Make Over

I really dislike my house. The rooms are small, the house is small, the backyard is small, and worse yet, the kitchen is just about non existent. We bought our house during the big "boom" here in Vegas. The upside to this is we made a killing off selling our old house. That money went towards the down payment for this house and paid for our two rounds of IVF. Our cars are paid off and we are doing okay, thanks to the boom.

Unfortunately, house prices skyrocketed so much during this time that we are in a house that is 60 sq ft smaller than our last house. This 60 ft actually feels like 500 due to the difference in layout and a generous foyer when you walk in my house.

Now that the boom is over and the bubble has burst, we are stuck. Our house has been on the market over one and half years of our 3 1/2 years we have lived here. We had it on the market when the boys were born and then again when they turned one. Apparently everyone else dislikes our house, too.

We have decided if we are stuck here, we need to make it more space efficient. The past two nights Don and I have been waiting until the kids were in bed to start pounding out the wall underneath our stairwell. It is getting hollowed out in an effort to gain another 25 sqft of kids area. Granted it is less than 4 ft tall, but it really helps to lengthen the living room area so we don't feel so boxed in.

Last night while Don was removing studs from the walls/floor I started preparing the walls for primer. The orange is coming off our wall and being changed to a lighter green/grey color (inspired by the matchbox). The tinted primer is on and it looks awesome! The whole room is softer and the lighter color really does give the illusion of more room. Once all our work last night was done, we removed all the blue tape, vacuumed up any mess, and moved the kids toy shelf back in front of the hollowed out wall.



This is our livingroom today after working late last night. This morning when the boys walked downstairs they started giggling. They knew something was different, but it took them a bit to figure out it was the wall color. "Wall go?" "Blue wall?" they asked with big smiles on their faces. It will be interesting to if the energetic orange color coming off the wall makes a difference in their energy level throughout the day, now that the walls are a nice soothing color instead.