This is what the dining room looked like during our 10 year wedding anniversary dinner party (July 2008). It has since then morphed into something a little different.

This is the progression of the dining room:

View from the living room into the dining room

Yes…the carepets were red, there were a million layers of wallpaper, and the walls beneath the plaster were crumbling.

We had to demo one wall in the dining room and fix the plaster on the other two walls. This is a pic of the dining room after we removed the wall on one side (with the lathes). Also on the left of this picture we discovered wood paneling underneath the wallpaper and drywall.

This is what the dining room looked like after we installed the dry wall on the one wall.
This is a picture of my husband while we were putting our first layer of primer on the wall (we put on two layers of primer and two layers of paint).
As you can see in this picture we removed the blood red carpeting and restored the original wood flooring.

You can see the pine doors we installed in this picture. This is the door that leads into the basement.

My room (before)

This is what my room looked like when we bought the house. This is what the room looks like now. This room was an addition to the rest of the house. We thought it was a newer addition but when we started renovating we found wood beams that were really thick and very solid, unlike the newer wood used these days. The wooden beams were covered in faux wood panneling which was then covered in a couple layers of wallpaper. The floor had a really ugly shag carpet. To say this room was hideous is an understatement!

We bought the house on April 30, 2007 and didn’t start doing anything to this room until mid April 2008. I think we were avoiding tackling this room because we couldn’t decide what to do with it. My husband wanted to make the kitchen bigger and I wanted a room for myself. Anyway, the problem was solved because the connecting wall is a load bearing wall which would have made the removal of that wall very expensive…so I got my room! When I was nine months pregnant with Kiran, my husband and my father- in-law demolished the faux wood paneling, removed the carpet and pretty much everything else in the room. Then the original doorway was closed out and they put in the door that opens straight out into the backyard. We had to put drywall up and then my husband installed the wood flooring. Yes it is real wood and I am pretty amazed that he figured out how to lay the wood.

We bought this mantel at a thrift store in Philly. It was love at first sight. We bought it even though we didn’t have a fireplace! (You can see a little bit of the ugly carpet in this picture). This room was used as a storage room while we renovated the rest of the house.

When we bought the house, the upstairs bathroom had pink tiles (!) and looked really dreary. I was told that the tiling in the bathroom was “excellent” and that it would cost a lot to demo the original tiles which were set in cement. So we kept the pink tiles. I decided to go with the pastel theme and we painted the walls a mint green color. While the mint green did liven up the bathroom the color combination looked a little “southbeach-ish” according to my husband. So I added some black and white pictures in black frames to give the room some depth. I bought the layer cake chandelier on ebay for about $30. We painted the ceilings in high gloss paint so the ceiling glistens at night when the light is on.

The bathtub had really ugly doors on it. We recently removed the doors and I installed a shower rod with this fabulous shower curtain (Marimekko print).

This is the linen closet in the bathroom:

I love having a window in the bathroom. This window faces south so the bathroom is always drenched in sunlight. This is a picture of the window sill in the bathroom:

The picture below shows the bathroom after we had painted it but with the shower doors and original light fixture.