A doorway you can't use???

Things have been pretty crazy since B has been back in the country. I have had to be much more thrifty in my projects because our income has shrunk considerably(worth it to have him home). So the projects have slowed a bit but the ones we have done are amazing!

Lets start with the popcorn ceilings!!! Sooo ugly!!! But so nice now! We spent days(weeks) sanding and compounding and sanding and compounding and sanding and and and oh man it was a lot of work to smooth out the ceiling. Ill admit, though, it was only one part at a time with a day or two in between. Our living room had so much dust in it that I had to vacuum our couches, then run a swiffer over them, and THEN wipe them down with a wet cloth. We tried covering them but it didn't always work. Anyway, Id include pictures but its just a boring old ceiling and I'm sure you'll catch glimpses of it in the next projects picture bank.

Next we got rid of those awful looking doorways we had...
As you can see there are big modern walk through openings that we normally use. Next to them, however, are the remnants of old doorways. Real doorways... minus the doors. Who, might you ask, would modernize a house by making big grand openings next to old doorways and then neglect to close up those old openings? A crazy person, that's who! We have been wanting to fix this for every minute of every day of the three years we have owned this house. We finally got around to doing it! (So for three years we were the crazy people)
The two openings are referred to as the kitchen opening and the hallway opening. So we did the hallway opening first, and I would totally post an "after" picture but I didn't get one before we started in on retiling the hallway... Suuuuper messy!!

But anyway, we ended up working with an architecture to make sure our house was not going to fall down when we closed up the openings and made the hallway opening a little wider.

The pictures at the bottom are the "after" pictures for the kitchen opening and on the other side of that wall we put in that custom shelving unit instead of closing it completely!

The Front Door

The front door.

It is the doorway to your own little piece of heaven on earth... sometimes.

The Old Door

NEW door!

When we moved back into our house after being gone for over a year, the front door was sticking. It was getting harder and harder to open. I decided to walk to the Library one afternoon. After I pushed the garage door button and made a mad dash to slide under before the door closed, I realized it was FREEZING outside. Because the garage door opener was in my car... in the garage... I tried to get in through the front door. I knew the door was sticky, so when it didn't open right away I shoved it with my hip. My "hip check" was apparently a little beefier than I had intended because along with the door, part of the frame opened too. I completely destroyed the whole right side of the door frame. All this for a Jacket??

Fire Alarm Doorbell

Caulked the seams.

All I could think about is how excited Brandon would be, because he had wanted to replace the door for weeks and I had put it off saying we didn't 'need' to. By the end of the day, however, the deed was done and we had a new door.

We had to caulk and shim and level and screw and tap and foam this stinking door before it fit right. The door came with wonderful instructions which made the whole process much easier.After it was done, i caulked the outside so everything looked even and smooth. Always wear gloves... its super messy. I think i wen through an entire roll of paper towels.

The whole door frame still needs a coat of paint since the raw caulking collects dirt like none other!

-S