Our new shoe cabinet

Here is a picture of our new shoe cabinet. It is so nice to have a place for the little one to put his shoes so they aren't literally all over the house, it was always like a scavenger hunt when he needed to find his shoes and we were always tripping over them. This beauty holds a minimum of 12 pairs of shoes and has a drawer at the top that we are using to store all of our sunglasses, yes we have tons of sunglasses living by the beach. All I have left to do with this little corner of the house is to add pictures to the picture frames. It's nice to have the entry way basically done. I also still need to paint the doors on the closet and the decorative cement walls, but that is it for this room.






Here you can see the wall all taped off to see how it would fit in the entry way. This picture was taken before I painted the wall and put the light switch plate back on the wall. 

Our new kitchen island, stools still to come

Here is the kitchen before we added the new island. You can see I used painters tape to mark off where the island would go. I did this to get a feel for if the island would disrupt the traffic flow or make it too difficult to access the stove, dishwasher or refrigerator. I also played with where the tape was a bit to work out a good placement for the island, probably not entirely necessary as we were only adding a freestanding island and therefore could move it later if necessary. Of course once you get your stuff on the island it is more difficult to move and I wanted to make sure everyone was going to be ok with the addition of a kitchen island. 

Here you can see the storage area where I am storing my baking pans and sheets and carriers and all of that good stuff, freeing up space for other things.

Below, you can see the back side of the island where the stools go. I ordered a pair of metal stools, slightly industrial and modern yet still look a bit like they belong in a farm house, they should be here next week.

The house is really starting to take shape and feel like a home already. 

Our new house, a work in progress. The playroom/kids guest room.

This is the playroom/kids guest room in our new house. This room took a lot of coats of primer and a lot of patching of walls and even the door to the room. This room had writing on the wall and everything, right down to bright orange walls and bright yellow trim. What a project this room was. Oh lets not forget the disgusting dark blue carpet, thankfully that was covering up a terrazzo floor. The terrazzo does need some serious work but as it is currently just being used as a playroom I figured that can wait a bit.

Our "little man" also picked out the color for his playroom, ok he really picked out 2 colors for his bedroom so I decided to put one color in each room. This room is Valspar Summer Breeze and we loved this color so much we painted our bedroom the same color. I know the room looks pretty good in this picture, but the terrazzo still has more adhesive to be removed and it has pits in areas of it and it has a rough area where it meets up with the tile in the hallway so there is still a ways to go, but it has definitely come a long ways already. I am really happy with how far this room has come in the short time we have owned this house, oh the joys of a fixer upper. I should say for those of you who are debating buying a fixer upper please really think about what you are getting yourself into and what level of time and skill you have. Also realize it will cost more and take more time than you expect, but that being said if you are confident this is a good path for you to go down remember that in the end you will have a house that really suits you.

Here is the glorious before picture. I will admit this room kind of scared me as far as just how much work needed to be done to it, but it is now in such a better place that I don't cringe when I go in the room because I know how much work needs to be done. Now I cringe for a whole other reason, the mess all over the room.  :-) I guess that is all "kids" rooms though, you just never know what kind of mess you will find in their rooms when you enter that door. In his defense though as you can see there really is nothing for him to store or put most of his toys away in so I totally understand the problem in this current situation but we do need to work it out soon as we are getting a dog in just over a week and everything is fair game to a dog, at least in the dogs mind.

 

Our new house, a work in progress. The "little man's" bedroom

This is our "little man's" bedroom. This is the first room I finished, well I use that term lightly as we still aren't fully unpacked. That actually includes putting all the clothes away as I haven't even found all the clothes or even all the hangers, yes I am currently taking all the hangers stores give me with my clothing purchases. Oh the joys of moving. 

Anyhow, this is the before picture of his room. It had decent looking roman shades although they were broken. It also wasn't quite as bright or dark of a color as several other rooms were and therefore didn't require as many coats of primer. 

The "little man" picked out the paint color for his new room, Valspar sweet mint. We actually liked it enough that we painted our bathroom the same shade and now I am really loving the name of the color because we just picked out our new dog yesterday who's name is Minted, how appropriate and funny that I just realized that his room is sweet mint and he picked a dog named Minted. 

I picked up the new bedding for his room at Target as he wanted a pirate/beach room. I loved the octopus pirate pillows so that was a bit of a splurge for his new room but given the quilts from his old room worked with the new bedding it wasn't that big of a deal. The sheets from his old room will be used in his play room/kids guest room when I finally get beds in there. 

As for the blinds we took all the window treatments in the house down and ordered new natural shades with black out liners from Lowes. The black out liners will not only provide privacy and allow the rooms to be dark for sleeping in and such but should also help cut down on the need for AC which is pretty high in Florida. I will post pictures of the blinds when they come in. I will say I loved how we could borrow the window blind book to check the colors at our house, we changed our color to a slightly lighter and brighter shade when we saw them in our house with our paint colors and all.