It is a 3 bedroom Cape Cod in the Silver City neighborhood of Milwaukee's South side. We are about 20 minutes walk from Miller Park and can actually see the stadium from the window of Pete's baseball room. We spent the first 11 days working on the house and then spent a maddening 7 days moving from our 49th St. apartment (which has been our home for EIGHT YEARS!). It was a crazy time.
But here is some of our progress...
We gutted the master bedroom closet and painted it white. We added new closet rod and shelves for each of us. We painted the master bedroom, which had been a neutral cream color, to a pale green with dark green dry brushed trim which matches our bedroom set. We pulled up the carpet having been deceived by wood grained wallpaper into thinking there were nice floors under the carpet. Instead, there was a barn style sub floor that was much worse for wear. We still thought we could salvage it, but after $27 worth of wood filler we came to the conclusion that it would never re-finish to what we wanted it to look like and moved to plan B - laminate wood flooring. It went in fairly easily and looks Beautiful!
Pete has always hated the Mud room (little back hall going into the kitchen and down to the basement), it was all paneled, and not paneled well, and carpeted and generally ugly. How could we know what kind of project we were getting ourselves into when we started pulling the paneling off of the walls. After much swearing and gnashing of teeth we got all the paneling down, pulled out the shelf which was built with several different size pieces of wood and a WIDE variety of screws and nails. We primed and started painting the room, Pete replaced several bad pieces of wall board, and it's in a bit of a holding pattern. It's livable, and has been moved down in the priority list.
While we were upstairs, we painted Pete's baseball room and changed it from the lovely lavender to a neutral cream. It too had the barn-style sub floor, although it wasn't in as bad of shape as the bedroom, Pete found a peel and stick tile that he liked and we installed that. The room is ready for pennants!!
The dining room wasn't originally on the priority list, Pete had bigger issues with the green floral wall paper than I did, but it was easy to peel off while we were bored and on the second floor. While Pete was struggling with some project (basement or mud room) I decided I had everything I needed to paint the dining room and did. Wall paper down, lovely beach border (?????) down, and a lovely antique white applied to the whole room. Much better.
I am embarrassed to say that I don't have any before and after pictures of the basement. It is a cellar in every sense of the word and we have been struggling with everything from dampness to down-right lakes since we moved in. Pete has done an amazing job trying to make the basement functional. He installed an entire corner of shelving to hold all of the Christmas, Prop and other miscellaneous tubs, patched holes in the floor so that we have a usable area of pallets for furniture and camping equipment and created a nice, dry laundry area for me. We are still working on it, the shelves need to have additional bracing added and we need to replace the laundry sink. We also FINALLY purchased the dehumidifier that our real estate agent told us we needed the very first time we looked at the house. But it's getting there.
We have also know since we looked at the place that the kitchen would be a challenge, it's small and ugly. There are a lot of cabinets, but they are so disproportionately big compared to the rest of the room and they are impractical to get in to. I had originally thought that I would remove the enormous cabinet over the sink and replace it with shelves for our plates etc. but when I discovered that I would not be able to hang curtains without interfering with one of the cabinet doors I decided to take the doors off of a couple cabinets. 
In the end I removed the doors from all but one set of upper cabinets (I have to have some place to hide things!). I wasn't sure that I would have enough space for all of my things, but between the pantry and the mud room, I have been able to set up a very workable kitchen. We found a black and white tile that we both love and put that in the kitchen and pantry - we will carry it out to the floor of the mud room when we get to that point in the mud room. The only hiccup we hit is that the room isn't wired for an electric stove, so we have the stove and refrigerator in the room, but the stove is still just glorified counter space.
So that is the story of our house to date. We have been living here for about a month and love the neighborhood - love the house. We planted some flowers and a small herb garden in the back yard, Pete will continue to work on the basement while I move my attention to the front porch and we'll just keep plugging away until we're done. Let's face it, we have 30 years to get these projects done!!
