New house update- during pics

I went over to the new house today to check up on the progress and move some stuff into the garage. The wall between the dining room and living room is gone and it looks amazing! Kudos to my mom for the idea to take it out. It opens up the space and lets so much more light in. The painters have been there all week. The colors look great! If you remember, the hallway before was a horrible dark green (a nice color but not on a wall). We changed it to a light khaki color and it made such a difference! My mom is doing her room in a light sage green, Bella's is lavender, Riley's will stay white, ours is a light blue, and the rest of the house is varying shades of beige/khaki.

Here are some pics of the way the house looked today when I was there.

Next up, new carpet and new hardwood floors!

The hallway

The kid's bathroom

Bella's room Mom's bedroom

The kitchen

The dining room, minus the wall

Gotta love Photoshop

The last two Thursdays I have spent taking classes on Photoshop. As a photographer, Photoshop is a necessity! It is the best photo editing software around!

I learned a little bit about photoshop in college, and have since taught myself a bit more. But, this class was great! I relearned some tricks and tips I had forgotten and discovered new ones. bThe teacher is a professional photographer out of Tulare, CA. He does a lot of wildlife photography but also does weddings, portraits and product photography. He was a wiz and photoshop. At times he went so fast it was hard to keep up, but I still feel like I walked away from his classes knowing a lot more about photoshop than I did going in! Photoshop can be as easy, or as complex, as you want it to be. For example. I just did a few quick things to each of these photos and it made a world of difference.


What do you think?


Before, SOOC (straight out of camera)












After, see how it pops now and the colors are more defined?
















SOOC


















after adjustments














See what a difference a little photoshop can make to your pictures?

Good House Hunting and the Demo Crew

For those of you who don't know, we have been house hunting for a few months. We decided to combine households with my mom due to her health issues. Our current house had enough bedrooms, but was two story, so it was out. Her current house is not big enough and is in a seniors only development so it, too, was out.

House hunting was fun at times, and frustrating at times. We saw a ton of houses, a few that we really liked and most that were just not up to par. My mom gets the finder's fee for discovering the house we ended up buying. She saw it on the MLS and wanted to go take a look at it. That viewing led to more viewings which led to an offer. We closed escrow and got the keys to the house this past Friday!! We are very excited!

We are getting a lot of work done to the house. Some will be done now before we move in and some, like the landscaping, will be more of a gradual process once we are settled in the house. The first thing we wanted to do was tear out a wall that separated the diningroom from the rest of the livingroom, thereby creating one big "great room". My mom had the great idea of letting the kids go at the wall with hammers, since it would be coming down anyway. We invited our friends, The Climers, to participate with us and needless to say, we all had a blast!! We had 3 hammers and a sledge hammer all attacking the wall at once. We left an utter mess behind us but we got most of the wall down and got a lot of energy out in the process.

Here are the before pics of the house. I will be posting the during and the after shots as well down the road. Keep in mind, these are the BEFORE shots, the house will look much different once we get some work done! We are putting in hardwood floors in the diningroom, livingroom, kitchen and hallway. We are also getting new carpet in the bedrooms and painting the whole house.

And here are a few pics and a video of the kids doing the demo work