My favorite part of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is when they move the bus. I mean, who doesn’t love the look of surprise on everyone’s faces?
Well, we had our own big reveal of our family room remodel at Thanksgiving. We finished with just a couple days to spare. It feels so good to be done with it! So everyone yell with me “Move that bus!” and enjoy these before and after photos:
From the front door:
From the living room:
From the kitchen #1:
From the kitchen #2:
From the family room #1:
From the family room #2:
We absolutely love the new space! I enjoy the extra light that comes through the opening. I love that on Thanksgiving I could watch the Macy’s Day Parade while I was stuck in the kitchen cooking. I love that Alex can be in the family room and I can cook and feel like we aren’t so separated. We love it all!
At one point we thought we’d put french doors in. Logistically, it wasn’t worth it (we would have had to move the door to the garage over to make it all work) and the cost didn’t make sense. We knew we’d have the doors open 90% of the time too, we’d only close them to separate the dogs on occasion, so why bother? Instead, I got smart and bought a gate (and one additional extension to fit it for our opening size). It’s tension mounted, so we can take it down if we want for parties, but it’s great to keep the dogs out of the family room when we aren’t in there to supervise them. I highly recommend this gate for anyone with dogs or kids.
So that’s it! No more drywall dust. No more shop-vac as a furniture piece in the family room. And especially, no more painting or caulking. Give us a couple months though, we’ll find a new project to tackle. (Like, a new door to the garage, new white trim in the rest of the house, or new carpet in the family room since ours has a hole in it where a wall used to be and is a hideous blue… I haven’t thought about it at all though, can you tell?)
Don’t forget to check out how we got to the finish line:
Demolition
Cutting the opening
Drywall
Mudding
Sanding, sanding and more sanding
Painting trim
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