side

And living area on the other

(we were in the midst of decorating for Christmas when I took this picture!)

BUT…a few weeks (months?) later, we realized that the larger room, which we loved, was essentially completely unused. We never even walked into the room, and for such a beautiful room, it was a waste. I have to say that I was pretty against moving back into the other room…Jon was completely leading the charge. But now, I am so glad we are back in the living room! I love how it has turned out :)

(Henry always makes a beeline for the fireplace, hence the gate!)

And here is the dining room, now that it is once again a dining room!

We desperately need a new light fixture, something for the walls, and perhaps a sideboard/table of some sort, but I really like it.

And here are the built-ins now…we painted the inside a slightly darker color than the walls, and I like how it turned out!

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The office is still kind of unfinished…when we moved in, the wood paneling was dark, and it was all around the windows, ceiling, etc. Here is a picture, although the lighting is bad so it is kind of hard to see.

One of Jon’s projects was to tear that wood off around the windows and to paint it all white. Here are some pictures of the office now…

(the color of the light fixture looks odd in this picture…in reality, it matches the roman shades!)

To the left of the desk is my college diploma…and we need to hang that, along with Jon’s college diploma and my law school diploma. But to be honest, we haven’t put much time/effort into this room because it is going to be swallowed up by our kitchen renovation! For now, though…it works.

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And the kitchen…well, I don’t really have any good before/after shots. It still looks like it is from 1973 (well, it is) and it desperately needs to be renovated. Here it is:

We got a new stove, so that big white monstrosity isn’t still there at least, and the flooring is gone (although still kind of an eyesore).

This was the eat-in part of the kitchen before…

And here it is now…baby steps.

Hope to share some really good before and after photos once we do our renovation.

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Okay, so moving upstairs…here was the landing when we moved in.

We took the wallpaper down and painted it, but strangely enough, we are actually contemplating putting wallpaper up again…just not THIS wallpaper :)

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Here was the master bedroom when we moved in.

(you can tell this is the professional picture!)

And now…

(don’t mind the sloppy bed…I made it when I was holding Henry!)

So, it looks quite different now! I think we are going to get new bedroom furniture soon…and we need a new lamp, bedside lamps, and once again—something on the walls. But we will get there!

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We haven’t renovated the master bath yet…it is still the horrible pink/burgundy color that you see in this picture. But we did lose the wallpaper and paint it a neutral and muted color at least! And we got a new toilet. But we still have the lovely green light fixture!

Here are pictures of the master bathroom, just because it is hilarious.

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Here was Charlotte’s room before

And now, here is what Charlotte still refers to as “her new big girl room”! I love this room…it is a really nice size, has a lot of closet space, and it is just a really comfortable/girly room :)

(Charlotte wanted to make a cameo)

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And here are some pictures of Henry’s room before…

I absolutely love Henry’s room now…the lighting in my pictures are pretty awful, but you get the idea. The whole “theme”, if you can call it that, stemmed from the painting above his crib, which my Aunt Emilia bought for us at a charity auction a few years ago. I feel like this is a room Henry will really like when he gets older (at least I hope he does!) :)

(before the curtains were finished)

Finished curtains

And yes, I realized one of those frames is empty…I am working on that :)

Our rocker corner :)

(Henry was a little congested when I took these pictures, hence the humidifier)

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We haven’t done anything to the hall bath just yet, although that is something we hope to do soon…not that the yellow/blue combination isn’t on the cutting edge of interior design, but I think we are over it, haha.

We have gotten rid of the see-through plastic shower curtain, however.

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The guest room is kind of a problem, because it is quite small, and it is hard to arrange any furniture in there…right now, we just have a pull-out couch for when our mothers stay over, but I hate it. And what makes it worse is that it is the first room you see when you walk up the stairs. I don’t have any before pictures of this room, but here it is now…

Not really sure how we are going to be able to fix that room!

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And finally, one of the biggest transformations has been in the basement…when we moved in, it was all darker wood paneling, part of it was carpeted, there was what appeared to be a wood dance floor in the middle of the room, and there was a bar when you first walked downstairs. It was…interesting, to say the least. We wanted to make a play room, so we painted the paneling a lighter color, carpeted the entire basement, got rid of the bar, got window treatments, a window seat, some furniture…and this is what it looks like now!