November Thanks--Week 2

Time for week two of giving thanks for the things in my life.  Last week's entry is here.

This week I am giving thanks for our lovely home.  It isn't the biggest house, nor the fanciest, but it is ours (well the bank has a claim, but we won't quibble about the details).  We have put our stamp on this house since we moved in.

One of the first things we did was to take down the horrid wallpaper in the dining room and living room (which have become the front room and living room, it's a bit complicated but if you saw our main floor you'd get it.) The next thing we did was to have a friend come over--who owed Nick some work in trade--and he helped us to redo the majority of the plumbing in the house. It definitely needed it.  One of the motivators to do the plumbing was a back up that we had to clean up.  The stairs got wet and I slipped down them.  Nick rebuilt the stairs that afternoon. 

Next in the major redo department was the basement.  It had two rooms and a very poorly thought out set of closets between them.  The closet was four and a half feet deep with one bar in it for each room.  No shelves in the back and therefore plenty of wasted space. We demoed the entire south half of the basement and rebuilt it to create a nice master room, and smaller bedroom.  We still need to add a window to the small bedroom, but it works for us for now.

The next room for a major overhaul was the upstairs bathroom.  It was a poorly thought out layout that had been sort of improved but not well.  We completely gutted it to the studs and built it up.  It has more usable space now and is perfect for the boys.
THe summer of 2007 I went off to field camp and since Nick was left to his own devices with Turbo, who was then 4, he attacked the attic. It had been a totally unfinished storage area.  He changed that. Through lots of sweat and effort, it is now a place for the kids to hang out and play games and watch movies.  Nick and I have an office area, a hobby area and some storage still.  It really quite nice up there.

Next we did half the Kitchen.  New cabinets and a concrete counter top which gave me a lot of usable counter space. Nick had fun with the counter top, we did it ourselves, although the bulk of the work was done by Nick.  He's my handy dandy fix-it guy.

The kitchen counter Nick put in.

The master bathroom was the next redo.  We didn't have a master bathroom, just a bathroom under the stairs.  Since our bedroom is in the basement it wasn't hard to rearrange the laundry room and create a master bath.

The other half of our now finished kitchen.

You all know we finished up the kitchen this summer and that we put the tile down in the laundry room this last weekend and not long ago we redid the tile around the woodstove.  Oh, did I not really mention that?  Well, when we moved in the house had a woodstove with a raised hearth around it.  Nick called it the toe killer.  Earlier this summer we moved the old hearth out and a couple weeks ago Nick laid out tile so it is level with the floor.   No more toe killer.  It looks nice.  We plan on changing out the old carpet for cork flooring, once the budget permits, so like next spring.

The newly tiled area around the wood stove.

So with all the changes to our humble abode it has become a much nicer place to live.  Next year we plan on continuing the upgrades and doing some work on the rock gardens we have.  In today's climate, I'm glad we still have a house that we don't own more on than it is worth, we aren't drowning under a crushing mortgage, and it has a great location.  So it isn't big and showy, it more smallish and cozy, but I love it and am so thankful we have it.
Are you thankful for your home?  Or thankful for something else?  Thanksgiving is just over a week away.  Yikes!