Curb appeal Before and After

My parents came over this week to help me do a whole lot of work on the front yard.  The success of the "growing grass" experiment has had amazing results so I'm taking it a step further with a 50 pound bag of grass seed.... drought resistant :)  We'll see if it really works but I'm watering it like mad.

If you remember the awful part of what I was dealing with and what it looks like now you can't see a better result!

 

And after a whole lot of work and a whole lot of pain in my back/legs/arms/shoulders 

 I'm going to paint the bench black though.  And I really want to put a fountain to the right and a lamp post behind it. . . .but I'm kind of out of money for a little bit....

 Hopefully the seed I planted will grow some grass in this dead spot where I've killed off a ton of weeds.

 Think Google Street View would replace their image with this one?

 Front flower bed - I have a garden gnome I plan on putting in there somewhere.  We stole it from someone's yard when we were in high school.  I fully expect that if I put it in the garden that someone will steal it.  I embrace this and welcome it.

 Flagstone patio with bench and side flower bed.

 ooooo new grass.... ooooo ahhhhhh and its all soft too!

 New shutters!

 Awesome house numbers with one of my favorite fonts ... a little art deco a little modern a lot fabulous!

Other potential additions to the yard include:
The big foot statue from the SkyMall catalog

 

Or maybe Roswell the Alien Sculpture

Maybe a solar birdbath/fountain (my friend Jacque says I have to have a fountain not a birdbath because of mosquitoes)

There are actually a lot of options for solar outdoor fountains.  And solar lamp posts... I highly recommend this - particularly if you're too cheap to pay for the electrician to come out and install some kind of outdoor outlets.

The office

It's really hard to believe this is what this room use to look like just a few years ago.  Can you say hoarder? 

Basically what we did in this room was rip off the wall paper, patch the plaster, replace the ceiling, replace both the overhead and sconce lights, paint, rip up the carpet, sand and stain the floors, paint the wainscoting, new windows to of course.... and there you have it :)

UPDATED: Master Bathroom

I hired someone to do the renovation for the master bathroom.  I know I know... I've tried to do everything myself, but the reason I've tried to do everything myself is so I could have someone professionally handle the master bath.  So.. here we go... Master Bath progress

From This:

To this!

and now this

Master Bedroom Befores and Afters

This room use to be the room my grandfather used as an office or generally to store his ... "stuff" in. When I came back home from California this is what it looked like.   I'll never forget picking up pieces of paper to find roaches scurrying around.... ahh those were the days....





When I started cleaning out the .. hoarding... he had a hard time letting go of a lot of stuff. So I told him he could keep it if he put it in "his room" meaning his office. The good thing about that is I got rid of about 4 porch loads full of stuff but the bad part is I ended up with a room in the house filled to the ceiling with shit.

Finally, I convinced my mom to help one afternoon and Mom, my step-dad, and my friend Josh and I went in there like a swat team while he was at work and started pitching and loading stuff onto the porch. 3 big black trash bags full of junk we threw away and another porch load of stuff we donated to AmVets. I dusted, painted, painted molding and baseboards, the windows of course are new, I ripped up the carpet, sanded the floors, finished them, put on a layer of poly (I've since been told I need like... six layers of poly so I'll do that) and installed new wall sconces from lamps I converted so I could put them on the wall.

Still need to buy a bed frame and paint the ceiling, but here's where we are now.





The evolution of what once was and now is the downstairs master bedroom.

Stairs Sanded, stained, poly

Ohhhh those were the days.  Here's what I did to the stairs.  The biggest problem with refinishing hardwoods on the stairs is you can't use that giant machine that is so effective.  I had to hand sand them all with the orbital sander and by hand.  Booo!  But they're done now :)

 

That's my grandfather - he's helping.

 ew

This is them cleaned off and sanded

Then stained

Then Poly put on - so far 3 layers... I need 6 - you'd be surprised how hard it is to find 8-9 hours where no one would be using the stairs or the hallway...

Where all the magic happens

Or at the very least where all my stuff is...  My bedroom is closer and closer to being finished.  The lighting went in and I painted my ceiling but ran out of paint for one area... oops... so closer and closer.

This is taken from the front window - except I moved the book shelf to the triangle

Giant triangle where I moved the bookshelf and added another one as well as wall shelves 

 Pic of the other side of the room - the "sitting area" this is taken from sitting on my bed

The new lights!  There use to be a ceiling fan here ... but it's gone now and it's got 4 lights in the ceiling rather than hanging down.