Home updates continued - Windows

Here is another project we did on the house.
Super duper overdue in posting this but oh well.. Better late than never.

This one we actually tackled back in February before Katherine's birthday party. When we bought the house it was all painted bright white inside, had no furniture and of course when we visited, all the lights were on, so it never occurred to us that the living room might be a bit dark.
Well fast forward a good bit of time, we painted our walls a nice tan color, put our stuff in, some of our furniture is dark, and we don't always keep all the lights on. And all of a sudden we realize that even on the sunniest, brightest day there is something missing. Namely daylight!
The way the house was designed is that the entire side wall which faces the neighbors on the left is solid. There is not a single window in the living room on that wall. There are two windows around the fireplace but they are facing north so there is not a time of day when there would be a ton of light flooding through them. They are nice and big, but they are just not enough. At least for our taste.
Now on the other hand, our front dining room is gorgeous and super bright which was making the whole dark cave impression even stronger when you were in the living room on a sunny day.

So then we noticed that there are a few other houses on our street with a very similar design and they actually had windows on that living room wall. I'm sure they were added after the houses were build. Anyways, we decided that we would do that too.
We hired a contractor to cut openings in the wall and install two nice, big windows. And Oh MY GOSH what a HUUUGE difference this made! Our entire great room is now constantly flooded with gorgeous daylight. It is so nice and bright there. And the best thing, the added windows did not compromise the privacy of the space at all. That side of the house faces our neighbors' garage and bonus room (upstairs) so there are no windows staring straight into our windows. Whoever designed our street did a really good job offsetting the floor plans so that privacy is maximized. It's great!
So glad we did this and I am sure that this will add to the resale value of the house somewhere down the road.

Also, if anyone is interested, we would highly recommend the guy who did this project for us. Super quick and professional. We have already hired him to do another project in the house because we were so happy with the work and price.

Here are some pictures from the process...

What it looked like on the outside....

And here is the inside view...

 And a final view from the outside.

We love it!!