In the beginning...

So. We have owned this house for 7 years, and bought it partially on the potential that the upstairs expansion space had for us. In retrospect, this was not the most cost-effective way to buy a house, but we were newbies, so there it is. Now, we were finally able to finagle a way to finance this venture (one less kid in daycare helped!) and we decided to go ahead with our plans to finish the upstairs 1/2 story with 2 bedrooms and one bathroom. The 2 bedrooms downstairs will become a family room (yyyyes!) and a guest room/office-type room. AND since we have a porch off of the soon-to-be family room, we will convert that to a mudroom of sorts - which will further reduce the clutter of the front room. Here are the photos of what the expansion space looked like before we got started:

This is the view of the stairs from our hallway to the exisiting stairs going up.