rental remodeling

I haven't been doing a whole lot of knitting lately, but with cooler weather bound to roll in one of these days I have lots of projects I hope to get to. I'm having some ladies over to the new house this week to kick off fall knitting and I'm psyched, because 1) I now have space in my home to have regular knit nights and 2) one of these days I will finish the trellis and vine pullover.

The three seasons porch after all of our (mostly Matthew's) hard work. I wish we had taken before pictures. It was moldy and mildewy with rotting carpet and peeling wainscoting on the bottom. Now it's just lovely (well, except the landlord needs to put in a new floor, but our lovely rug is good enough for now)

So, if I haven't been knitting, what have I been doing? As I alluded to above, we have moved to a more spacious abode and that has taken up a crap ton of my precious time. On top of all the moving, we've had to do some serious updating to this place because our new landlord way over sold what he was going to do to make it livable. For starters the place was filthy. It's pretty clean now and we've tackled two of the biggest projects we agreed to do (one of them because of previously mentioned over promising landlord's inability to do as he promised). I'm pretty proud of our handy work and it reassures me that once we get this place tip top, it will be awesome.

Powder room before. The wallpaper on the right was peeling, which made it easy to remove, of course it only revealed the really stubborn wallpaper underneath.

Powder room after. I was going to paint it a lovely shade of gray, but after the stupid landlord made a stink about paying for paint while we were doing all the work I decided to paint it with the leftover white from the porch. It is a rental afterall and it's still a hundred times better. Now, it just needs curtains.

The next project was going to be to paint the living room (light french gray - a lovely bluish gray), but I think curtains, a rug and some lamps will fix that up okay for now, the real need is in our bedroom, which has walls the color of disgusting bodily fluids. We're thinking a soft gray. There's really nothing wrong with the paint, except for the color, so we can't hold this one against the landlord, well except for the fact that he has bad taste. Anyways, I'll keep you updated as we beautify the new place. Here are some comparison photos:

Our new place (see the need for curtains and rug, also I hate that plant there, but it needs the light)

Old place. This is actually the old arrangement, I don't seem to have picture of it after we moved the little shelf thingy)

Should I even mention the state of our new kitchen? No, I'll just be happy with all my extra space - for now.