Construction is done! (Sort of)

Phase 1 (of probably 3-5) is done!  Our laundry room remodel turned into a bathroom remodel and we couldn't be happier about it!  We also traded in some paneling for drywall to round out this phase.  Phase 2 will begin hopefully in January with all new doors to match the style we chose for Lily's bathroom as well as updated trim to be completed with new carpet in the living room and all three main floor bedrooms.  Once that's complete, we'll be done on the main floor for the time being.  Sometime down the road we'd like to give the kitchen a face lift - if I wait patiently enough I think I'll  be allowed to even get double ovens!  And someday we'd like to update our master bathroom.  But both those things will be on hold until we do a major renovation on the basement.  And after everything Santa brought Lily, we need that space sooner rather than later.  For more pictures, you can check out my previous post to see the progress.  But as promised...here are the after pictures!

Project: Laundry room
I knew that there had to be a better use of space than what we had going on.

BEFORE

We got rid of the whole house fan and light fixtures and
replaced with can lights

The itty bitty piece of trim you can see on the right
wall is the closet we removed for Lily's bathroom

And the stackable unit just wasn't doing it for us - especially after Lily spilled a cup of milk on our king sized comforter.  So I turned to Pinterest and found hundreds of ideas.  I showed these two photos to our contractors and said "HELP!"

I fell in love with this countertop.  Mike wasn't sold but now he is :)

I needed to regain storage with the loss of this closet.
Cupboards and a hanging bar were a must.

From those two visions we turned that dark and dreary hallway into our fabulous new laundry space! I literally snapped this picture the second the guys had put everything back together.  It hasn't looked this clean since :)

Project: Lily's bathroom

The Sparty bathroom ended up green after all.  From day one I despised that bathroom and now it's the only room in the whole house that's actually "done".  I'm so pleased with the way it turned out and Lily loves it too.  And even though we took out a closet to add the bathtub, I ended up with a new closet off the entry from the garage where the old stall shower was in the corner.  We were also able to put in a pocket door which is a huge space saver AND the guys were able to move the door opening so we could put a larger vanity in.  

Project: Good-bye paneling

The after picture I have of the living room really doesn't do it justice but the sun is shining so much today that the light looks bad no matter where I stand.  I cannot believe how much larger the room looks after taking down the paneling.  It's amazing.  The last thing we have to do here is decide whether we can salvage the fireplace.  The wood paneling over the bring was glued on and unfortunately it's not coming off.  Even if we decided to paint it, we'd still see the chunks of glue.