before and after (well, in progress…)

For those who have broken bread in the Church of Norm….

Because otherwise my mom will kill me, some shots of the progress on the living room and entry..

Originally, the entire house was done in that 70’s gold carpet. We’ve been slowly working to get rid of it and the front half the house has been redone in vinyl tiles. the fireplace was the classic 50’s wall o’ brick, and the front door was a 70’s piece of fiberglass (white), with two sidelights of textured yellow glass.

I don’t have an inside picture of the front door handy, but you can imagine the curb appeal of this baby:

The front porch now looks like this — the door I had installed, but the porch I redid myself:

The inside, you can see, was nothing to write home about:

The far wall of the living room had some nice but not expensive bookshelves for Laurie’s cookbook collection:

Replacing those are some new built-in shelves:

And the wall o’ brick has been boxed in and we’ve added shelves for books and display:

And now the final piece is to cover the walls of the hallway in pine tongue and groove to match a similar wall in the living room, and then finish the trim and prep for painting.

From this:

to this

(I’m just happy beyond words that the door has been trimmed out…)

And yes, if you look at the dates on some photos, these rooms have in fact been in some state of disrepair since 2002. The last two years or so at Apple, everything ground to a complete halt. It’s one reason why we decided to get this done while I had some time to do it — and why I decided to take that time…

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