April Fool's

Don't let the title of this blog fool you as I really have nothing to talk about regarding April Fool's Day pranks or anything of the sort.  I'm merely writing about what Ryan and I did yesterday.  Bear with me as this is going to be a long blog as I want to include some long overdue pictures as well. 

I was super lucky yesterday and was able to attend Rockies opening day as KPMG had an extra ticket in their suite and my boss was nice enough to ask me if I would like it.  It was a perfect day for a ballgame and I just happened to be wearing purple!  The Rockies lost but it was great to be out at the ball field on a Friday afternoon.

While I was enjoying the ballgame, Ryan was at home as our new carpet was being installed.  Let me start from the beginning.  We still had the original carpet in the master bedroom and the stairwell and it was atrocious.  In the upstairs guest bedroom we had rubber mats.  Yes, I said rubber mats.  You see, one night when Ryan was talking to me about what he wanted to do with the guest bedroom (when it still had the original carpet in it) and I wasn't really listening I said "Do whatever you want".  He took that and ran with it and when I woke up early the next morning I caught him chucking the ripped up carpet out the window.  He had torn everything up while I was sleeping so he could put rubber mats down to make a workout room.  I have chosen my words with Ryan much more carefully since then.

I don't really have any good pictures of the stairwell and you can see the master carpet in a previous blog.

We had decided we would tear up the the old carpet and move furniture ourselves to keep the cost of installation down.

We had lots of help from the furbabies and I'm pretty sure in the pictures below Ryan is continually saying "Get out!"  The floor under the carpet was disgusting and you can kind of see in the pictures how much dust was in the air.  Thank goodness we got under there and were able to clean it out.

After all the work we did I couldn't wait to see the new carpet!  When I got home last night after the game the carpet did not fail to impress me.  It looks gorgeous!!!  I absolutely love it!  We got different carpet for each of the areas and we're really happy with all three.  Below are pictures of the master, guest, and stairwell in that order.

Here are some pictures of the bedrooms with their furnishings.

I love, love, love the new carpet!  Thanks to Ryan's Dad for helping us pick it out!  If anyone needs new carpet they should talk to Vearl with Carpet Direct.
With the installation of carpet, we are very close to being finished with the main floor upgrades we've been working on since we bought the house four years ago.  I've been meaning to blog about the kitchen which is one of the upgrades that we recently finished after months of working on it.  Here are before pictures of the kitchen and butler's pantry:

 

Pretty much nothing on the main floor of this house had been updated since it was built in 1995.  The stainless steel appliances were put in by us a couple of years ago. The first thing we did (besides putting in appliances) was paint the cabinets black.  Ryan was super nice and let me "help" and waited until I was out of the room to paint over my gloppy, sloppy messes. 

The next steps were to:  install pendant lighting, install granite counter tops, and put up a back splash.  Ryan worked so hard and did a ton of this work himself.  The only thing he didn't do was install the granite.  He did tear up the counter tops for the installers and he found a half eaten hot dog AND bun in the crevices underneath the old counter tops! HAHAHAHA!  It was the funniest (and grossest) thing.  Here are some pictures of when Ryan was installing the back splash.  That was what he was doing one Sunday morning before I woke up.

After all that hard work we have a kitchen that we really love.  Here are pictures of the final product.