The Good Life

Okay so here we go. I'm gonna try the whole blog thing on for size and see how it goes. I don't even really know where to start, so background info maybe? My husband Thom and I moved back to Riverton Wyoming about a year and a half ago, well, Thom did anyway. We were living in Salt Lake and Thom got a job with Wyoming PBS here at CWC. The housing situation being what it was, we couldn't find a place to live. So Thom lived here with his boss and I moved back to Star Valley with my parents. Our son, who was six months old at the time, hung out with me in good old SV, for obvious reasons. Thom found a house, which we bought and started some major reconstitution on. Six months later, the baby and I moved in. Yeah, it took that long. We did a total rewiring of the whole house, gutted the kitchen and redid it. So that has been our project for the past year and I am proud to say, that aside from one wall needing to be sheet rocked and painted, the first level is complete!! I am so so excited! Here are some pictures of our work.
This was the living room before we started. PS that is not our furniture. Gag.

So here are a couple different views, sorry about all the junk in the way. But as you can see, a lot of paint went into this room. Sheesh.

Instant living room, just add furniture, rug and curtains. And a little junk.

This is little Izacc's room before, if you can't tell from the picture, this room is tiny.

Way cute huh? His room is probably my favorite. Way better than it was at least.





Here was the kitchen. It doesn't really look THAT bad, I mean things were pretty well taken care of and clean. But it was terribly outdated and needed some major TLC. Oh and PS, check out that carpet! Whew! I mean have you ever seen anything sexier???










Sorry sexy carpet! We laid down some slate tile, looks 110% better! PLUS it was so easy!

Doesn't even look like the same room! Oh, and we have a stove, it goes in that hole.

This was our bedroom before...

...and after.  Ahhh, so much better

There is another bedroom on the top floor. When we bought the house it was bright yellow. No, I don't think you understand the severity of this situation. I mean yellow walls, ceiling, it was, well...
As soon as we moved in I put a coat of primer over it just to make it stop. It was really hard to even be in that room. So it was our mini storage for the longest time. My sister in law and I just finished cleaning it out and fixing it up.



























I painted it blue because I figure once we have more kids, I'll have to move Izacc to a bigger room and I definitely did not want to paint that room twice, know what I'm sayin?

Ahh, and now we come to the bathroom, the Cinderella story of the Coles' house.
So this bathroom was the most disgusting place on earth. (I exaggerate for effect. I know there are way more disgusting place, but I digress...) So the walls were the color of, um, pee. Nasty yellowy dingy eww. And there was tile all around the bottom of the whole room. Old yeller tile, nasty tile. The tub was obviously never intended to be a shower because the tile only went halfway up the wall. Someone had attached a hose and shower to the faucet and converted it, but due to all the moisture, the paint was peeling off the walls. The window frame, which was wood, was also turning to much and flaking off. Oh, and least we forget, there was a nice shag carpet that covered the floor. Nice and yellow and smelly. On a hot day, you could open that door and almost smell the faint remains of a dead skunk or rotting outhouse somewhere...it was horrifying. So we purchased the stuff to fix it all up nice and never got around to it, never got around to it, etc. Last April Thom went to Las Vegas for a week for a convention of some sort. The second he left, my brother Spencer and I went to work. First, we fixed the window.


We tore all the tile off the wall. Then we decided that rather than spend the next eight years of our lives sanding and mudding to make the dang thing smooth, we tore the old wall down and put up new sheet rock. I then painted and we put the wonder board on the floor and tiled the sucker!



Spencer built a shower and then we tiled the walls. Whew, what a chore that was. But we made it work.











And just look how stinkin cute it turned out to be!!!






































I love it. So that's it. The story of our house. Now maybe we can focus on unpacking. We're still kind of living out of boxes. Up next, the basement...yikes.