Final Remodel Pictures: Before and After

I've been wanting to show you the reason why I took such a big blogging break this summer.  Don't panic! The above picture is a before shot of our living room. It looked like this for 15 years, after we remodeled it the first time. I was finally ready for a little class, so I enlisted the help of my very handy man hubby. He taught himself how to do almost all the work on our addition, from laying concrete, exterior stone, wiring, insulating, bead-board, installing a wood floor, carpentry work and dry walling. I know that I kept you all updated on bits and pieces of our remodel, but I thought I would blog the before and after pictures just so you can see what a dramatic difference all our hard work ended up making. Thanks to the Dave Ramsey plan, we were able to enclose our porch and add 75 square feet to our home without going into debt. Doesn't sound like much footage, but I hope you can see what a difference it made in the layout of our home. I'm so proud of my hubby! He tells me I'm banned from looking at any home improvement magazines for a least a year, LOL.

Here is our new living room, complete with gas fireplace and wood floor. We put bead board on the ceiling and trimmed out everything in oak. He had already made me the scrapbook shelf in the corner. We were kind of going for a simplified, modern, yet old, shabby sheik look.

Here, I'm looking into the living room from the extended dining room/office area. I still haven't got our pictures on the walls yet. Michael got this rug for me from Iraq. It has been rolled up on the bed for 5 years. So nice to have a place for it now!

I took this picture standing in my old living room looking at the old door going out to our old porch. This whole wall was knocked out and the door moved to the extreme right of this picture. So glad the carpet is out of here! You can sort of see how tiny the dining room (to the left) was, especially with my file cabinets in the office area.

Not a good picture, but this is the same view. You can see the office is now distinctly separated from the dining room. Love it! Love the wood floor in here as well. We have a nice open "L" shaped floor plan now. Also love how much more light I have coming into the home with an extra window, plus a big window in the door that lets a lot of light in as well. You can see the new door going out to our new enclosed porch to the right of the picture.

This was the dining/room office area before the remodel. It was so small that I couldn't get a good picture of it all together. 

This is how it looks now. Love having wood floors in my dining room instead of carpet. I'm not nearly as finicky as I used to be about the kids making messes with crafts in the dining room. Look at all this space! I'm in heaven!

Here is a picture of our old open porch. Wasted space in my opinion.

This is what our new front entrance looks like. People have said it feels more inviting and warm to enter our home. Awesome, because that was the idea we had in mind!  We didn't have enough siding to cover the new addition, so we had to think outside the box. I thought stacked stone would look nice around the entrance. We didn't stop there, but also added stacked stone around the front and side of the foundation and the inside of the porch area. I also wanted to keep a lot of light coming into the house, so we opted for a glass storm door. We weren't allowed to build a porch off the house because we were too close to the street, so we had to sacrifice a little of our space for this enclosed porch area. I liked the pilasters and crown head that we put around the door. I think they add a touch of class.

This is a view from the glass storm door as you turn to go up the new porch and into the front door. Perfect place for decorating and now I don't worry that all my decorations will blow away. I'm glad we used the stacked stone on the front steps and around the foundation. 

Instead of using drywall, we decided to beadboard the entire porch. Very happy with our decision. I liked all the trim we used in here, too. This is a view from our front door, looking down into the new enclosed porch, glass storm door is to the right. The house is also much warmer now. An added blessing!

Well that is it! I hope you enjoyed the tour of our new addition. I'm so glad I took before and after pictures because I'm stunned by the difference. I can't believe how God has blessed us and made it possible for this to be built. Because we did almost all the work ourselves, we managed to do all of this, plus a pass through in our kitchen for approx. $10,000. If we would have hired a contractor to do the work it would have been at least double that. So proud of my hubby for being willing to learn how to do all this stuff! I think I better wait to ask him to start on the kitchen for a least a year ;o)

Blessings,

Jackie