I'll be home for Christmas...

Well, we will not really be in our newly renovated home for Christmas, but we stopped by yesterday to check the progress & were quite pleasantly surprised to see that almost the entire interior has been painted! Wow, I tell you, paint makes all the difference in the world! Now we like color in our home, lots of color! Since the living spaces in this home are a little smaller than we have now, we chose to go a bit more neutral in the main areas to give continuity & open the space up visually. As much as I love paint, picking out the colors was a chore...mainly because Jeff & I didn't have a ton of time to sit down uninterrupted & look at swatches. So we basically sat down late one night & picked everything to give to the painters the next day...we were also dealing with only a paint deck & it is hard to choose colors off of a tiny strip of paper! AND we are going with a very different color scheme in this house (more tans, blues & grays) than we currently have (lots of red, browns & orange.) But we are so pleased with how things turned out! We are starting to REALLY get excited about moving & my mind is already spinning planning layouts & organization!

Anyway, I snapped a few photos yesterday of the progress at our new house, so here they are...you can click here to see some of the befores!

Laundry Room: I think this is going to be one of my favorite rooms in the house! Our washer/dryer are charcoal gray, so we chose that color for the cabinets & I love the way they turned out! And I'm super excited about the storage in here because the kitchen has less cabinet space than we have now.

The Kitchen: I want to do an antique glaze finish on the cabinets once we move in. We have also considered painting the lower cabinets a blue color to coordinate with the glass mosaic tile we are using for the backsplash...but we do kind of like them all cream...I am planning to leave some of the uppers with the doors off...at least the ones on the laundry wall (beside the refrigerator space.)

From Living Room into Dining Room...the main color in these rooms is Macadamia (Sherwin Williams) We knew this was a safe bet because we used this color at Jeff's family lake house earlier this year. We had this opening cut between these two long narrow rooms & it brings in so much light, I love it!

From Dining Room back into Living Room: The fireplace brick we painted the same as the kitchen cabinets. We are hoping to use an antique salvaged mantle that my dad has on the fireplace.

Nursery bedroom: A bit of a stronger/brighter color than we have now, but I love the intensity & think it is great for a boy! It also coordinates with our bedding really well.

Girls bedroom: Okay, remember me saying that we sat down late one night to pick ALL of the colors...well, this is the one that didn't quite come out like we expected...I wanted to ever so slightly kick up the intensity of the girls' current pink color, but this room practically glows! We are going to try a linen finish or color wash over it to soften it a bit.

Hall Bathroom: So we had to work with this blue tile because we didn't want to gut the whole bathroom...it will be completely gutted when we add on in a few years, so we hoped to just freshen it up with paint...we chose a chocolate brown for the walls & it looks great...but now the tile looks so tired & sad...we are going to try painting the tile (on the walls, not the shower) to get rid of some of that blue.

Master bedroom...a nice soothing blue, we love it! (It looks brighter in the picture than in person.) We have kind of flip-flopped our current Master color scheme...currently our room is chocolate brown & the bathroom is blue.

Master bath: Chocolate brown with white wainscotting. I've always wanted a bathroom with wainscotting! Too bad this one is 1/3 the size of our current bathroom! But we are thankful!

Jack's bedroom: He picked this blue & I love it! It is a bit darker & almost nautical looking in person. It is painted on the paneling which gives it a cool textured appearance. We are going to do a Surfin' theme for his room & this is the perfect blue for catchin' a wave!

Family Room

Family Room

I guess this would have been the logical place to start, but here is our new front door! Please excuse the shadow of the old storm door outside it...that is going to be removed.

Now because this post wasn't very Christmassy...and really because I've been so horrible about blogging lately, so I must combine posts when I can...here are a few pictures of the cookies from the 5th Annual Christmas Cookie Exchange that I hosted on Friday night! Probably one of the last (or the last?) party I will host in this house! Despite the cold temps & rainy weather, we had a great evening of fellowship & cookies! I'm bummed to say that I didn't get any good photos of the ladies who made these delicious treats, but thank you girls for coming out & sharing in a fun evening!

We are so thankful to have our current home &  that we will get to enjoy one more Christmas in it. It really is a wonderful home & we are so blessed! While we are anxious for this house to sell, we are glad that God has spared us the chaos of packing & moving over Christmas. He is good all the time & all the time, He is good!