House remodel is done!

Danny and I are happy to have a new home here in SLC. We bought this duplex on a tree lined street in the Sugarhouse area of Salt Lake. It's a lot different than our house in Idaho; smaller rooms, smaller yard and less room in the kitchen. But we are thrilled to have a "brand new house" in SLC, close to Taylor's school, Danny's work and all our family & friends in Utah. We are counting our many blessings.

The home was built in 1947 and needed a substantial amount of work. These houses have a lot of charm and are in great neighborhoods,but they are old and everything is original, so it's outdated.

This is a long post, mostly for our memory, so we can remember how this whole project looked before and after.

Here's what we did:

-Fix the broken water main in the front yard by repairing the pipe under the front yard.

-Replace the broken furnace, add new air ducts and added an Air Conditioner.

-Replace the kitchen and one bathroom and added a bathroom in the basement.

-Rip out cat hair infested carpet and refinish the beautiful hard wood floors, and extended the floors into the kitchen.

-Replace all the doors, baseboards and windows.

-Taped, mudded, texture the walls/ceiling and painted the whole house.

-Redid all the electrical work including getting a service upgrade from Rocky Mt. Power.

-Replace all the plumbing in the house, which included jackhammering a 10 foot trench in the basement to move the plumbing for the bathroom downstairs.

-Frame, sheetrock, insulate, carpet, trim, tile, vanity etc.. in the basement.
-Buy all new appliances and including a new W/D. I love having brand new, clean appliances!

-Spend endless hours at night, and every Saturday working at the house.

-Going to the dump several times and shopping at Home Depot for sheetrock, nails, screws, wire, tools, stain, lumber, light fixtures, insulation, door knobs, trim, caulk, carpet, paint, sinks, fixtures, green board, light bulbs, tape, rollers, mud, vent covers, spackle, cement and more endless supplies. Luckily Home Depot has "car carts" for the kids, (which Isaac loves to drive) and they sell snacks!

Here are a few pictures of the process, we are still settling in, so the house is not quite decorated yet. I decided to start the post at the end of the finished project rather than at the beginning. The pictures are scary of the "before" remodel, and they don't even do it justice at how BAD it really looked!

Here is our kitchen, we just finished installing the cabinet doors last night! Danny built the cabinets and I LOVE how well they turned out. He is so great at all of these tasks. He is definately a very multi-talented husband, one of the many reasons I love him !
I got a hutch to store small kitchen appliances etc.. because the kitchen has less cabinets than our house before. I love it, it fits into our house perfectly!

Taylor and Emily's room, complete with loads of toys and the snake "Mr. King". They were thrilled to have their stuff back and to sleep in their bunkbeds.


Our bedroom, I didn't get a picture of Isaac's room, it's too dark, I have black out shades on his windows to help him sleep better.


The living room

Messy laundry room, but so nice to have a large room to put stuff. We have plans for better storage, just haven't had time for that yet.

We added a bathroom downstairs, I guess this is the "kids" bathroom, it's so much bigger than the one upstairs.

Upstairs bathroom, with nice new shower, tile floor, vanity etc....

This is the vanity in the downstairs bathroom.

Now to the before and the pics. during the remodel.

Here is the basement being framed.

I forgot to take pictures while we were insulating. That is a miserable, itchy process and I am SO glad it's over.
The tools to help that got this project done.

Here is a pic. of the upstairs bathroom after we removed each and every tile from the shower and floor by hand. This took all day because the tiles were put in with chicken wire, and covered in cement. It was amazingly strong tile, but so ugly and gross. We could not get the cast iron bath tub out of the bathroom, it was too big and awkward. So Danny used his new reciprocating saw ( it was his Christmas Present from me!) and cut the tub in half! It was a crazy day, but we were so happy to get the old, leaky heavy tub out of the bathroom. He is so resourceful and knowledgeable in these situations. So here is the tub sitting in the snow outside waiting to go to "The Dump".

We redid all of the electrical in the house, thanks to John for all his help, skills and knowledge. This was intersting to me, to see how they run wire through the ceiling,walls and attic and it all comes here to bring electricity to the house.

Here is the bathroom again, waiting to get the shower installed, and sheetrock put in.

Here is the basement in the sheetrock/mudding/taping stage. We are really happy with how the basement turned out. It was hard to figure out how to arrange the rooms and where to put the bathroom etc.. But we came up with a good, livable floor plan that utilizes all the square footage in the basement.

Here is the basement before we replaced started doing anything.

Here is the basement before we started doing anything.

Here is the kitchen before the demolition began. It was a whole day of cutting, sawing and ripping this kitchen out from the floor up! We took a HUGE dump trailer to the dump full of just kitchen appliances, sink, laminate flooring cabinets and more stuff after this day.

I love the difference in the kitchen!

There are still a few little things to finish, but most of the hard stuff is done! It feels so good to be living here and have a little free time again. We feel guilty in the evening if we aren't busy working on project. The kids love being here so far, it will be a perferct place for us to live.

We had tons of help from so many people; Mom, Dad, John, Marcus, Derek, Brett, Natalie, Taylor, my cousin Dillon, Alan, Vic, Jeremy, Caleb, John H., Tyler, Emily and even Isaac. We appreciate all the help and time spent working for us, we could not have done this without all your help.

THANKS SO MUCH!!!

Now we just have to work on the outside of the house and tackle the yardwork- I guess there is always something to work on!

This is how our dinner table looks after eating a meal with Isaac! No wonder nobody volunteers to do dinner dishes. It feels like eating with an animal at the zoo. He stands to eat his food, uses his hands to shovel food into his mouth and begs to eat off of everyone else's plate. He is so gross!

Today is just another busy day, here are some things I am so thankful for today.

• Having dinner already done (cooking in the crock pot)
• Warm weather, it finally feels like Spring!
• Getting my car battery working again.
• Emily going to her dance class, she gets SO excited on Wed. when she can wear her ballet clothes and tap shoes.
• Having our garbage/recycle cans emptied. We have had so much garbage since we moved in. I have been Spring cleaning and getting rid of tons of stuff.
• Having a nice, new house to live in.
• Counting down the days until we go on our trip, ten days to Hawaii! I can not wait! I want to start packing right now, but won't until next week.

Hope you have a great day.

Snowy Spring Break!

We had a cold, snowy start to Spring Break this week. It's supposed to be Spring, but we got a several inches of snow at our house this week. The snow froze all our daffodils and tuplis in the garden.

For Spring Break this week, we had a "Stay-cation". We stayed in SLC and did lots of fun outings with the kids.

On Monday we went to Hill Air Force Base to the Air Force/Air Plane Museum. It has tons of huge airplanes, helicopters etc.. Taylor loves this museum and invited a friend along. The boys liked seeing the missles and all the equipment for the airplanes. Isaac kept yelling "Airplane, Airplane" the whole time we were there, he thought it was great!

Then Tuesday we went to Chuck'E Cheese for some fun. The kids had fun spending their tokens, watching the band, and playing on the slides, and play equipment.

Wednesday we went swimming at a fun indoor pool close to our house, with Mono and Becca and some of our neighbors. Everyone likes swimming except for Isaac, he cried and wanted to go down the water slide the whole time. He finally settled down and had fun for a while and then he wanted to just get out of the water. He was tired and being high maintenance!

Becca LOVES the water and will be swimming independently any day now.

Thursday we went to Classic Skating, but I didn't have my camera. Isaac loved going down the big bouncy slides all by himself.

Then on Friday walked to the park and spent the morning at the playground and exploring the river. Danny got off work early and we decided to got to the Aquarium.

We had a blast at the Aquarium mostly because Danny was with us. He knows lots of interesting facts about sea animals, fish, sharks etc.. The kids had fun at the touch tanks, and learning all about the animals and sea creatures.

The rest of the week was spent playing with Legos, sleeping in (just a little) reading,books, going to the library, watching movies, playing with friends and going on bike rides. Taylor read a book a day during the break, he loves "The Magic Tree House" series, and checks 6-8 of them from the library at a time. Then he stays up late in his bed, with a lamp reading. He is growing up so quickly!

I am sad Taylor has to go back to school this week, we had a fantastic Spring Break with him out of school.

Happy Easter!!!

We had a nice, calm, relaxing Easter at home. It was good to lay around and watch Conference while the kids ate all their Easter Candy.

The Easter Bunny did a Scavenger Hunt for the kids so they had to follow the clues to find their baskets. They thought it was tons of fun, and loved all their goodies in their baskets.
Emily ate all of her candy the quickest, she chowed it down!

Isaac didn't get to much candy, half the time he puts it in his mouth starts chewing it, and then spits it out (usually in my hand!)

The other day at the store, he unwrapped a whole Cadbury Egg and popped it into his mouth before I could stop him. It turned into a huge, wet, chocolate mess, and I only had 3 wet wipes in my purse. What a disaster! He is quick and quiet when he's doing naughty things.






I just added this random picture of Isaac because he is obsessed with pretending like he is driving the car. He begs me for my keys all day and when I hand him the keys he goes to the car and tries to unlock the door. Sometimes I let him get the keys and go to the steering wheel to play, he loves it and will play in the car for 30 minutes (if I let him ). He is the funniest kid!

We had a Easter Egg hunt with our friends in the neighborhood on Friday. It was cold and snowy, so it was indoor, but the had fun. Hopefully the weather will be better this week, for Spring Break.

Just click on the photo collage to see the pics. better.

Happy Easter to all!!