well, i guess this is the "worse" before the better

Home renovation. What were we thinking? Tearing up our house in the middle of the school year, leaving us with only three usable rooms, one of which is the bathroom... We must be out of our minds. And yet that is exactly what we have done.

(For the record, I'm writing this post in our bedroom. Not the bathroom. The other option would be the kitchen, but even that is pretty much a disaster at the moment.)

And what, you may ask, is the project?

1. Bedrooms: Our house is (well, was) a 3-bedroom house, but the third bedroom is really only useful as an office because it is located directly off of the living room. In addition, all of the bedrooms are quite small. There is no way to fit a queen bed into any of them without one of us having to climb over the other one to get in and out of bed. So we are going from a 3-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom house by removing the wall between two of the existing bedrooms. Instead of having 2 small bedrooms plus an office, we will have a small bedroom, an awesome master bedroom, and office space in the basement....

2. Basement: Our house has a full basement, half of which was finished by the previous owners. However, this finished half was not particularly useable. The carpet had been water-damaged, and as a result a large chunk of it was cut out several years ago. And the carpet that remained was not exactly the kind of thing you'd want to spend a lot of time sitting on. Yuck. In addition, there was a closet under the stairs that was prone to growing mildew, an oversized (and ugly) cabinet disguising some sort of water pipe in one corner, a broken ceiling light, etc... So the project is to make this finished half into a useful space. Right now the plan is for it to function as a family room, an office space (in that we will put a desk down there), and a secondary kitchen storage space. (Small kitchen/eating area = not much storage, so we keep some of the less-frequently-used things, Costco purchases, etc. downstairs.)

Do I have pictures, you ask? But of course!

We've had to move a few pieces of furniture to the garage. Sorry, bikes! 

This is our living room. Sigh...

The kitchen - one of our livable rooms. (No, really.)

Looking from the hallway into our new master bedroom.

Our new closets!

This is where the office closet used to be. 

This was the door to the office/3rd bedroom. It's ready for drywall!

What, doesn't everyone keep their dresser in the hallway?
For the record, yes, we can both squeeze past that to get to the bathroom. 

The kitchen again.
As long as we don't want to use any of the pots and pans in that cupboard, we're fine....

New and improved basement stairwell! There used to be a solid wall to the right,
additional walls surrounding the landing, and a door into the finished area. All gone!!

Ta-da! Our amazing open basement entry. Note our auxiliary kitchen storage on the left. 

This used to be a mildewy closet. No more! It's ready for drywall. Sweet.

OK, so... There you have it! In a week or two the drywall guy will be here, and then it's on to the painting, flooring, and finishing. It will be worth it in the end, right?!?!