This Old Church House: September 2012

What started out as an idea to simply re-texture the uneven, cracking, chipping walls in our former office, ended up turning into a full-blown remodel. Our newest, long awaited room remodel is finally complete! We are so comfy and cozy in our new family room and find ourselves gravitating to this space all day long.

Here's a picture of the room taken before we moved in a couple of years ago.....

This is how we lived for way too long.....we just had nowhere to put our junk!

Notice the boxes along the left wall.....well, we had those for over a year.......

After a big garage sale recently (Oh wait, we don't HAVE a garage....that's why our room looks like this....I mean a yard sale!!) and selling a lot of things on craigslist,

we simplified our lives and got started on the remodel.

Here's Dustin using the last piece of furniture left in the room (which also got sold on craigslist)......

We pulled off the old window casings and got two bids on re-texturing the walls....both over $1,000! This is when we got the idea to put 1x6 mdf boards on the walls instead.

Cute, cottage look for more than 1/2 the price!!

Here's the start of putting up the siding......with every single little nail hole covered with spackle.......

Not sure when or how it was decided but I think we were just so sick of the gross carpet, that it ended up getting ripped up too......literally RIPPED up from the GLUE that was holding it down.......

I know most normal people would look at this hard, caked-on glue and think about what they could cover it with. I'm not normal and I enjoy a good challenge! Plus, I thought it would be worth a shot to salvage the old, original, historic floors. So, our first attempt was using a heat gun and scraping up all the glue.

Just for the record, I took this picture of Dustin, but it was me who was crazy enough to spend hours and hours doing it too.......

Yes, even after the heat gun, more glue had to be scraped up. We used paint stripper to get up most of the remaining glue until it got to where we could sand the rest.

I should be embarrassed to admit how long I spent doing this but.....after so many hours you just can't quit....because then all the hours that you already put into it would just be wasted and in vain. But, there was definitely many moments of thinking.....this was a stupid mistake, what was I thinking? Fake, engineered wood floors would be a welcomed site....who cares about preserving the original floors!!!!

In the end, I'm glad we did though. One more look at the BEFORE.....

And now the AFTER:

Just have to show a close-up of our new sectional couch. We have already enjoyed this SO much! It represents a little more than just a couch. Not only have we wanted one for so long (I've dreamed about putting my feet up on this chaise lounge), there's just something about going through all we did to make this room what it is and then laying back on this comfy couch, appreciating how hard we worked and the clean, beautiful space around us.

We will have some good family time on this couch.......

Another BEFORE .....

And AFTER......

I wasn't sure I'd like the look of all these storage bins. I thought I would take a lot of them out and put some cute decor and books in various squares, but it has been amazing to be so organized....having a place for everything! Many of the things that were in the old desk have been organized nicely in these bins.....we just need to label them all now so we can find them!!

I noticed you can't really see the siding in my photography! Here's some close-ups of the siding on the walls that's showing up a little bit better.........