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Tag: before

  • How to Prep Your Home for Sale

    How to Prep Your Home for Sale

    As we continue our search for a new job, we are also prepping the house for sale. Although we haven’t listed it on the market yet, we want it ready to go up as soon as we know where we’ll be moving. By having the home in top condition before listing it, we should be able to sell it in a short time period, without too much back and forth with a potential buyer.
    Also once we move, we will not be able to take care of anything in the home, so it needs to be looking good, in case we have to move before it sells.

    So before you list your home for sale, I suggest going through room by room and making a list of anything that needs updated, painted, or repaired.  Mark has gone through the home and made this list for us. It’s going to take a lot of work, but we don’t have much else to do.

    Master Room
    – Clean walls. Possibly repaint
    – Fix the broken blinds

    Bedroom #1
    – Touch up Paint
    – Reattach closet door

    Bedroom #2
    – replace flooring in walk in closet
    – scrub walls. Possibly paint

    Bedroom #3
    – Scrub walls

    Bathroom
    – Touch up paint
    – Fix door jam
    – Fix cupboard door
    Hallway
    – Touch up paint
    Front Room
    – Retrim doorway
    – Repaint
    – fill screw holes

    Kitchen
    – Touch up paint around window and ceiling
    – Spacer between cupboard and wall
    – Ceilling edge above stove
    – Caulk around attic entrance
    – Conceal the back of the cupboard showing
    – Trim around pantry doors
    – Sand, caulk and paint trim

    Family Room
    – Paint trim and ceiling
    – Paint fireplace top piece
    – clean paint off doorknobs

    Stairway
    – fill cracks
    – paint
    – clean doorknob
    – Stain hand rail

    After you’ve gone through the inside of your home, take a walk around the outside. List any repairs. Make sure the sprinklers are working, the lawn is trim, and weeds are pulled. As a buyer, the lawn is the first thing we see. Make it look good, but don’t invest too much money into it. I enjoy having a lawn to make my own, rather then redo what the previous owner had done. I would say stick to daily upkeep of the yard, and don’t try and do any large projects unless it really needs it.

  • May’s Before – the yard

    May’s Before – the yard

    This month I’m focusing on our yard.  Actually there’s a lot I’ve got to do this month, but I know I can get the yard done, so it’s what I’ll be showing you.
    When we bought the house it had this fun two tiered garden circle in the middle of the yard. I personally liked it, but Mark didn’t. So we began tearing it out so we could lay some sod.  Before we got the sod laid, it started to snow, so we had to wait until this year.
    We didn’t get right on it either, with all our inside projects going on, so the weeds really started to take over the area as well.
    The kids had really taken it over as their “sand” box as well. I’ve had a hard time letting them play outside because they come in just covered in dirt.
    We taught Princess V a little lesson in hard work last night as well. She has become very picky with her food, to the point she’ll just refuse to eat, but then ask for treats, and throw major tantrums when she doesn’t get them. So we told her if she ate, she could have a popsicle, if she didn’t she would get to do some hard work with Daddy. Guess what she ended up doing?
    Yep, Hard Work!

    We’ve got the weeds out, and some sod laid, but we need more than we assumed. I also got some tomatoes planted.
    Mark got me some flowers for mothers day that we’ll be planting in the front yard as well. I’m very excited to get out there and get them in the ground.
    Hopefully at the end of the month I’ll have a nice bakckyard without a dirt pile to show you. 
  • April Before – Kitchen and a Baby

    April Before – Kitchen and a Baby

    I love this monthly link up at Shine Your Light. I’ve really been able to push some projects through this year!
    This month we’ve got two major projects going on. Some people would probably call us crazy (I think we’re crazy!). The thing is, when your husband is a teacher, and they’ve got a week of Spring Break, it’s the perfect time to get some major things done!
    Our first project this month, is having a baby. Baby Prince was due last Wednesday, but he’s still hanging out in my massively huge tummy (seriously, where’d my belly button go?!).  If he doesn’t decide to make an appearance on his own, I’ve got another appointment on Monday (what do you know, Spring Break means my ob took off as well.)  As long as there’s room at the hospital, we’ll be coaxing Baby Prince out into the real world!
    There will be some much cuter photos at the After Party!
    Our second HUGE project this month is our Kitchen Remodel. After our basement remodel last year, the kitchen was the next room we wanted completely made over. The cupboards were old, and had nails poking out of them that caught a finger on more than one occasion. There weren’t enough outlets for me to really enjoy my cooking escapades with the kids, and counter space was limited. So we sat, planned, and planned some more. With the arrival of Spring Break, we had finally created an outline of our kitchen, and purchased everything from IKEA.

    It really wasn’t a bad looking kitchen, but it wasn’t very functional, or all that pretty.  We’ve been working on it for a week now. The counters are out, the flooring is gone, and the electricity is all wired! Mark is in there right now mudding the walls to prep it for paint, and we should start seeing cabinets next week.

     
    oh yeah, we also scraped off the popcorn ceiling, and will be needing to fix that as well. 
    What are you working on this month?  You can link up your Before and Afters over at Shine Your Light!

     

  • Family Room – Before

    Family Room – Before

    Shine Your Light I am determined to have our Family Room done before Baby Prince arrives. Ever since we started our Dining Room remodel, the family room became the staging zone. It’s located in the back of the house. There is no access to any other room besides the backyard from it. So we were able to stack tools and hardware in there while we remodeled. Well, we finished the Dining Room in february, and it isn’t looking any better. Here’s what I’ve got to work with this month

    At first glance from our beautiful dining room, into the family room {Cringe}
    We still need to put a frame back on the doorway

    When we did the dining room, we had to replace support beams. Which means we had to temporarily support the roof, this was the result. We’re still debating on just retexturing the ceiling, or creating a new ceiling with hard wood (kind of like this pallet ceiling)
    I’ll probably put up different curtains once we get more of a theme for the room. We’ll be repainting all the walls.

    This picture makes me laugh and smile. I probably should have taken the photos off the wall before the mess started, but they survived.

    Well, this is just to show the horrible mess of everything, and to motivate me to get started. Eventually I want to open up the closets to open shelving and wood storage for the stove.
    Hopefully I’ll see you at the end of the month with a much different looking room! Perhaps different enough it won’t be recognizable as the same room….perhaps.
  • Dining Room Recap

    Dining Room Recap

    I wanted to pull our Dining Room remodel into one recap post. It’s so neat to see the before and after shots next to each other!  For me, it just doesn’t even look like the same room anymore. I love our new Dining Room!
    It started out as a simple floor to ceiling pantry project.  Building this half wall up and into a pantry.
    It soon took over the whole Dining Room when Termites were found. Keep in mind I consider this lucky, since we found them before our roof caved in!
    Our simple project became a massive one. But we learned some cool things a long the way – like how to add temporary support beams to your ceiling.
    and how to remove layers of wallpaper and paint
    and how to tape and mud.
    Since I was mostly told to stay out of the kitchen at the end, due to all the chemicals from primer and paint, I got inspired by pinterest to make a hanging drum light.
    We took a special family trip to pick out this artwork. We wanted a Venetian feel, and I feel like we got that with the wall color, and this photo.
    And finally we were done! If I haven’t said it enough yet, I’ll say it again, I love our new Dining Room! I love the pantry that allows me to see what we actually have! I love that we can all fit around the table, and there’s enough light to see by!
  • The Nursery – before

    The Nursery – before

    Shine Your Light Well I forgot to get my after post up of our kitchen last month, and still haven’t even posted it! I promise a full post on the kitchen is coming a litte later this week, with before and after shots!But before it gets too late again, I wanted to show you my Before and after project for the month of February.The Nursery!  That’s right, baby Prince is due in 2 months, so it’s time to get the nursery all set up.  For the last, oh 4 months, the nursery has been used as a store all room. If I didn’t know what to do with something it got tossed in there.

    I’ve tossed out a few boxes of garbage already. Gone through many more boxes, and still have some more to do. Amazingly I found a box of checks, so I don’t have to order any more! I knew I had some somewhere.
    My biggest problem is that I’ve begun just moving things from one room to another. Since we put Princess R in the same room with her sisters, we had another “empty” room. So most of the items from here, have been moved to another store all room. One day I’ll have the energy and vision to get it all completely organized.
    Our plans for the nursery are fairly simple. Although the multi-colored walls did grow on us, we will be painting them all the same color – blue.  We purchases some blue curtains for the windows with a gift card my sisters gave us for Christmas. I got some blue argyle bins to store diapers and other baby items.
    One of my favorite traditions, though, is the puzzle. Mark and I pick a puzzle out for each of our kids. We put it together, glue it, and frame it to hang in their room. We are both pretty excited for the baseball puzzle we purchased for this room.  Once the painting it done, we’ll set up a card table in the nursery to get it put together out of the Princesses reach. 
    We still need to find a dresser, and possibly a changing table. I’ve become pretty adept at changing babies on the floor though, so it’s not really a need. I can’t think of anything else we need, but I’m sure once the room starts coming together I’ll be adding more.