Inside...work in progress

I honestly sucked at taking pictures throughout the whole house process, mainly I think because we were so busy trying to get everything (and I mean everything!)  painted before we could move in.   I did find some pictures though to help give an idea of how different it looks now.
Here is the "heart" of the house...the kitchen/dining area. This picture was taken while the previous owners still lived here.  Our offer had been accepted (it was a short sale) and this was our 2nd walkthrough:

As you can see, it was pretty cluttered with ALOT of colors going on.   But we saw good bones in this house....and we were able to overlook all the cosmetic stuff we knew we could change.

Here is the kitchen area on the day we got the keys and went in to start cleaning...

There was alot of random trash left behind...a dishwasher full of dishes, cupboards with dishes...closets with all kinds of miscellaneous debris.   Here was the garage...

We spent an entire day just cleared all the STUFF out of the house.  We opened all the windows and just threw everything along the side of the house knowing we had a few dump runs in our future.  Here is the trash pile we ended up with that evening...(pictures are blurry, not sure why...sorry)

I could go on and on about all the stuff left behind, but it makes me mad when I think about it too much....so at any rate - we cleaned out the house, and the next day we started painting.  And spent the next 3 weeks doing nothing BUT painting.
We have these awesome cathedral ceilings with fabulous big windows....but of course that means we had to paint on an extension ladder.

(see that little patch of mustard/gold?  that's the color that whole wall used to be)
I love color and didn't think I'd want to paint the inside of our house white....but I think we were so happy to get rid of the orange and burgandy and mustard/gold, we ended up choosing a color called swiss coffee, not ultra white, but pretty close to white.
We then chose a greenish color called "green tea" for an accent wall in dining room and carried it over into the kitchen.  And we painted the cabinets a cream color.  We took all the doors off and are in the process of sanding and painting those.  It took FIVE coats of paint to cover that awful orange on those cabinets - but totally worth the work involved. 

SIGH - man, did it feel good to paint over all those colors!   Fresh and clean...out with the old - we covered up the gold!   hahahaa
These pictures were from before we actually moved in - so I will take some updated pictures at some point.

We also ripped up all the carpet and flooring and put in laminate floors to match the wood trim around teh windows in all the living spaces and new carpet in all the bedrooms...

We now have a large area rug in the living room and one in the dining room as well which helps warm things up and taper down the noise level as well.

More to come!