We are homeowners!

So I know it has been a looonnngg time since I've blogged. That is mainly due to the fact the we recently bought a house! It has been keeping us pretty busy. When we first bought it, we were spending every free second of our time there working on it. We got an amazing deal on it because it was a foreclosure. Surprisingly it was in great shape for being a foreclosure. We took on a few big projects before we moved in. We wanted to replace the floors and refinish the kitchen cabinets. We did everything ourselves in order to save money. At one point we calculated that we saved over $3,000 dollars by using our own blood, sweat and tears instead of paying someone to do it for us! Here are a few pictures. I don't have any really good "after" pictures yet because there are still some small projects we are working on. I will try to post those pics as soon as we are finished with those projects.

We are proud and excited homeowners!

Here is the "before" of the kitchen.

This is the view from the kitchen looking into the living room. 

Here is an up close view of the old scratched cabinets. 

This is pretty much my favorite part of the whole house....this huge pantry!!!

Sorry...this isn't a very good pic. This is the view from the living room to the dining area.  

Here is the nice big living room! 

Here is our entryway from the front door. 

Even though the floors were all in good shape, we decided to replace the living, dining, and kitchen floors with a wood laminate. We could not afford to completely redo the kitchen, so we decided to give the cabinets a facelift. Both of these projects turned out to be ALOT of work. Philip did the floors all by himself and I did the cabinets. Even though it was a lot of work, we love how it turned out. 

After sanding all the cabinets, I never want to sand anything again!  

 Removing the tile was quite a chore!

Wood floors getting installed! 

Philip worked so hard on these. 

I also found a great desk at a thrift store that I wanted to refinish. I also refinished a filing cabinet, but I don't like how it turned out as much so I'm not including pictures of that. 

 Here is the before. There were lots of scratches on the top and the hardware was completely rusted. 

More sanding!  

Here is the finished product. I don't think the picture does it justice! It looks much better in person.

We have really enjoyed being homeowners and feel very blessed to be at this point in our lives. We have a never-ending list of projects, but I guess that is just part of owning a home! Our next big project will be tackling the yard and trying to make it look presentable!