Kitchen & Living Room Progress

While we've been trying to focus all of our free-time and efforts outside, we have spent a few moments here and there trying to chip away at the kitchen.  It doesn't look like much since I last wrote about it, but we've actually made some good progress in here.

This is where we left off on the last progress report:

If you remember, we took out that wall and had a structural beam put into the ceiling (something we hired out) and then we put up new drywall and started mudding the joints.  After hours spent mudding ourselves, we realized that we just weren't that good at the whole process and it was taking us way longer than it would take a professional, so we decided to pay someone to finish that up.  Plus, we had an area between one of the beams in the den that was hastily repaired (we think there was water damage from the a/c unit in the attic that had to be fixed some time ago) and then covered with popcorn ceiling texture, which hid it's horrendous defects.  We had our guy mud the new joints and also do a skim coat over that repaired area.  It took him about five hours within the span of two days...something that definitely would have taken us hours over the span of weeks.  It was well worth spending the cash.

Anyway, enough talk about drywall mud, here's what the kitchen looks like today:

The Reading Room - Mini-Makeover and Plans

When you walk into our front door, the first room you see, besides the entry you'd be standing in, is the formal living room.

Or at least, that's what we think it was intended for and probably was right after the house was built.  For us though, it was a space we didn't really know what to do with.  We were looking for houses in the 2000 square foot range when we were hunting and well, this one rang in at 2400 and a big chunk of that extra 400 square feet is this room.  So, extra space?  Great!  Except, what do we do with it??

Our Fresh Pantry Makeover

You know, I have blog dreams of posting on the every-other-daily - giving the internet a new DIY project often to quell the monotony that daily life (especially that of stay-at-home moms...am I right?) can bring.  BUT, being one of those monotony-living moms means there isn't much room for projects AND blogging everyday.  So, in saying that, I just want to apologize for being absent here for almost THREE WEEKS!  It's not because I don't care but mostly because I've been painting, and painting, and painting some mo...and mostly keeping us all alive and thriving of course.  ;)

But, finally, I have something to show for all the painting.  Huzzah!

Our new and improved pantry:

I don't know that I ever shared what it looked like before but I definitely took a quick pic before I started and...

Kitchen Plans

While I am hustling in the kids' room (more on Insta), WE have been BUSY in the kitchen.  And when I say busy, I mean we took down a wall a couple of weekends ago and now we're just waiting on contractors.  So really, we were busy.  And now we're waiting to get busy again.  Which is why I can take this "down time" to tackle the kids' room...just wanted to clarify for anyone thinking we can do alllll the things at once.  Nope, not here.

Here's what this side of the kitchen looked like right after we closed:

And if you had walked into the den/living room and stared at that wall from the other side, this is what you'd have seen:

Or maybe it's what you wouldn't have seen.  That's what we're talking about.  From walking through this house on day one to now, we've dreamt about possibly taking this wall (halfway) down to open up the kitchen to the living room.

Entry Way - Before & After

I know I said I’d be back with a master bathroom reveal but I’m hop, skip, and jumping over to the entry way today instead…because I’ve been procrastinating taking those after shots of the master bath I so desperately need to ring up a true reveal.  In my defense, we’re fairly certain one of the twins has the flu so I’ve been hunkered down with her.  We’ll get there, right?  You know it.  :D

Anywho, the entry way.  Entry ways are one of my favorite rooms in any house.  Just like I wrote about a back entrance awhile back, they can make or break first impressions of a house being the spot that's seen first.  They can also make or break your mood when you walk in from wherever it is you’ve been.

Here’s what ours looked like before we moved in:

I didn’t take this picture in the brightest part of the day in this room so it was feeling a little dark already and obviously, a pile of boxes doesn’t do much for aesthetics.  It was a real Debbie Downer for sure.

But, BUT, look at it now:

Kids/Guest Bathroom Reveal

So, I did a thing.  I know I casually mentioned I was doing it a few weeks or so ago but…

I brought this horribly lit, outdated bathroom…

into 2018 with a little bit of paint and some better lightbulbs.

Our Kitchen in Print

I love writing this blog.  I love coming up with things and showing you how to achieve the same look/end product for less.  All of that requires lots of pictures tossed out into the interwebs of our nest.  While it’s great fun to get to see our house on a screen on the www, it’s EVEN MORE fun to see it on paper…magazine paper that is!!!!!! 

A few months ago I was contacted by This Old House magazine.  Katelin, the writer of their Budget Redo column, wanted to know if they could feature the kitchen in their October issue and golly gee, I said “of course”!  So, if you’re a subscriber (you can subscribe online too!), check out page 30!

I thought the kitchen’s debut in this month’s This Old House would be a great opportunity to check in on it and let you know how everything is holding up five months later (read the original reveal post here)!  How are things holding up to the test of time?  Well, most things look like they were done yesterday, a few not.

Happy Corner

Let me introduce you to my new favorite corner of this little house.
It doesn’t really look like much but it’s my favorite because it’s chock full of fun diy’s I’ve been knocking out over the past couple of weeks.  Still on the list is a hook system (just like this one) that I want to get up on that empty wall to the right of the door.  Hopefully that will happen before school rolls in this fall so we have a place to park backpacks.  :)

To jog your memory, here’s what that corner looked like just after we moved in:

We desperately needed a place to store shoes since this is the door we use most often and so we bought Ikea’s Mackapar, hacked it, and still love it.  I finally got around to painting the living room last month too.  Goodbye tan!  With all of the orangey-wood trim and lack of light during the majority of the day, white was the clear winner.  We went with Pure White by Sherwin-Williams.  The door was in a sad state; dinged and stained.  It was begging for a new coat of paint.

How to “HIDE” A Dishwasher

This is a post all about a white elephant.  Not the Christmas party kind and not the circus kind.  It’s the kind in a room.  A kitchen actually.  And did I mention it wasn’t an elephant at all but a dishwasher?!  No?  Let me tell you all about it.

Our landlord so kindly installed a new dishwasher in this little house for us before we moved because we are first-world, spoiled peeps who can’t not have a machine that does the dirty work for us while we wrangle four kids post-dinner.  *eyeroll*

So awesome, right?  Right.  So, now we’ve got one and we’re SO thankful because, as you probably know, it really does make life just a little easier.  Well, I got a few comments on how great the dishwasher looks painted after the big kitchen reveal and those words were music to my ears because that’s what I wanted everyone to think.  But, listen.  I am not inconsiderate enough to think I should go and paint a dishwasher that isn’t technically mine.  But I really hated how it stuck out of our pretty green cabinets like a rowdy toddler at Mass.
  I sent the above picture to my sister right after I finished “tiling”.

The Big (Little) Kitchen Reveal!!!

Well, this has been FUN, hasn’t it?  Taking our little rental kitchen from what it was to what it is really had me going…for six whole weeks.  I’ve never gotten an entire room finished in six weeks!  It’s kind of a big deal.  And you know what else is kind of a big deal?

OUR KITCHEN!

Subway Tile Wallpaper

It’s week FOUR of the One Room Challenge and that means that I’ve been working solely on this kitchen for five whole weeks.  Maybe that doesn’t sound crazy to you but I’m a jumper – I jump from room to room with projects and never spend more than a week or two in one so this is kind of a big deal for me.  While it feels so good to have an entire room almost finished, I have to admit, I’ve been feeling a little antsy and am excited to move into other rooms.  One more week…

One more week for me and for all of the other featured designers and guest participants.  I’m really excited to see all of those final reveals!  I have a date with an ice cream bowl and a studying husband to sit and browse one night next week!  :D

This week in our kitchen, I brought the boring backplash to life.  When I say “backsplash” what I really mean was a four-inch countertop lip and a painted wall.

This was taken in the midst of painting upper cabinets a few weeks ago.

Here we are today:

DIY Pot Rack from Towel Bars

You say pot, I say rack…

pot…

pot…

YES!  That’s it!  Let’s get excited over here!  We are the proud owners of a neeeewwww pot rack!

Having a pot rack hanging on our kitchen wall wasn’t something either of us has ever desired.  But then enter small kitchen, very little lower cabinet space and oh, looky here, a big empty wall.

One Room Challenge–Week 3

Hey hey!  It’s week T H R E E of the
and over here, things are looking UP!!  No really, they are.  I got all of the upper cabinets painted this week and, oh my, it is CRAZY how much more light bounces through what I already thought was a fairly bright kitchen!

Check this out:

And then take a look at the same area pre-move:
The Almighty said it best with “Let there be light!”  Have you ever gone white in the kitchen (or any room really) and experienced the added light?  It’s great, right? 

I’ve written a few posts on how I paint cabinets in the past and time around the paint can wasn’t much different in the way of technique but I did use a new-to-us paint than I have in the past and got a little smarter as far as set-up goes.

One Room Challenge!!!

You’ll never know how excited I was when I found out that the One Room Challenge just started on April 4th!  If you don’t know what that is, check it out here.  Basically, you take on a room (entirely redo, refresh, remodel, whatever have ya) and you get six weeks to do it.  I’ve always seen it come up on Instagram and other blogs but I’ve been always the spectator and never the participant.  Not this year though!  I’ll be linking up and following along with other guest participants here! 

I’ve got until May 10th to take our kitchen from old to gold-winning and ironically, I started ripping down the wallpaper in our kitchen a week before I found out the challenge was happening so I’m right on time.  But *gulp* I’ll need every single one of those six weeks since I’m on a serious budget and I don’t have the luxury to just go out and buy what I need.  I’ve got to find it secondhand, on clearance, or on mega-sale…you know how I do.  Oh yeah, and I have four little kids running around. 

You might be wondering why I’m tackling a kitchen in a rental house.  Why waste time, energy, and money on something you’ll be leaving in a year or two?  Valid question.  Answer?  Because I love doing this stuff.  As a stay-at-home mom, daily life can get a little monotonous.  It’s a beautiful life and I’d have none other, but getting out my paint brush and planning decor is the equivalent to going out and getting my hair or nails done for me.  It’s self-care – getting to expand my diaper-changing and feeding horizons to project beauty onto the space that I’m changing diapers and feeding in.  I think it’s important to love the space you’re living in too so spending a little bit of money to make that happen here is well worth it, in my opinion. 

With that, here are the plans for the kitchen:
-take down the wallpaper
-paint the walls
-paint the cabinets and replace the hardware
-make a pendant to replace the light over the sink
-redo the fan shade
-repaint the rug (maybe?)
-hang a pot rack
-hang a spice rack over the stove
-install some sort of backsplash

The budget:  $150
Total spent so far:  $18

Here’s the a picture of the kitchen I ran in and took one day before we moved in: Too bad I didn’t think to actually step farther into the kitchen to get a picture.

Ikea Mackapar Hack

I’m baaaaack!!  But still not unpacked.  Ack.  It’s ok though because we’ve done a hack and hung a rack.  So hopefully you’ll give me a little slack. 

Ok, ok, I’ll stop before you feel like you wanna whack me.  ;)  The girls and I have been doing rhyming in homeschool…

Ahem…

We have a situation.  Our back door is our most used door and therefore, where we keep all of our most-used shoes…haphazardly (usually) set on this little shelf (previously a bookshelf in Sebastian’s old room).

It looked a mess because it was kind of a mess.  Our closets are small and lack space for lots of shoes plus I like the idea of shoes being near a door for easy access so this was our situation.  I feel like entry ways should always be clean and uncluttered since they’re the first things you walk into when you come home.  They could make or break a mood, ya know?  When ours is cluttered and messy, it really makes me happy to be home.  So inviting.  Like, welcome home to your peaceful abode…ooh!  Watch out for that little shoe!  *trip and an ankle twist*  Ok, so maybe I’m being a little too dramatic but really, first impressions do count, right?  That can somehow apply here.

Anyway, the wall next to the door was begging to be a functional one so we had to come up with something.

Spotted: Goodwill

We’re trying to get on more of a weekly schedule over here.  We’ve got our daily schedules down pat pretty much but we’re trying to organize our weeks so that we know where certain things are going to fit in.  Things like me getting a little break from the kids for just a smidge of time.  I think they call that self care, right?  It sounds so whiny and poor-me-I’m-surrounded-by-littles-all-day-long and I hate that because, as you know if you’re a mama, one of the hardest things is to be away from your kids…yet getting a little breather once in awhile is good for the sanity aspect.  It’s one of those catch 22 things I suppose.  Mother bear can’t rip herself away from her babies she loves oh-so-much yet if mother bear is asked one more question about why the toilet paper is white or why a marker is called a marker or why we can’t stick things in our ears, mother bear might actually turn grizzly.  You know.  I bet that, if you’re not a mom, you might be able to relate in dealings with coworkers sometimes, yes?  Anyway, our budget doesn’t allow for a mothers’ helper or babysitter (nor does mama’s-girl Gianna) so we’re working with Anthony’s work schedule which makes things a little more difficult on the planning side but as you probably know, challenges are looked square in the eyes ‘round here.   

So far, we’ve pretty much figured out a morning when I can get a couple of hours to do whatever I want/need to do and last week, I spent that morning perusing a thrift store and it. was. awesome.  I feel like my most recent (of which there have been few) thrift store visits have left me feeling disappointed – I’ve found nothing of interest – and like thrifting as a spectator sport is dying out.  Around where we live, there are lots and lots of people trying to make money off of refurbishing furniture and things and so, if you’re not the early bird or the frequent peruser, you’re not the one getting the worm.  So basically, with the ability (or should I say the lack of ability) for me to get to thrift stores early and often, it takes some serious luck for me to bring in a thrift store win.

Anyway, I’m seriously rambling here when really I hopped on to share deets on that thrift store excursion from last week.  For this one, forget about all I said about the luck and stuff because I found SO MUCH GOOD STUFF! 

Look!

Tour De Rental

Prepare yourselves folks.  Prepare yourselves for the most exciting tour of a rental home in blog history.  Ok, so maybe just this blog’s history.  And considering we’ve never rented before, there won’t be much compeition so the honor is all this house’s and the unecessary excitement all mine.

I know I went with the nutshell of the story in the last post but just for a little recap, we’re renting because we sold our house, found another, walked away from that other after the inspection, and had no choice but to rent because we had to close on our sold house.  So, here we are, renting for six months in the hopes that we’ll find a house to buy within that time period.  Fingers still tightly spiraled.

Part of me feels like it’s a little weird to post a tour of a home we’re literally just eating and sleeping in (although I did hang a curtain rod so…) but then there’s that bigger part of me that’s a sucker for house tours regardless of the ownership details.  Maybe you’re one of those interested peeps too and if so, here we go:

Why dontcha come on up onto our teeny porch…

The Little Gray House

Well hellooooooooo there!  It’s been awhile…too long.  I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed the “down time” that having a shop on vacation and a quiet blog provides.  Only kidding.  We moved.  There has been zero down time.  Who am I kidding?!  If you’re looking for a “How to Move with Toddlers” post, I don’t know if you’ll ever find it.  But, if you did, it would be one sentence long and that sentence would read – “Don’t move with toddlers ever, ever, ever, ever.”  If you really have to, well God bless ya heart.  You cray.

But let’s move on since the thoughts of moving still sting just a tad.  I’m sitting here in our unpacked rental (tour coming soon!), pretending like we’re settled in, and it’s all great, grand, and wonderful.  No really, it is.  It’s not so bad having half of your belongings boxed up in one mountainous pile in what could be your dining room.  I’ve really been wanting to live more simply and with less stuff and being forced to do it via a temporary rental is just what I needed, what we needed.  Maybe half of that stuff will just be donated when we realize we didn’t need it later down the road…and maybe not since most of it is home decor stuff and we all know how I feel about that kind of stuff.  ;)

Anyway, I popped in today to talk about *dun dun dun* the house that got away.  It’s not even worth tippity-typing out the novel that it would be to tell you all about the gray house and the saga that went along with it so I’ll try the nutshell route and we’ll see how it goes.

A Grand Entrance

We haven’t been doing much house hunting lately (yep, we’re moving soon-ish, in case you missed it) because we’re still spending every free minute finishing up some big projects at our current house. But there has been a little bit making this post possible.  This next house I’m about to show you, we didn’t really even physically see at all.  It was on our list of houses-to-see but was already under contract when we found it so we were just keeping an eye on it in case that contract fell through.
I loved it based on what I saw on the inside in pictures – good-sized bedrooms, a big kitchen, a big entry way, a double car garage, and ugly as heck.  Every single room had wallpaper.  The fixtures and cabinets were all dated and the curb appeal was non-existent.  But, unless a home inspection proved otherwise, it looked like any updates that needed to be made were just cosmetic and therefore, DIYable and fairly inexpensive.

Its only downfall was the small backyard.  It was on a corner lot and the so the attached garage extended into one corner of the backyard leaving a small corner of grass (maybe a 15’ x 15’ space in) the back far corner.  I was almost willing to overlook that though just because I loved the house so much. 

To Market, To Market

To buy a new house!  But first to list this one within the next couple of months!

Yep, we really, really, really want to move closer to where Anthony works for a good many reasons and so we’re taking the leap this summer and shooting for it.  Cue the tears though because we’ve brought home all four of our babies to this house.