Kitchen

WARNING: There are LOTS of pictures on this post.  

Alright, now that you have been warned about the amount of pictures, I will proceed...Thanks for staying :)

I am finally posting another room.  The kitchen has actually been done for months now but I've been either too busy to take pictures and post OR too lazy (aka resting from being too busy) to do it.  

Here we go!

 The next few pictures are right after Cory & I bought the house.  This one is right when you walk in from outside.

 Pantry

 From the other side of the kitchen.

 I fell in love with the cute shelves on either side of the window above the sink.

 Here' a shot of the linoleum floor that was starting to peel up.

 Vintage stove hood.

 There was a rotary phone on the wall that I just loved.

 The next picture is a close up of the walls in the kitchen.  Below the chair rail that you may have noticed in other pictures, the wall was stamped plaster.  The stamping made the wall look like it was made of tiles but it wasn't.

 The light fixtures.

The first order of business was to clean the kitchen and to remove the retro shelf paper.

                                      

The second thing was to get a new refrigerator.  I really liked the old one but it didn't really work well.  Fortunately we got a new fridge for a great deal.  Unfortunately the new fridge was a little too big to slide easily into the old spot.  Cory had to remove the unusually thick chair rail and shaved a little counter top off to get it to fit.

 After we installed the refrigerator we decided to install a dishwasher but we had to sacrifice some cabinet/drawer space.

 This is the first time Cory blew my mind with fixing up our house.  I thought we could get help from someone to install and reconstruct our cabinets but Cory said he could do it.  So, with some hesitation on my part I sat back and watched him cut our cabinetry to pieces.

 I shouldn't have worried a bit though because he installed it just fine.  He even rigged up a nice drawer for our garbage can (pictured later).  The dishwasher in this picture still had the protective film on it.  Many people who came to see the house thought we had gotten a green dishwasher.  It was pretty funny to hear the reactions.  "Oh, that's a nice shade...."

 I was content on keeping the floors "as is" for a while for money purposes but as we were cutting the cabinets out we noticed that there was nice enough sub-flooring underneath the linoleum that we could salvage until we found the perfect floor.
I'm not going to lie, tearing up the floor was a messy process.  A BIG thanks to my mother-in-law, Jeanne, who helped Cory & me scrape up some of the nasty glue.

 After the "gunk" was up Cory sanded the whole floor.

And then stained it to look like this:

 Next, we painted the ceiling and the top half of the walls.  Cory & I both swore that the kitchen was a cream color but as we painted we noticed it was more of a green.  We painted the top half of the walls the same color as we painted our bathroom, Glidden's Misty Moonstone.  It's a light blue-ish gray.

Then Cory impressed me again by installing new light fixtures.  At this time he also moved a light switch that was in an awkward place but I didn't picture document it.

 You can really see the color difference in the next picture.  See how the bottom half looks green?  At this time we took the cabinet doors off painted them white, moved the hardware placement, and replaced the hardware.

We put the cabinet doors back on and moved in at this point.  Our kitchen had the half blue/half green look for a while. The reason we just painted the upper half was because the lower half had the stamped plaster tile look that could not be removed.  In order to not have the stamped plaster look we would have had to replace the walls or cover it up.  We chose the latter.   Cory worked really hard to measure and cut the bead board. He did a great job installing it.  Here's a picture of the swinging door to our dining room along with the pantry door.

Then, for a little while longer we lived with all the green walls covered except for the area around our sink.

 Again, Cory gets the medal for being awesome.  He did such a great job at installing our gray tile back splash.  (this picture was taken during the installation)

 And if you're still with me, here's our finished kitchen!

 Our kitchen could technically be a small table eat-in kitchen but I couldn't sacrifice counter space for the microwave.  Eventually we will probably get a microwave above the stove (and replace the stove with a stainless steel one).  For now, it's on this cart that's been with me for a while.  By doing this, though, I could hang on to my gray china cabinet a little longer.

 Here's a better picture of the dishwasher with the garbage can drawer.

 The drawer slides right out.  I love having a large hidden trashcan!

 You may have noticed a little silver tray above the stove.  It serves two purposes: 1. cover up a small blemish in the bead board and 2. to serve as a recipe holder (magnet).  I saw that idea in a Country Living catalog.

 I'm probably crazy for getting such a light colored rug for the kitchen but I fell in love with this bathmat  at West Elm this summer.  I've scotch guarded it and praying that it stays pretty for a while.

 This is a flashback to the "before" kitchen. As you can notice the silver back splash and hood are bigger than the actual stove.  The stove was replaced a few years ago but the hood had cabinets built around it so the previous owner just left it as is.  Instead of replacing the cabinets beside the stove she just moved them down closer to the new unit.  This caused the upper cabinets to extend to the end of the wall with nothing underneath them, which looked disproportional.

 So we bought a small, cheap-o book shelf at Wal-Mart to fill the void.  It's a great place for all my cookbooks and provides some extra counter space too.

 If you click on the picture it  will enlarge.  I tried to label the changes that we made.

 And here's a few side-by-side before and after shots that will also enlarge if you click on them.

Wow, if you read to here then you are a true friend. :) You can see that Cory did SO much hard work for this room.  I just picked things out and painted. He's so great and talented and I'm very lucky to have him in my life..and I guess he's pretty smart too, he did marry me after all ;)  I kid, I kid.
Thanks for stopping by and have a blessed day!

Little Changes

Today I'm posting some little changes we've made around the house.  The first picture, though was one I found on my camera that gives a better view of the color of brown that our living room once was.  This is a picture of the back of our front door before we painted it white.  Now, imagine that color ALL over the walls and ceiling.  Very depressing.

Another little change is that we got a new duvet cover!  It's just plain white.  Very simple, I know, but I've always loved clean, white beds.  With it being white I can change out the throw pillow for different looks.  And, I got the duvet cover for 50% off, so I can't complain. :) 

 The next little change that Cory took care of was to take up a ramp that went to our kitchen door.  The little old lady that lived here before us had this ramp installed when her health started to decline.  We kept it around for a while for moving in furniture and house renovating purposes but quickly were ready to kick it to the curb.  Here it is before:

 And after:

Another thing we changed was some shrubbery in our front yard.  I will be the first one to admit that our house's exterior needs to be repainted and that our landscaping isn't quite up to par.  Cory & I have been focusing on getting the inside completed and also have been waiting on some cooler weather to tackle those projects.  We have made a small start, though.  Here's a picture of our house with some shrubs in front of our porch.

 We wanted to open up the front porch some so we took out two shrubs.

When we did that we exposed some squirrel damage.  Apparently our house tastes delicious because squirrels are constantly chewing on it.  It is REALLY frustrating and I have never wanted to harm a living creature until this has started happening.  It is a little freaky when squirrels attack your house and will not run away when you try to scare them off....I'm getting angry just thinking about it.  Anyway, we touched up some paint on the places they chewed and then planted some new Hawthorne shrubs in the old shrubs place.

 And the last little change is only "little" by last name and size.  It's a big change and a VERY happy one (and this change was not made by us).  It's our new little nephew, Henry Randall Little.  He was born on September 14th and he is a doll.  I'm so happy that I get to call him my nephew and I can't wait to see him again.

I hope everyone has a happy week!

Random Tid-bits

Well, I haven't posted in a while because I have been pretty busy.  I will post more house pictures soon. Right now I'm procrastinating.  I decided I would revisit a facebook note that I did a few years ago.  It was one of those "tag 20 people with 20 random facts" kind of things.  I'm going to post 20 new random things about myself.  I'll warn you that this is pretty lame so if you want to leave now, I'll understand.  
1. Many times when I'm texting somebody I type semi-"ghetto" and have to erase and rewrite messages before I send  them. (ex: "Fo' show, girl! That would be dope.") sometimes this happens when I'm on facebook too.
2. I now like the bubble gum pop music that I hated in high school
 3. I ruin my apologies with excuses.
4.I use to be friends with a guy who I believe thought he was in a movie by the way he talked.  He was real big on the dramatic repeating a line (ex: I just don’t know…….(wait for a bit)  I just don’t..know. (and then stare off into the distance)
 5.I watch corny television shows and get embarrassed when the dialog is cheesy.  I guess that’s because Cory can hear it and I think he’s judging me…which he should be doing.
6.Once someone told me that I could do a self-test to check if I had the West Nile virus by holding my head back (where I would be looking up to the ceiling).  I would do many of these self-tests at different moments where others could probably see me and think I was crazy (like in my car at a traffic light). I later found out that this person had fooled me.  Sometimes I still check, though.
 7.  I eat chocolate every day, even if it's just a chocolate chip.
8.Two things you can always find in my purse: lotion & gum.
 9. As much as I love little puppies I don’t want to own one.  It’s too hard to see them go and I really don’t want the responsibility…
10.I put CD's in my car and playlists on my ipod on random shuffle all the time.  I like the surprise part of it. .Although, many times I will skip a lot of songs to get to one I want to hear.
11.I have clothes from high school and still wear them sometimes…lame!
12. I can’t stand the Journey song, "Don’t Stop Believing".  I know people think I'm crazy for that.
13 Growing up I had a bad reoccurring dream about a character from the game "Guess Who"...It was Tom and it was scary.
14. II'm not really digging  this getting older thing. I feel like I should still be in college still but I could have gone trough a 4 year college two times now!  
15.Sometimes I feel sorry for Cory on road trips because I sing just about every song I hear on the radio.  It's a lot like this clip from Heartbreak Kid.

16.   I like to narrate animals and babies.
17 I stay up entirely too late on most nights.
 18.On trips I put earplugs and eyeshades in my pillowcase in case of a sleep emergency (someone snoring)
  19.I pick out random Independent films and they’re never good.  Cory still lets me pick them out, though. :)
20. I’m really ready for Christmas time!



I guess I need to get back to work.  If you read to here, then I hope you enjoy your weekend.  

The Living Room

 Today I’m posting our living room pictures.  I’ve been meaning to post other rooms but haven’t gotten around to it.  Now, let me warn you, our living room does not have any furniture yet.  We use our sunroom as our lounge area so we have a place to hang out.  We aren’t in a huge hurry to fill the room up with furniture because we want to find pieces that will last for a while and not a “cheap fix”.  I have an idea of what I would like to put in it and where it would go, but I’ll have to wait for a bit.  The only thing we have in our living room is wall art which is funny to me because that’s usually the last thing you add to a room.

The living room is located at the front of the house and the front door opens right into the room.

Our living room started out ALL light brown.  Like I’ve mentioned before every surface was brown: the blinds, the window edges, the baseboards, molding, and mantel.  Again, the ceiling was a shade lighter but still in the brown family.  It was very drabby to say the least.  Here are some before pictures. This picture was taken from the front door.  If you look closely you can see where there once where pictures were hung.

 The door in this picture leads into the hall.

 The doorway in the next picture leads to the dining room.  You can also see the drabbiness of the wall color compared to the white door.

The night we bought the house we took the dingy curtains down and started patching up the cracks in the walls.  There were quite a few but don't worry, our foundation was fine.  

 Did you see the brown painted window and blinds?  Crazy!  I guess the benefit of everything being so monochromatic and bland was that any color with a contrasting trim paint would look better no matter what.  We painted it Olympic Blue Silk.
 
And took up the carpet.
Here's our non-furnished living room now!

We kept the cornice on the window (but not on the french doors) and Cory painted the wooden blinds.  I'm so glad we could salvage the old ones.

We usually keep the doors to the dining room open but we have one more tweak to do in there until it's finished so I didn't want to show it yet. :)

The only picture that is hanging in the room is our house's architectural drawing that we found in a box.     Cory & I were really excited to find this, along with the blueprints for the house.  It's amazing to see the hand drawn details.  We really wanted to preserve it and my parents were so kind and had it framed for us as a house warming gift.  

Sorry about the flash spot.  I still don't really know how to operate my camera.  Here's the layout before the addition to the house.

Here's some (sort of) side by side pictures for the comparison.  I hope you have a great Labor Day weekend!