Before and After aka "I've Reached New Levels of Boring"

Before I bore you with baby pictures next week (next week!!), I thought I would do a few "before and after" pictures of our house since Hurricane Ike and the Giant Tree smashed into it 6 months ago.

Here is our master bathroom September 14, 2008:

Here is our master bathroom now:

The cabinets, countertops, carpet, and of course, shower have been replaced. Hot Brandon finished the shower last night, and it is awesome. It's 9 feet long, and 4 feet wide with an open walk-in doorway to the left of the above picture. (And that towel hanging there is more of a mossy green, not the weird lime color it appears here.) We're going to put some hooks in that back wall to hang towels on.

Here is the inside of the shower, taken from the back corner near the doorway. The floor is the small-tile slate. I'm so proud of my handy hubby and how hard he worked to finish this giant project. It took a lot more time than I think either of us anticipated. He has been working on it every spare minute for the last 3 weeks.

By the way, I feel like the lamest person on the planet for posting random pictures of the interior of our house. So boring. But it's so nice to be back in our house. And some of these pictures are weird angles so that I wouldn't have to clean too much before I took the pictures. :)

In addition to a major bathroom remodel, our kitchen also got a pretty good facelift. New cabinets, countertops, sink, and table. This is a random shot of our kitchen countertops after the storm. You can kind of see the cabinets there in the corner:

Here's our new cabinets (LOVE them) and countertops now. The wall color is the same as it was before, as is most of the paint color in our house. I didn't want to have to make a lot of paint decisions, and I was pretty happy with a lot of the colors that were on the wall before.

No "before" pictures exist of the nasty living room carpet we used to have. Let me paint you a mental image: Picture a tire-and-lube garage. Now, imagine that they had white carpet inside of the work area that had been there for several years, and several hundred cars had their oil changed over this carpet. Then someone decided to rip this carpet out of the garage and put it in someone's house. This is what was in our living room and downstairs office area.

Now, we have this pretty fake-wood floor, and I absolutely love it. The boys have learned not to run in their socks, and have bitten the dust more than a few times. Again, sorry about the weird angle of this picture. Please note Aidan's new toothbrush there on the red rug.

I don't have a "before" picture of the baby's room, either. Picture walls that were supposed to be tan, but were in reality more of an olive-green color (I should never be allowed to select paint color). Picture a college intern living in the room for the summer, and lots of computer equipment, music stuff, and a guitar.

I don't have a picture of the entire room, I've still got some organizing to do. My mother-in-law made the crib bedding (bumper coming soon), and I absolutely love it. The walls are post-it yellow, and there's a lot of green accents in the room, like this super-fuzzy rug on the floor by the crib. The crib sheet is brown with tiny little polka-dots, and the curtain is the same as the dust ruffle.

Here's the diaper hanger, which shows the prints a bit better:

Most of our other rooms that were repaired look pretty much the same as before. And some other things have not changed in our house at all.

Like this:

Quite possibly my favorite picture of my house.