It's Like Having A New House!

So what's a girl to do on a long weekend when her husband is due home practically any day now? Clean the house?

Sure.

Go shopping for a few things to spruce the house up?

Sounds pretty good.

Completely revamp the entire first floor of the house?

You betcha!

As of late the idea of moving rooms around on the first floor of our house has been tossed around. Or rather, several family members have been (strongly) suggesting that I should move the rooms around to make everything more user friendly.

Well, after some hemming and hawing and bribery, I decided to take the advice. Since Stonewall is expected home very very very soon I spent this extended holiday weekend getting the house ready for him.

Do wanna see the photos? Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?

You know you do. And you know I want to show everything off. (I meant to take "Before" pics, but I forgot, so here are the "Afters".)

This is now the dining room. It used to be the living room. As you will see in the new living room photos, our furniture is kinda big, so it seriously overwhelmed this space. The curtains will be moved to the new living room. I never had curtains in the dining room, so I'll be getting those eventually. (Actually, I have a curtain problem, but that's a whole other post.) I also need to move the dining room light into this room.

The best part though, sometime within the very near future (as I stated, I can be bought) we are putting in a breakfast bar! We will be cutting a hole in the wall where the giant framed picture is in photo 2, adding a counter top and some bar stools. Our kitchen is on the other side of the wall, so it will create a nice open feeling between the dining room and kitchen. Yay!

This is the new living room. It used to be, well, it wasn't really anything. When we first moved in we called this the Library because we had grand hopes of building bookshelves on all available wall space. This past Christmas we called it the Tree room because this is where we put our Christmas tree. This room is also called the Fireplace room because as you can see there is a fireplace in this room. Once Lil' Mootz was born I had a fabulous idea of turning this room into a reading/playroom. However, through it all, though it never was officially titled this, this room has been the ever impressive Storage room.

I'm not sure why it took us two years to figure out that this should be the living room, but we're not always the brightest crayons in the box.

As you can see, huge furniture, but it really fits this room nicely. Sometime this week we'll also be moving the TV in here and hanging it above the fireplace. However, that includes some fancy electrical work, so I have to wait for the pros because I don't want to die by electrocution or burn my house down.

Once upon a time we were also going to paint this room (notice the blue outline around thw windows and fireplace). That never happened though. I've super excited though because I have been promised that it will be painted ASAP! Now I just have to figure out what color I want to go with.

And finally, my favorite new room!

Lil' Mootz's playroom! This was previously the dining room. You can kinda see in the third living room picture how the two rooms are attached, so Stonewall and I can be lounging in front of the TV and Lil' Mootz can be playing contently with his toys and we can easily keep an eye on him. I am just so excited for him to finally have a space where he can spread his toys out and crawl, crawl, crawl to his little heart's content.

I'm also super LOVING the floor. I bought four of those rubber ABC block mats that they sell at Toys R Us and I just stuck them all together to create a mat that would fit the entire room. It's cushy enough that if he falls he won't whack his head (too hard) and it's so much easier to clean than carpet.

Quite the improvement, huh?!

I guess you can't really tell since you didn't know what it looked like before, but trust me. HUGE improvement.  Stonewall is going to love it!