Before and After

We love our home, but when we bought it about 7 years ago, it was in need of some major updating. 

Since we've moved in, we've:

re-modeled the kitchen,

refinished the wood floors, 

landscaped the backyard,

installed new front doors

and painted our little hearts out.  

One thing we had put off until a few weeks ago, was getting new carpet.  The old carpet was in bad shape.  After calling every company in the phone book and getting the best price (with the company we wanted to use), we FINALLY got our new carpet a couple of weeks ago.

Here's what it looked like before:

Sick right?

Well here's what it looks like now:



Notice any other change in that picture?

Do you remember how I've been complaining about how busy I've been lately? 

Well, during all of this carpet talk, I somehow got

roped into/"volunteered" (it's debatable at this point)

to paint our 3 sets of banisters.  We knew that if we wanted to get our home updated into this century that we had to do the painting before the carpet was installed.  At first we talked to someone about doing it for us.  But after finding out that the painter would just spray paint it white and then antique it with a dark brown glaze, I knew that it was something I could handle.  With a lot of elbow grease and some help from my dad, we painted and glazed all of our banisters before the new carpet went in.  We saved about $1000 by doing it ourselves (which will hopefully go towards granite in our bathrooms or that new couch we've been needing.)  Of course we're paying our painter/friend for his time too though. 

Anyways, it was a hard week of blood, sweat and tears

(o.k. I might be exaggerating a bit),

but in the end it was worth it.