[celstu1]

My bro needs some work!!! LOL I don't know how far he'd travel for it though!

He's a civil engineer, so you'd be getting a pretty good and trained laborer for sure! I'm very thrilled so far!!! We've got a long ways to go for sure...

Once the Cabinets are finished, the counter tops in, the electric updated and fixed, the back splash in, and the tile floor installed, then we can breathe a sigh of relief... we won't be done at all because we'll still need to paint, hang curtains, spray the heaters with white rustoleum to make them white and non-rusted looking, install the waines coating around the island, some baseboard around the island, some crown molding around the top of the cabinets.. theres probably always going to be little things to do, but I hope the bulk is done within a month or so we can use our kitchen again. Its going to be soooo amazing!!!

Our house is about 60 years old and it looks it. My husbands parents owned it for about 10 years before my husband bought it. They did some maintenance to it, but no real updating to it. They put in all new flooring which we are taking out now because it's almost 15 years old now and needs to come out. They did a major overhaul on the inground pool and they enclosed 2 back porches and other random things, new windows in some of the house, new siding. This house is REALLY a fixer upper. Everything in the house was well maintained (or should I say preserved? LOL) but it really really needs updating. To date, in the 5 years my husband has owned it we have done sooo much to it. And we are pretty proud we have no debt from it. We limit our projects and know that its going to take many years of constant renovations to get it up to par. We try to take summers off so we can enjoy the 3 months without a large project pressing on it.

So far we have:
- put a large cut out window between the kitchen and living room to let more light into the kitchen
- put all stainless steel appliances in the kitchen
- completely gutted the master bath and main bath and made the master bath big enough to fit a tub (used to only have a shower) and the main bath smaller (it was huge!) both were completely remodeled and rebuilt.
- Screened in the porch off the side of the house to make a nice area for dining on summer nights or hanging out where we can be outside w/o getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes.
- Replaced all the ceiling fans in the house since they were saggy.
- Painted over the dark paneling in the hallway and going down the basement stairs to brighten it up
- replaced the living room floors with laminate wood flooring instead of carpet
- Put a whole house water softening/filtration system in
- Built stairs going from the driveway area down to the pool area so people didn't have to go all the way around the fence to the gate.
- not to mention we've just about painted every room over again lighter and brighter

This year after we finish the kitchen, I want to replace the basement stairs with hardwood stairs since now they are carpeted and the carpet is gross looking, and I want to put a laminate floor in our bedroom and get rid of the carpet that the dogs have ruined.