For almost three years Josh and I have been living through extensive home renovations.  Trying to raise our boys in the midst of the chaos and change has been… trying.  I’d love to share a bit of our journey with you as I highlight some pictures and memories from Our Home Renovation Saga.

The playroom used to be a kitchen/dining room when we rented it out for about four years.

 

 

 

 

Here’s Josh taking apart the old kitchen cupboards.  Don’t you just love the flooring?  I didn’t mind it actually, but Josh wasn’t going for it!  I’m into character and charm and old stuff – he’s into new and contemporary.  Our house is a pretty good mix of both those styles.

 

 

 

 

Now we could start demolishing.

We discovered there must have been a fire in the upstairs kitchen!

Here’s the old kitchen gutted – there was some R7 – R10 insulation in a few of the walls and we discovered this part of the house must have been a small addition.

 

 

 

Starting to add vapour barrier to the ceilings so that when the insulation is blown into the attic we won’t get a ton of mess!

 

This picture was taken early in the morning on the day we were leaving for our family vacation.  We’d been up every night until after midnight leading up to this morning.  Josh was going on 4 hours sleep in this photo – we had to get it done before we left since the drywallers were coming in to do the entire upper floor while we were away for 2 weeks!

 

Josh framed in a big closet for the playroom to store toys, linens and odds and ends.

The playroom was our main living space during the renovations of the main floor.  We cooked, ate, chilled out and spent alot of time together in this one big room.

Here we are using it for storage during the fall of 2010.  At this point, the rest of the upper floor was getting the flooring and trim finished and we were living downstairs for a couple of months.

 

And here’s the finished product – the playroom is fully trimmed and the closet is done.  These pictures are all very realistic – we clean this up about once a week unless visitors are coming over!

 

The table Josh built for Elijah has found a new home in the playroom instead of in his room.  His room is somewhat small so we fit some other treasures in there and kept the table as a focus point for the playroom.   We added a tiny couch under the window.  This space is really coming together!

Here’s the playroom as you walk up the stairs and into it – heading down to the bedrooms.  Notice the box?  The boys LOVED all the boxes they got to play in during the renovations!

That’s it for now folks!  I hope you enjoyed this walk through our home renovations.  It’s been really good for me to write about it, put the pictures together and process it all this way with you.  I think I’ll put all these posts together, along with some photos, and make a journal of it that we can look back to whenever we need a reminder of why we did all that work in the first place!