Before and After...

What better way to show the progress of something (and all the hard work it took to get there!) than before and after photos?

I absolutely adore before and afters. One of the design/DIY blogs I read, I read partly because of their awesome before and afters (of rooms or furniture) (but also because of their great DIY projects and the sneak peaks they offer into other 'designy' homes, sometimes a little too 'designy', but still neat.)

Well, I may have mentioned on here before that Ike and I are renovating an old (built in 1910) house. It is really about a 10 year project with all the ideas we have of what we want it to be. We didn't even live in it the first five months we owned it so that we could get the upstairs done before we moved in (the downstairs, with the exception of the kitchen, hasn't even been touched). Of course we didn't spend five months just adding a few coats of paint and a spruce up here and there. Oh no. Countless things were done like rewiring, re-mudding the walls, redoing the floors, building new closets (whose trim matches the original trim because Ike is an artist!), sanding EVERYTHING, etc.

And lucky for me, I took before photos and after photos, and it really is astounding what a great job my sweetheart did (with a little help from me!) I can't wait to see what the rest of the house will look like! So here are our before and afters (with little explanations where needed). Oh, and before you even ask, NO, none of our ideas came from pintrest (since this is a happiness blog, I will refrain from venting about pintrest).

This is our little back porch.

My niece said, "Wow, that is a small garage." I replied, "It's not our garage, it's our back porch." She said, "Well, it smells like a garage."

Ike just built me this little gardening bench out of wood we found in an old building outside of town.

This is the upstairs hallway looking North. No art up here, yet.

The upstairs hallway looking South to the little reading nook.

My favorite part of the whole house, our little reading nook.

We had stripped off the wall paper and decided to leave it as an homage to the history of the house.

I've already spent a few rainy days curled up with a good book!

This is technically the guest bedroom, but we are using it as our living room/guest bedroom.

The actual living room downstairs is our spray room/work room right now.

We tore out the closet and Ike built a new one. We found the doors for it down in the basement, they were original to the house.

We had sanded them down and decided to leave them like that.

This is our bedroom. We love having so much natural light streaming in.

We tore out the little closet and made the entire North wall into a closet.

We lucked out and found these doors at Te-La-Re, here in town. They matched the house's original doors.

Ike built the closets to exactly match the original trim of the house.

Eventually we will renovate the kitchen. Ike wanted to leave it alone, but I had to get rid of that blue paint!

So proud of my find. We got the refrigerator for $9. It works great! Just had to be cleaned up. Suckers!

I also wanted to share a few of my favorite little thing in the kitchen...

These wine boxes work perfectly as shelves for our cook books.

We attached these bread tins to the cabinet to hold all of our fruit.

My dad made this trash receptacle for us. It is made entirely out of materials from the old barn that stood at my parents' house.

Last year, a tornado knocked it to the ground, so my dad salvaged as much wood and hardware as he could.

Even the nails he used to build it are originals from the barn.

It is a really special piece. I loved that old barn.

Anyway, that is a little peak into our home....before and after. I won't even show you the rest of the house because it is all before!

I'll show you the rest of the 'afters' when I have them...in 10 years!