House Update - Renovations and Treasures

My life has been extremely busy these past couple of weeks, as I am sure you can tell with my lack of deal and shopping posts!  I have still been shopping - I have to!  I just haven't had much extra time to sit down at the computer and type up my trips...

As many of you know we had the arrival of our daughter, Jade Marie, just under 7 weeks ago.  To make things a little more exciting, we decided it was time to hire someone to start renovations on our "frugal adventure".  You can see my original post about that adventure here, and a little bit of the progress here.  We had originally intended on doing a lot of the work ourselves, but with Jade's arrival that changed our plans.  My husband has been able to take some days off of work to take care of some demolition to help save costs on that. 

Things are moving along at a really nice pace right now, and we have plans to have it done and rented by June, 2011.  The man that we hired has had some great ideas and has really made a lot of headway already.  Here's some photos of how it's looking now:

Upstairs bathroom getting ready for tile. 

Master bedroom, ripping down the wallpaper.

Upstairs bedroom.

Small upstairs bedroom. 

Kitchen, gutted and ready for the new tile, cabinetry and fixtures. 

We decided to do more work than we had originally anticipated.  Since there's only one bathroom in this house, and it's upstairs, we are adding another full bath off the kitchen (along with a walk-in pantry).  We had to remove the wood burning stove to make this work. 

Even though this is going to be a rental home, I am replacing things with nice quality and design - things the way I would want them if I were going to be living there.  The ceramic tiles in the kitchen will be 20 x 20 and there will be expanded maple cabinetry with a new pantry too.  I am leaning toward stainless steel appliances for the kitchen.  The wood floors in the living room and dining room areas will be replaced with red oak flooring. 

So, as you can see, my time has been consumed with picking out lots of things for the renovations, and I have spent way more time in Menards lately than I have at Walgreens or Jewel!  :)

I also wanted to show you some of the beautiful treasures we found in the house.  I am a big fan of antiques so as you can see, this is all right up my alley!  I am going to have a hard time parting with some of these things....and some are already a permanent part of our home. 

This entire set of dishes was boxed up in the basement, wrapped up in newspapers from 1952.  It has obviously never been used.  I am guessing it was someone's wedding gifts that were packed up and stowed away to be forgotten about.  There were about 4 sets of dishes that were packed away like this.  Did I mention to you how much I like dishes?!?  Yeah, my husband wasn't too happy about his find!! 

So, as soon as things settle down around here I promise I will post more of my shopping trips and deals.  I would much rather spend my time in Wags than Menards, but then again, maybe next time I should bring my coupon binder along and see what kinds of deals I could muster up there! :)