Sometime before the world was formed, Jason and I had a desire to remodel our kitchen. Yes. That's how long it takes us to actually accomplish stuff.
I set myself to finding luxurious kitchens on Pinterest that would only befit a millionaire and never looked at them again once they were pinned to my wall. I'm pretty sure this is what Chip and Joanna Gaines do too, they just don't announce it in their magazine because they don't have enough space to do so after all the ads.
Sometime in the fall of 2017, we realized we wanted the cabinets to be white and from there, we'd determine the color of the rest of the kitchen.
The picture on the left was taken on the day we were shown the house when we were house shopping and also how it remained up until about 4 years ago when the only change we made was to paint the cabinets an espresso color that technically looked purple. Not Barney purple. More like purple espresso. The picture on the right was taken last week when Jason was gone and I rid the sink and island of all clutter because it's an after picture and after pictures can't be cluttered. (Bylaws 2.3.11a)
Here are various angles of the kitchen taken at different times.
Below is the kitchen taken from the downstairs living room on the day we were shown the house.
Same view taken literally 5 minutes ago when I realized I didn't have this view to share of the kitchen completed. Can you imagine if this were the 1800's? I'd have to wait months for my film to develop and then it would be Sepia!
This is nearly the only picture I could find of the kitchen showing the mocha colored cabinets. If you'll pay careful attention, you'll notice I took the picture because I wanted the memory of the time that Evan opened the towel drawer and proceeded to place them all in the sink for reasons I still can't fathom. Toddler brains are so complex.
As you can see in that picture above, the sink was a splendid version of crappy laminate, original to the house with stains and chips. While many other homeowners out there may have found the 80's style of ugly to be sentimental... I did not. So therefore we spent nearly one month and 5 trips to the granite yard trying to find a suitable replacement.
This particular slab is called Silver Cloud and is black and white with hints of gray.
Here's a better picture of it along with the new sink (a single bowl granite), spigot and tile we had put in with gray grout. You may notice that Jason is very OCD about weird things which is why there is a napkin under the handle to catch water and under my supremely awesome mason ball jar soap dispenser.
This is the clutter of tile work in progress. It's also why the picture is blurry. Clutter makes me shudder. I rhyme.
Once the tile back-splash was completed we decided we needed an accent color and I loved egg shell blue. This color does not look like an actual egg shell that is blue, have you seen one? Regardless, we found the color I was looking for and Jason set to work painting the legs of the kitchen island this color. It was also during this time that we decided to get new stools and a new overhead light fixture for the island. Jason also got a new pantry door which my sister pointed out to me just now.
I even found hand towels at Wal-Mart that matched my color scheme. Yay me.
Somewhere in this process Jason did two things to appease my aesthetic need. One was to whitewash the fireplace and paint the mantel white. Surely it's no fault of mine that I felt the Brady Bunch brick that was installed back when the show was in it's prime needed to go. This particular picture was taken the day after Evan hit his forehead and got stitches.No, I don't go to extremes.
And this is the final project once I bombarded Hobby Lobby.
The second thing he did was shiplap one wall on the far side of the kitchen using the old fencing I begged him to get from our next door neighbor who replaced his fence last year.
I love it. I will most likely rip it from the wall if we ever move and bring it with us. That's the level of my commitment to shiplap.
The final big project was to stain the kitchen floor and replace the carpet in the dining room. Who is the fool that thinks it's a great idea to have carpet in a dining room? If that's you, I apologize. But clearly you don't have kids. Or spaghetti.
This was the only before picture I could find of the dining room because it was so rarely used due to the whole carpet scenario that I didn't remember it existed. The gold/orange combination weren't anything to be admired either. I'm pretty sure this was taken when we were moving in because... mattress. Otherwise, who knows?
This little new floor undertaking took a few days because did you know they have to seal off your house like you're bubble boy?
I was in a state of agitation during this time because that whole level of the house was a wreck,
We had to move the refrigerator to the other room and couldn't use it AND, in order for me to continue unhindered from my coffee addiction, I had to move the Keurig to the master bathroom. This was seriously a necessity. Otherwise I'd be writing this blog post from jail because of the murder I committed when I couldn't have coffee. Also. That floss is mine. I floss.
Here's the empty dining room, ready to have the new floor laid down.
Here it is with the new floor (pre-stained).
Here's our floor guy explaining to Jason that he thinks I'm weird because I moved the Keurig to the upstairs bathroom and he wondered if should keep the plastic up for me once the floor was done because perhaps I belonged in the bubble.
I managed to get a picture of him sanding the floor. Looks like an over-sized 1940's vacuum cleaner to me but what do I know?
After the stain before the finish.
After the finish.
After the finish when Jason covered the floor with cardboard to keep us from walking on the floor. OCD. (technically, you need to stay off of it for a day or so to let the finish do something or whatever).
Here's the completed dining room. We painted it and Jason used the leftover fence to make a shiplap wall in here as well. Now I love this room and we still haven't eaten in it yet. We are still in the process of finding room decor and a farmhouse table for it. Sometimes slothfulness takes over after big projects.
The final work to be done to complete it all was to paint the railing between the kitchen and the living room and install new light switches and outlets. Jason said he would rather have a samurai sword shoved down his throat while jumping on a trampoline than do the light switches and outlets again. I actually made that "rather" up, but he did tell me to make sure I wrote about that horrific experience for him so I wanted to make it as dramatic as possible in order to honor his wishes.
If you are reading this and contemplating a remodel of your own, don't. Go buy a new house instead.
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