Home Improvements

We have lived in our new house for a little over a year now and we have made quite a few improvements to it since we moved in. You know what they say though, the projects never end as a homeowner. Tyler and I have a list of more projects we want to do within the next year. I thought for this blog post I would give a little before and after of some of our projects. Again, this is probably a boring post to most of you, but I blog for my family and this is one of the things I want us to look back on.

One of the things we loved about this house was the backyard, but one of the things we hated about this house was the backyard. It has so much potential, but it needs so much work. Here's a little before of it.

 We knew the first thing we wanted to do was to have a big patio. Tyler spent weeks designing it and then he and his dad spent weeks forming it. I was so impressed at their work ethic. They would work for 12 hours+ just to get it ready. Here's their forming job...

One of the guys who came to help us said that this was the best forming job he had seen from people who didn't do it for a living.

We ended up having to do the whole patio in two pours.



And here's the finished stairs

They look so good here and they weren't even finished yet.

They had to put this special powder on the patio for it to get to the color we wanted, and we had to leave it on for a week. It was very tempting for a certian toddler to not step on it. We ended up finding a lot of these...

So cute!!!

And now the moment you've all been waiting for... Our completed patio!!

and the side lot...

I don't mean to gush about Tyler too much, but he is pretty amazing! I know everytime he does a project it is perfect. We love our new patio; it is so fun to sit out there and look at the view of the mountains.Oh my gosh, you guys... look at the view (sorry, inside joke). Thanks Tyler for working so hard this summer to make our patio AMAZING!!!

Tyler also painted the back fence. Here's the before.

And the after...

We have also added about 6 new trees to the back yard. Here's the before...

And the after with two of our new maple trees...

Our yard has improved, but it still needs some work, but that will have to wait until next spring.

Not only have we improved the back yard, we have done some projects in the house.

I think I have already blogged about this, but we turned the spare upstairs bedroom into Caden's room. Here's the before picture that I took about a year ago. That's Makayla in the picture. So weird to think that Caden is about the same age.

And here's the after with Caden...

We got new couches in our family room. Here's the before...

And the after...

This isn't that new, but I like to see how my favorite wall has changed with new pictures of the babies.

After...

We moved our leather couches downstairs. Here's the before...

And the after...

We got a new playing card table... Have we played cards on it yet? Nope.  Here's the before...

And the after...

And finally we transformed our computer room/ work out room into a full fledged gym. Here's the before...

And the after...

Whlep, I think that's all the home improvements for this year. It's been a lot of work for Tyler, so I've given him permission to take a few months off before we start our winter projects!!