Our house - before and after

Kitchen - before (we removed the wall next to Jon)

Arch in living room - before construction (in the "after" pics you see the arch gone)

During construction

Our new kitchen

We also painted the office...here is the before picture of a corner of the office

Office - after painting

After several months of planning and about three months of construction, we finally finished our home renovation project. What started as just a kitchen remodel quickly spread to the rest of our main floor - we replaced all of our hardwood floors (we think the floors we replaced were original to the house (1902)), tore down a wall and the arch, and painted the entire first floor. We are so excited with the final product. The painter we hired moonlights as a house painter but is really an "artist" which worked well for Jon and I since we had a hard time finding a creative way to paint our house. We purchased the big painting in the living room from Dave the painter.

We talked about remodeling the kitchen since we moved into our house in 2003 and you could argue that the timing to finally start the remodel was not ideal (I just started back at work after having the baby) but we are glad we finally finished. In fact, the day the painter left and we no longer had to come home to contractors in our house, Jon and I broke open a bottle of wine and had a glass every night this week while admiring our finished house. Friday night, as we were enjoying our wine, Spencer crawled across the house for the first time, so I guess the timing proved somewhat ideal.

During construction we moved our entire first floor of the house into the guest bedroom, basement and garage. Jon and I lost all motivation to unpack so we have nothing on our walls and the door will probably stay shut to the guest bedroom for at least another week....or two!