when we moved in to our house almost 1.5 years ago, i thought that it would take 6 months, tops, to completely de-wallpaper, re-paint all walls and ceilings, and refinish the (promised by both realtors and previous owner) beautiful hardwood floors under all of the gross carpet. then we could take a few years to work on smaller renovation projects while saving our money for a big kitchen and bathroom remodel. we quickly learned that it can take over 3 months to remove wallpaper from just one room... and that painting takes much more time when you have to repair the walls first... and that we only had half of the beautiful floors that were promised to us. so that is why we still have the damaged hardwood floors downstairs, a completely untouched by us stairway, and one entire room that still needs a lot of work. and that's to just get it to the point where i thought we'd be a year ago. which is why we are still working on starting, and finishing, rooms.

we worked on some good rooms in 2009 - we have our downstairs bathroom, that was a lovely shade of school bus yellow before:then there was the time that we decided to ignore all of the rooms that we hadn't even started to paint our bedroom for the second time:(by the way, i realized i haven't taken a single picture of our room since this one. i will have to work on that...)

we also had the room that gets the award for "most changed" - our office, aka the "old spice room"this room also gets the award for "most frustrating". please see: katie vs crown molding: round 1, katie vs crown molding: round 2, and finally, katie vs crown molding: round 3
(and yes, i realize that i haven't posted any recent pictures of this room either... the thing is, we actually never finished working on the baseboards, and it has become our second box room/storage room - so it pretty much still looks like the picture above, only with more stuff. and there is no katie vs crown molding: final round. the crown molding and i have declare a truce - it will look decent as long as no one looks at it too closely. or steps into the room and turns around and inspects the corner above the door. that is it's bad side and i've accepted it).

but the room that i'm giving the best of 2009 room award to is our guest room.because once we removed the lovely green (broken) ceiling fan with matching green curtains...
and the "build-in" shelves that came with the house...
and painted, painted and painted...

we now have a guest room that i think is very relaxing and inviting and is actually one of my favorite rooms in the house. sure it's pretty cozy after we put in a queen size bed, but it's big enough for our guests, and that's what is important.well, our guests and our cats. because they think they are the most important.

** please note that none of these rooms are what i'd consider to be complete. we still have lots of boxes to unpack, pictures to hang, and things to do to decorate and continue to make this house our home. at this point i consider a room complete once it has fresh paint on the walls and i can start to move furniture in. or more boxes full of random stuff, we have lots of those :-)