Amazing

That's all I could think when I walked upstairs in our house this weekend. I couldn't believe it. I can't remember if I've said this before, but the ceilings upstairs were barely 7 feet tall (more like 6 ft. 10 inches), so you can imagine, if we ever have kids, and they don't stay perma-short, they might have some trouble with ceiling fans and doorways. Matt could just barely walk under a doorway without hitting his head. Lights would have all had to be recessed. We were cool with that if that was the only option, but we asked Leon about raising the ceiling (it'd have been cooler if I could say raising the roof right there, but no, just the ceiling). Raising the roof, while fun, would have been extremely expensive.
Well, he promised he'd get us as much height in each area as possible, but that they would have slopes. I thought that could look cool anyway, so we told him just to go with what he could.
This weekend was my first day over there since then, and WOW... It was a whole new upstairs. They did an amazing job.
What's more (and really neat because I sorta had this idea--that's not often with the structure stuff), I had asked if they could floor in more of the attic/unused space and just take the closets back as far as possible, even if only 3 feet existed between the floor and ceiling. The closets were TINY, and I would hate for our future children, or Larry and Wally, to be forced to live out drawers only. Again, we would have been fine if that was the only option, but the closet space is awesome now--you can actually walk in. Also, there was a little squared off section in one of the upstairs rooms that I asked if it'd make a good long closet, and they studded it in, and it looks great. ONE more thing is we asked about pushing out a little cubby area in the bathroom (which is a little small) so we could at least recess the toilet, and it looks awesome, too! As you can tell, I was all smiles (more in shock) at everything they were able to do with the upstairs. It is night and day from before. I now regret not taking a million pictures of the before. I did take some, but not nearly enough the capture the remarkable difference.
I'm a little sad we had to get rid of our glass doors that sectioned off a room that overlooks Main St., but with those doors, the space on either side became unusable...so we sacrificed the doors (saved them, though, for something else, maybe) and so now there is one large room where those doors once made two small areas. It'll make a great play room, or if necessary, a third bedroom.
Here are some pictures. I really wish they did justice, but it's hard to capture it all.

The picture on the left is the closet now that they knocked down the drywall and filled in the floor some. It's so much bigger. The picture on the right sorta shows how it was before.

This is that same room where we added the closet. The closet is in the corner you see in the right. Below it shows a little more detail of where we added the closet.

This is sorta hard to picture, but the top picture was the little squared out area that you see in the directly above picture. Where the door is on the picture right above is still there, we just added a long closet as well. So there are basically two closets in there now.

This is where we opened the two small areas into one long room. Like I said, sad to see the doors go, but we saved them. And, now the space is more usable. The ceiling height makes the rooms look so much larger.

Basically, where the vanity is, we recessed the wall to put the toilet, now. This really opened up the bathroom.

Where you see my mom pulling off wall, is pretty much where the the other picture is taken..now all of that is opened up as a landing.

You can see how the ceilings have been raised. (don't worry, floors are being preserved).

This really isn't a great before/after, but this is the same room. Straight ahead on the picture to the left is where we added the closet space. It was so small you couldn't walk in.

Just another bathroom picture.