Extreme Home Makeover

We have been doing some fun house projects lately!  If you know Ryan and I, we LOVE projects!  Well, let's put it like this.  I love the ideas and planning and picking out stuff and then Ryan executes it.  We're a great team, really!  :)  I love that Ryan is very project oriented and he gets the job done right and in a timely manner.  He HAS to complete projects all in one sitting (or weekend).  He doesn't leave it lingering for weeks on end.  I love that about him!

What I REALLY wanted to do with this post is put the  "before" pics of our house on here.  Like before we even moved in because that is an extreme home makeover post in itself.  However, those pictures are on a hard drive from my old computer and they are not exactly cooperating with being put onto my new Mac.  So, I'll have to keep working on that!  For now, I have some before and afters, but the Before's are not the TRUE befores.  Make sense?  :) 

In February we got LOTS of snow.  Ryan knew we were expected to get snowed in for a few days so he quickly thought of a project he could do.  Oh yes, the fireplace!  We have hated the tile since we moved in, but didn't quite know what we wanted to do with it.  We saw some rock at the fireplace store when we were getting gas logs and we both liked it and decided this is what we should do.  It wouldn't be too much of a project because Ryan could lay the rock right on top of the tile.  Perfect! 

This is the before.  Yucky cream colored tile around the fireplace.  Mind you, before we moved in there was a lovely brass fireplace cover over the opening and all the white wood was honey oak.  I promise I'll figure out a way to post those pics.  They are awful!  

Rock on the bottom......

Rock all the way around!  Looks good!  

Oh but wait.  Sorry honey, but I really think we have to do the backs of the bookshelves too.  They look horrible with the white background.  I think it would look great with rock on the backs of those too!  :)  See, like I said, I have the ideas.  Ryan executes! 

Looking back I am horrified at how "plain" this looks!  Yikes!  I always knew it needed something, but I didn't know what!

Much better!!

Much Much better!!  This isn't the best picture with the light, but you get the idea.  It really warms up the whole room!

Project 2:  Furniture makeover! 

When we moved in we brought all of our furniture for our old house.  We bought it for that house and it "fit" that house perfectly!  It was great!  Well, it wasn't so great for our Kansas house.  It was much too big for the room and I never really liked it.  Back in February when our moms came up to visit we went furniture shopping, met with a designer who helped us to pick our furniture that would fit the room to scale much better and wa-la.  8 weeks later it was delivered!  We LOVE the way it turned out! 

I don't think I took official "before" pics, so I'll just have to find a few that will do so you get the idea!  Oh wow- looking back I did not have a great picture of the living room at all.  I'm telling you- I wasn't in there all that much because I didn't like it!  Ha!  Guess no one was- there were no good pics!  Here's the best i could do:

Big clunky couch in front of the windows.  This picture is Dustin sleeping and Ryan trying to make him sneeze by putting pepper under his nose.  :)

You can see a little bit here....the couch was overpowering the room!

My fav little nephews! 

Oh yes, and remember this??  This is what our couch looked like for the first 5 weeks here because the moving company LOST the other half of our couch.  Nice!!!  Ugg- I hated living so disheveled!!  

And now the after pics! 

We love the furniture but OBVIOUSLY we need some accessories to tie it all together!  The furniture fits so much better in the room and we feel it is SOO much bigger than before! 

Friday Ryan and I went accessory shopping.  I love Ryan's input on this and I think he might be part metro, because he always picks out the good stuff.  :)  He has a good eye for decorating.  We got most of this stuff home and I messed around with it for an hour and I couldn't make it look right.  He came up in 5 minutes and arranged the sofa table and I love it!

Found the picture and it was PERFECT for our room.  Had all of the colors we used and really tied everything together!  The sconces were from our old house.  Glad we kept those!  The lanterns are my fav.  The candles are flameless and they are on a timer.  They turn on every day at 7:00 and stay on for 4 hours and turn off automatically.  Love them! 

The other view!  It is so cozy- we love it!