Is it done yet??

Welcome to the guest room being torn apart so that it can become Gregs new bedroom... This is with the plaster and lathe having just been torn out. We sent it all out the window into a dump trailer positioned in the driveway.
We seem to missing a ceiling now! This is a lot of really old insulation hanging down...

We tried very hard to keep up on the clean up, which is good because if we hadn't, we probably wouldn't have had the room to work! Greg put a lot of hard work in to tearing down and then building up his new room that we know he will REALLY appreciate it and take good care of it.

Early on in our ownership of this home we put in blown insulation because there was NONE in the house... Something we will never do again. We decided this when we tore apart the living room. When you do blown insulation you have to do it every few years because it settles. This is what it look like when it falls from the attic floor onto your second story floor. One big mess!

Nice new insulation that will stay in place. Like I said before, there was NO insulation in this house. The exterior walls were completely without which made for an expensive heating bill... We think this will help out A LOT! Greg is doing the daily vaccuuming to keep the construction mess to a minimum.

While we were at it tearing apart the guest room we decided to do the upstairs hallway as well. The plaster walls came down, the lathe came down, the old doors came out. The pictures of the tearout are on the real camera (all of these pictures are from Johns cell phone). Here are some pics of the new walls with the red color and the pretty new doors and of course the new door casings! -I picked them out!- :)

The new hall light. Yes it is big, but we like it! We are toning down all of the red walls with a lot of white trim -crown molding will also go up- and this big white light!

Here is the view from the landing on the way up the stairs. Note all of the light that the new fixture is affording us! We still need two new doors for this hallway. They would be the ones on the left...

Pretty new door not yet painted. They are solid core doors and they are VERY nice! I've noticed since Greg has moved in to his new room he can rarely hear us calling for him because of this door and all of the insulation... Or perhaps he is just ignoring us because he is enjoying his sanctuary!

Back to Gregs room... This is the view inside his new closet that was built into the room. His room includes the staircase to the attic. I believe that the door to the attic used to be the closet in that room with an opening in the ceiling to the attic, but the old owners must have decided to tear it out and make it into a staircase to the attic and have the room go without a closet. There was still space to build a closet but not without covering the heat run going to the room. We decided to tear up the hardwood floor very carefully so that we could run new ductwork under the floor and have the heat come out the new wall... This is what that looks like!

From one side to the other...

And there it is coming out the new opening.

What would be the point of all of the new insulation and doors without putting in new energy efficient windows too?? Love the window casings!

Here is the view of a new window and the custom made attic door (of course it had to be an odd size and would have cost a fortune to special order so John customized it himself)! It has not yet been painted which is why it doesn't match.

A view of the attic door, closet door, and the door to the room... Might I add that Greg picked the color of his room. It is called "Evening Symphony". I have to admit that there were a lot of people nervous about the dark color, but we all had a vision and it seems to be working out well. Also, note the new ceiling fan... It is a brushed nickel to match the rest of the hardware that we got for the upstairs. Not to mention, Greg has been wanting a cieling fan for a long time! I don't blame him!

We decided to do an "Extreme Home Makeover" reveal for Greg so last Friday night I took him to his Grammy and Pops' house to spend the night and John had a friend come over to help him with moving furniture and getting things set up, including some surprises! Let me tell you that Greg was REALLY surprised when he came home Saturday night. I met him, Grammy and Pops at Dons Original for dinner and then brought him home. I had him put his baseball stuff away in the garage and then sent him upstairs to put his overnight things away and to bring down his dirty laundry so that I could get started washing it. He went up the stairs and in to his bedroom... Only his bedroom was missing a lot! Like his bed, his dresser, etc... There was just a big jumble of things on the floor for him to go through later. He turned to me and said that he guessed he wasn't sleeping in there that night. I told him to check and see what John was up to so he went to his new bedroom door, opened it and found John on his bed playing with Gregs brand new PS2 on his new flatscreen TV!!!!!!!!!!!! Since I was behind Greg I did not get the pleasure of seeing the look on his face but John did and he said that it was perfect! I don't think Greg has stopped saying thank you yet!

Now, the room is not yet done... The closet has yet to be finished so he will have a ton of storage space in there to keep things neat and tidy. There are curtains that are in the process of being made still (we do have blinds). But this is the gist of his room.

I think John snapped all of these pictures before Greg got home while he was still putting things away. Gregs dresser used to be a dark wood and is now painted white with nickel pulls and it has a mirror mounted on the back of it. We really like the white furniture because it helps support the dark blue room and make it less cave like.

The bedside table used to be wood as well, but that was also painted to go with the room. The bed had not yet been made in this picture but we had Gregs new "Yankee Gray" (like their away uniforms) bedskirt, his brand new sheets that he picked out, and his favorite stars and striped quilt. His "quillow" from his Aunt Heather is also on the bed...

The wall space for the new closet is the perfect size for his framed "Starry Night". Greg is a huge fan of Vincent Van Gogh. On the closet door is a Harry Potter banner. I think it is for the Griffindor House. The ends are still curling even though he has had it for awhile... He just never had anywhere to hang it before!

On the back of his bedroom door is his Green Bay Packer football guy wall hook. It holds his robe .

Here is a nice picture of his desk with his Van Gogh calendar over it and his toy box that John and Big Guy built for him when he was little... It is still filled with stuffed animals. We are going to have to get those out of there for him so he has more room for his own things. He has already told us that there are some that he would like to hang on to for himself but he will share the rest with his little brother.

Well, I hope you enjoyed viewing some of what we have been busy doing over the last few months. I will say that the day after Gregs new room reveal, Gregs job was to clean out his old room. He spent a lot of time in there moving his things in an organized fashion to his new room and throwing out things that he no longer wanted or needed. Although he is still utilizing the closet in his old room until his new closet is done, it is on its way to being ready for our new little boy. Once Gregs things were out, John went in to clean the floors and then both John and Greg moved in the babys furniture, putting together the crib and bringing up the dresser. We still need to wash down the walls and do some touch up painting there is really very little that needs to be done to get the room ready. I personally want to turn the top of the dresser in to a changing table but that shouldn't be too hard, atleast not for the guy who has built rooms in preparation for this new addition.

Back to the point of this post....

We really wanted to do something amazing for Greg to thank him for being such an awesome kid and give him a sanctuary where he can escape to when everything gets to be too much. Our family is going to go through a change welcoming a new member and although Greg is excited for it we think that he might also appreciate a place of his own to just relax, so we are trying to give it to him. He gives 100% to his family and to his school work all of the time, and we want him to know that we recognize that. Thank you for being such an amazing son Greg!!!