Dining Room Upgrades

Here is a before picture, before we did anything in the dining room:

Beautiful Pink, with a very classy light fixture.
For the longest time, this light stayed. We painted, refinished the floors and started adding furniture. The Black dresser in this room was a "free" piece. It was a yellow kids dresser that I painted black and added new hardware.
Here's a view from the kitchen.

We finally got a new light! I got it on sale at Lowes for $22! I waited so long to get something, because i didn't want to spend 100s of dollars on this. This isn't exactly what I wanted, but the price was right.

In the same Lowes purchase, I got the light for the front of the house, online, free shipping!

Bedrooms!

A while back, this is what Our bedroom looked like. Unfortunately, our antique bed frame broke, so we slept on the mattress on the floor for a little while. We upgraded to a Queen size bed and it is awesome!
I've started hanging things on the walls, slowly, around the house. Picture of daisies with I love you, I love you not picture from my parents for our 1 year anniversary is hanging on the wall over my jewelry storage. A picture from our wedding is on my nightstand.

We have the poster the Tober girls made for our wedding in a frame.
Our new bed! We just bought a bed frame too, updates later.
The upstairs spare bedroom, formerly known as the purple room, isn't much different. Still has the weird door, ugly ceiling fan and no heat. But it doesn't get used that much, except for the closet space and the dresser, for Matt's clothes. Maybe if we had more visitors we would make more of an effort in here.
Bed in upstairs spare room.
Downstairs spare bedroom. I have tons of pictures that need to be hung up, including the picture of the golden gate bridge that Matt and I got on our trip to San Fran in March.
This is the room where Rosco's crate is for now.

We really haven't done much more work to these rooms, just acquiring more "stuff."

Living Room

Not too long ago, the living room looked like this:
With wrinkly curtains and white sheers in the window seat. And a really uncomfortable futon. We recently rearranged the furniture, got some new bamboo blinds for the front window and a carpet. The pup loves the carpet.

The blinds make it look so much cleaner.
We got a different couch to replace the futon too. Its not the prettiest, but its comfy and it will do for now.
We got this carpet from some friends that were moving. It doesn't fit quite perfectly, but it does the job, its protecting the floors and Rosco likes having a big carpet to lay on. I'd eventually like to get a 8x8 square rug that fits here.

Curb Appeal

I don't really have any more updated pictures of the front of the house, since I don't really take them that often, and we haven't done much to improve curb appeal, but we recently did a couple things to spruce up the front.I have always hated the aluminum awning over the front door. I think it dates the house and is not needed. Its hard to see it from the straight on view, but you can kind of see it in this pic with my mom watering the garden from last summer.
Well, its allllll gone. After less than an hour, Matt had the awning off, and was ready to power wash the house.

We also got a new light fixture, mail box and house numbers. These pictures were taken at night, but at least it shows the new light fixture.

I'll take some more, when its daylight, so you can see the new bamboo blinds instead of the ugly white sheers in the window.

The Basement

Started work on the basement a while ago. Here's a really dark BEFORE picture:

Ripped out the old paneling and ceiling
Painted the walls white with paint that seals them. Dad and I got a little loopy from the fumes.

Another view

Starting to paint the floor.

And this is what it looks like now, complete with Tina's sewing machine.
The other side of the basement stairs.


Some areas still need some work, the laundry space.
Still have the red & green plaid carpet on the stairs.Still have some paneling to finish, painting the rest of the floor, organizing the storage area, etc. But its much more clean down there now :)

Over a year in review!

So much has happened since I last posted over a year ago. I am really bad at keeping up with this, but I had some excuses, such as getting married! Here's a little taste of what has been going on...

Scotty graduated from Alfred University. He's a College Graduate now & he looks so happy.
We went to visit Matt's family for Matthew's 1st birthday party.
Lorelei (6 months) & Matthew (1yr.)
We got married on the most beautiful day in September, 9/12/09!
All the professional pics can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kawunsch/WeddingProPics#
We went to Aruba for our honeymoon & went on an ATV tour of the island and a Snorkeling tour.
We got a puppy a couple days before Thanksgiving from the Smilin Pit Bull Rescue. His name was Finley, but we named him Rosco. He has tons of energy.
Matty & Lauren got married in Baton Rouge, LA on 12/5/09. They had an awesome grooms cake & we got to see lots of friends.
For New Years Eve, we went to 2 parties.
During the holidays, visited with friends :)
I had to go to San Francisco for a conference in March. Matt joined me and we did some sight seeing in Palo Alto, San Francisco & went on a wine tour in Napa Valley. This picture is along the coast, it was pretty chilly.

In May we went back to Syracuse for the 40th Anniversary of the Rugby team. Got to see lots of former teammates and friends & played some rugby in prom dresses.
For the 4th of July we went to visit our friends Michelle and Grizz in Boston.
In August we took our Annual trip to Saranac Lake for the Rugby Tournament. These are some of the guys Matt played with on the Syracuse Alumni team.
We took Rosco and went camping with Sue, Chris, Lorelei, Natalie, Ben, Jeanetta & Kevin. We took a trip to the Renaissance festival.
To celebrate our 1 year wedding anniversary, we were planning on going camping, but the weather didn't cooperate. We went to Akron park for a little while until it rained on us. We celebrated a week early, since we were both going to be away the next weekend for rugby. The wedding cake was still delicious after we thawed it.
On Labor day weekend, I broke my jaw in 3 places after I fell off my bike. I had my jaw wired shut for 4 weeks. The wires are off now and I am almost completely healed.
Since I was out for rugby season, I was home for our actual anniversary. We headed up to Beaver Island (where our reception was) to walk around and do some off leash stuff with Rosco since the park is closed for the season.

I had signed up to do the Warrior Dash in March, so I still went (9/18/10) but didn't participate in the race. I am looking forward to it next year. We camped in the Catskills and the rest of the group ran the 3.23 miles and did the obstacle course.

I was really excited right before I got my wires clipped and I could start to eat solid food again.
We recently went to Octoberfest in Ellicottville and rode the ski lift up to the top of one of the slopes at Holiday Valley. The leaves were all changing and the weather was beautiful!
The wires are completely off now and back to eating a regular diet.
For Halloween we dressed Rosco up as a banana.
And we dressed up as lawn gnomes!

So that has been the past year plus a couple months. I am going to try to be better about updating more often. I will post soon with updates that we have done recently on the house.

xoxo
Kristin