Before and After: Landscape

I have to say, my husband was more excited about this project than I was.  Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled we did it, but he was about to crawl out of his skin he was so excited.  It certainly does kick up the curb appeal a notch! 

After living in this house for 3 years, we finally bit the bullet and signed on the dotted line.  A new paved driveway!  You'll see from the before picture that this was much needed!  Not to mention we were the last on the block that had not done it yet.

Before

See what I mean?  Pretty bad.  We had widened the driveway about 3 feet over the years and the gravel was pretty sparse.

After

I really am blown away at how different it makes our yard look.  The whole process took only about 4 hours which is absolutely amazing to me!  My husband is working on aerating, seeding, mulching and planting fall flowers now, so I will share the final look once he is done.  We're coming right along!

Master Bath Reno: Before and After

In my previous posts I have told you about the 2 weekend bathroom renovations I did with my brother and sister-in-law.  I have shown you the before and after photos of the guest bath, now onto the master! 

This bathroom is teeeny tiny!  We were able to get this one done a little quicker than the first one.  It still took all weekend long because you have to wait for tile adhesive and grout to dry before other steps can be taken, but it was not as many late nights which was nice.

Without further ado, here are the before shots:

Did I mention it was small?!  It's hard to get a good shot in such a tight space, but you get the idea. 

So what we did was rip everything out:  the linoleum floor, the old vanity, cove base moulding, toilet, etc.  I took a few shots of the process we went through in the bathroom.

Once everything was out, the first step was to patch walls.

Next we laid Durock cement board.

In case you were wondering, this is where the toilet goes during the whole process!  ;)  After laying the durock we painted the walls.  We called it a night and the next morning began tiling.

We picked a dark tile in both bathrooms because they have 2 very large dogs which means lots of pet hair!  They wanted something that wouldn't show every bit of dog hair every second of the day.

The walls are Ben Moore "canvas".  Since it is such a small bathroom, my sister-in-law asked for a light color.  She also wanted to keep her current shower curtain but didn't want to pull any of the actual colors in the curtain out for the walls.  So neutral it was!

Once the tile was done drying we grouted and after that dried it was time to start bringing everything back in and putting the bathroom back together.

She already had antique bronze fixtures(vanity light, mirror, towel bar) so we kept with that look and changed out the knobs on the vanity to match and added the goose neck faucet. 

We also installed new mouldings around the base.

After installing the toilet, hanging the mirror, shower rod, and towel bar, we were done! 

NOTE:  The over the toilet shelving is already gone!  I told my sister-in-law it did not work in there and she agreed once she put it back in that it had to be replaced with something a little more stylish!  So please don't think that was a design decision to have it in there! ;)

So there you have it!  Our master bath renovation is complete!  This one came in around $600!  I'm happy with the way it turned out.  It's stylish, yet neutral enough to appeal to a large variety of buyers.  If I get pictures of the bathroom without the ugly toilet shelf I will share them with you! :)

Once again, most major items were found at Lowe's.