October 8, 2012

  No new picture today, but here's one from October 2006. 

This is a picture taken of us in front of our house in Michigan.  We loved that house.  It wasn't new or big or particularly nice when we bought it.  But after painting every room in the house except the laundry room and adding other updates, we were quite happy with it.  Before we left I wanted to take a picture of every room to remember what it looked like. (Somehow I missed the girls' room.)  If you're not interested in seeing a bunch of empty rooms, skip the rest of this post.  But I love to see other people's houses.

This is the front door and foyer.  To the right are three stairs up to the bedrooms and to the left is the living room.  The door right by the front door leads to the basement.  There was terrible linoleum in this foyer when we first moved in, only to be made worse by the raccoon who pulled up pieces of it by the window, trying to get out.  We did this tile ourselves, and I must say it's the best home-improvement project we've ever completed. 

 Living room.  We used the back part, which is supposed to be a formal dining room, for a computer area.  The door on the left, behind the table lamp, leads to the kitchen.

 

This is the family room, right through the foyer area.  And that's the lock on the fireplace doors to keep raccoons out.

The kitchen and dining room.  The door on the right goes to the living room and the glass doors on the left go out to the patio.  In the back is the laundry room.

 Laundry room.  The door at the back is a half bath that I probably only used 2 or 3 times the whole time we lived here.  To the right is a door that leads into the garage.

 

Stairs and hallway leading up from the foyer.  The door on the left is a bathroom.  The first door on the right is the girls' room, the second door is the boys' room and the door straight back is the master bedroom.

 This hall bathroom was the first room we redid.  It had some terrible wallpaper and tiny white tile.  Everytime I cleaned it, I felt like I was only releasing the pee smell even more.  So we tore it up and never looked back.

The boys' bedroom.  Erik still morns leaving this room behind. 

Master bedroom.  There is also a master bathroom off to the left.

Basement playroom/craftroom/guestroom.  When we moved in, this room had dark paneling on the walls and one lone light fixture.  Jeff's dad helped add more lighting and we painted the paneling--an awful bright yellow color.  I can only attribute my lapse in judgment of picking that color to being pregnant.  In fact I went into labor with Ryan while painting.  My neighbor came over to watch the other kids while we went to the hospital and I can only imagine her reaction to the color we were painting.  A couple years later we repainted it.

 Back patio

 

Hours and hours were spent on this swingset that came with the house.  My neighbor, whose yard you see behind the set, told me when we moved that she was going to make her husband put up a fence so she wouldn't have to look at the empty swing set.  That still makes me cry. 

Front of the house.  These flowers never looked better than the few weeks before we moved. 

This picture was taken of us on our last day in Michigan, just as we were getting into the car to drive away.  Leaving that place was about the hardest thing I've ever done.