Oops. I forgot to show the finished walls!

I realized that I never posted about my new walls being finished. We got this finished and then when right into the next project, so I got side-tracked a bit. 

I believe this is where I left off in my last post. The walls were going up and the finishing touches were being done so we could paint everything. The process ended up taking longer than what we originally thought, but we love, love how it turned out. 

TA DA......I am in love with our new walls. And the new paint. I ended up going through 8 different paint samples before I found the right color. It is Benjamin Moore Shaker Beige. 


Everything turned out just like I envisioned it would, which is good because Chris had some serious doubts about my vision. 

But he loves them too, which is really good because I didn't want to hear 'about the time Christie decided we needed walls and it turned out to be a complete disaster' for the rest of my life. 


It really is amazing because they look like they have been here all along. 


And I don't think I ever posted my canvas wall. 

I had this set of the beach pictures turned into canvas'. Thank goodness for Groupon. It took me a few months of getting coupons to buy all of these because canvas is expensive!  I got them from Canvas on Demand and they turned out really nice. Most of you will recognize these pictures from our Christmas cards last year. My sister-in-law Kathleen Frank took them for us last summer. 

Right after we got the walls finished, this was delivered. Actually two days after the walls were finished this ended up in my living room: our new wood floors! 


I will post about that whole process in a few days. One word pretty much sums it up though: Dust. 


Thanks for visiting me! 

We have walls!

We are moving fast with our home improvements. Ever since we bought this house, I wanted to change this:

The 2nd level is open to the family room and can get noisy. Sometimes it is hard for the boys to go to sleep because they can hear the television and sometimes it is hard to hear the television if they are upstairs playing. Or if anyone is talking downstairs it travels right upstairs so I really wanted to close up these openings. I had no idea how much it would cost or how difficult it would be. I decided to go ahead and get some estimates to see if this was a possibility for us or not. And thankfully it was very possible! 

Yesterday they started by ripping off the ledges...

and then framing and building walls! 

Here is the back and what it looked like upstairs. 

 

They added soundproofing insulation, and drywalled everything.  

We have walls! I am so excited and hoping this helps keeps the noise from traveling up to down and from down to up a little less. 


Today they are finishing them off with the mudding and texturing, and then we are having everything painted.  I hope everything will be done by the end of the weekend and I will post more pics. 


Thanks for visiting me!

Home Improvements Are Happening Again!

Now that the holidays are over and our trip to Disney World is done :(, we are back to finishing up the kitchen. 


This is what we were left to finish:

We finally hired someone to come out and pull those three center cabinets out so that we can actually put those barstools under the counter. 

We also wanted to do something with this eyesore of a utility sink in our laundry room. This room is right next to our kitchen. The man we hired had the great idea to take the cabinet he was removing from up there, and put it here with a new granite counter top. He said he had a scrap piece of granite that would match our existing granite. 

He showed up bright and early this last Monday and got to work. 

This is right after he removed the 2 piece cabinet that would go into the laundry room now. 

Here is a pic of that cabinet pulled out. See someone familiar in the corner there checking everything out? She was so spazzy on Monday. She would want to check out what he was doing and would peek around the corner at him, but would not dare come close. And every time he would go outside to get something she would bark at him coming back in. All day long and he didn't leave until almost 6. You would think she would have got used to him coming and going after about hour 4, but nope. 

Here is the new cabinet in the laundry room with the new sink top just put in. Yea! Huge Improvement!

And now the cabinet with the third one pulled out and the new cabinet ends installed to give it a finished look. 

And here is the final product! We love it! I now need to get in there and refinish these cabinets and then the kitchen will be done. 

This was the only bad thing. When the cabinets were removed we found out what we were afraid of: no tile under them. The woman we bought the house from left us one box of this tile in the garage. I think it is going to just be enough to fill this space. I hope! 

One of the cool things we had him add were these pull-out recycling bins in the cabinet. We had this ugly, old trash can out for recycling and now we can hide them! 

And here is the new laundry sink and cabinet. Huge, huge improvement. 

 And of course when you start doing home improvements something will break and need replacing. Our dryer broke right before we started this whole thing. We had someone out to repair it and it didn't work and the next repair was going to be more costly. 

So we decided instead of fixing this dryer for the third time, we would just finish off our new laundry room with these:

We wanted to get stainless, but they cost so much more that it was kind of silly to do that. These are huge! I washed our king size bedspread yesterday with no problem. And with two growing boys, I think these are going to be so worth it! 

So that is where we are with the home improvements. I'm just waiting on the tile guy to come and fix the floor before I get into refinishing the cabinets. We have some more big projects we are going to do over the next two months, so stay tuned! 

Thanks for visiting me!

Our Kitchen Reveal-95% Complete!

First off, I have to say that we love our new kitchen!! It took quite a while to redo these cabinets (over two months) and I'm not completely finished yet, but for the most part it is done. 


To refresh everyone's memory on what we started with, how about a few before pictures? 

I don't believe I have ever posted the above picture before, but this is the kitchen on the day we decided to make an offer on the house. We were taking another look before we decided for sure and I snapped a bunch of pictures to look at while we were deciding between this house and another one. 

This picture was snapped on my Iphone right after I got everything unpacked and put away in the new kitchen. 

Then this last picture was when we tried to brighten everything up by painting the walls green. I really wanted that color to work, but it just didn't. I think it brought out the yellow in the cabinets even more and just didn't look right with the granite. 

So next I decided to take on the huge project to redo all of these cabinets too. There were times when I was in the middle of this when I thought what in the world have I got myself into. It felt like all I did was cabinets for two months. I was so sick of cabinets. 

So. Sick. Of. Cabinets.

But then....I finished. We painted the kitchen a nice chocolate brown. And we got new light fixtures that Chris installed. And we decided that the white refrigerator just did not look right and on black friday took advantage of a killer deal on a new stainless refrigerator. And our old dishwasher would leak on the floor sometimes. Not every load that was washed, but after about every 10 or so there would be a puddle of water on the floor. And it was loud. So very loud. So we decided to replace that too with a black friday sale. 

And now we have this beautiful kitchen that we absolutely love!!!!!!!

Once again I used the Rustoleam Cabinet Transformation Kit. (I really think I should be a paid spokesperson for them at this point!) The outside cabinets were done with the Pure White and glaze. The island was done with the leftover Expresso kit I had from redoing the boy's bathrooms earlier this year. So far I have bought two of the white kits and one dark kit, and got two new bathrooms and a new kitchen out of them. Not including the new appliances, this kitchen remodel for the kits, new hardware, paint and new lighting ran us about $600. Not too bad!!!! And another bonus from redoing all of those cabinets is that I don't hate the kitchen floor anymore! I think it really works with the new cabinet colors. 

I still have one last part to finish, which is why this post is titled as 95% complete. 

I decided to wait to do this part after the holidays. We want to have those three center cabinets removed so that we can actually push the barstools under the counter. We will have to hire a handyman for that because we have no idea how cut those out and keep the granite from crashing down. 

So for the year 2011, I have refinished 46 cabinet doors (fronts and backs), 25 drawers and 2 medicine cabinets and completely redone 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself! 

Thanks for visiting me! 

Kitchen Cabinet Sneak Peak

I had every intention of not showing any pictures of our kitchen until we were completely done with the remodel. But we finished the first section this last weekend and I am so excited with how it turned out that I just had to post some pictures!


I forgot to take before pictures of the first section we worked on, so I went hunting through my old pictures and found this one from last Christmas. 

It is a little blurry and not the best pic, but this shows the section we started with: the desk area plus the cabinets to the sink. It was a big area to start with and I won't try and do that many at the same time again. I learned that smaller areas will be better for me to tackle and still manage to keep up with the rest of my life. Last week I felt like all I did was kitchen cabinets and I had to neglect other areas of the house. However, I'm glad that I got a section of top and bottom cabinets done so that we can see how it is going to look. 

Ta da...........The after:

Chris added all the new hardware. Look how perfectly lined up they are! (He made himself a template out of an old cereal box.) 

The green wall color is going to go away too. Imagine a chocolate brown on the walls. And now our kitchen table chairs match the new cabinet colors! That was a happy accident. Gotta love those! 

And for another comparison of what the cabinets looked like before, here is the other side of cabinets that still need to be done. This really shows how the new cabinet color is going to look so much better with the granite counter tops and backsplash. These golden oak colored cabinets don't bring out any of the granite colors at all. 

And here is the keeping it real picture. 

I still have 3 doors to get done for this side. Aww, the wonders of photography to hide things we don't want you to see. :)


I still have lots more cabinets to do to get this job completed. There is also an island that you can't see that has 12 doors and 6 drawers to refinish on it. My goal is still Christmas to be done with everything, but secretly I'm hoping for Thanksgiving! I just have to stay focused on the job. :)


Thanks for visiting me!

Laundry Room Cabinets Transformed

I'm back with another home improvement project. This time we decided to redo the laundry room cabinets. I decided to do those before the kitchen because I want a lighter finish with glaze and I want to make sure we like it before I start the kitchen. It is easier to change a few cabinets in the laundry room than a whole kitchen.


Once again I used the Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations kit. I can not even begin to say how much I love this product. So far my bathrooms are holding up beautifully.


Here is the laundry room cabinets before:

There is nothing terrible with them. We just do not really care for the golden oak. And when I show you a picture of the kitchen, you will be able to see that the cabinets do not go with the granite countertops. 


A closeup of the cabinets. They are just plain ol' oak cabinets. 

And now the after:

This time I used a light kit rather than the dark I used in the bathrooms. I used the Pure White with a glaze. I had never done a glaze before, but I am happy with how it turned out. We still need to paint the room and someday I want to replace the hideous utility sink that is in there. You can't really see the sink in these pictures, but trust me that it is UGLY! 

I think the cabinets will look much better when we get a different color on the walls. 

Chris added the new hardware to the doors. It is from Ikea. I love having hardware! I was always opening the doors from the wrong side. 

Now that we know the laundry room turned out okay we will begin to tackle the biggest project yet:


The Kitchen! I think the distressed white cabinets will blend much better with the granite. We will be changing the green wall paint too. And I would love new flooring! (But I don't know about that yet.)

My goal is to have this done by Christmas. Wish me luck!!!! 


Thanks for visiting me! 

My 2nd Bathroom Remodel Finished!

 I know I said I would be back with more vacation pictures, but I decided to interrupt those posts to show you my latest home improvement! 


Way back in January I said that I was going to redo Connor's bathroom right after I finished Spencer's bathroom.  Well..... I got a little sidetracked, but I finally finished it! It is about 6 months later than I originally thought it would be. 


The real reason it took me so long was because I dreaded the thought of removing more wallpaper. So I kept procrastinating. And procrastinating. And ...you get the idea. 

To refresh your memory of what Connor's bathroom looked like before, I have these lovely photos. When we bought the house, I knew there was this flower border in here. I thought the rest of the bathroom was a sponge paint finish, but nooooo.........it was all wallpaper. 

Lovely wallpaper that was applied right to the drywall. All of that had to be removed before I could do anything else to the bathroom. 

So here is one last shot of the bathroom BEFORE.

 And now for the big reveal.......

AFTER

We love, love, love how it turned out! I redid the cabinets again, added hardware to the cabinets, replaced the mirror and light fixture and painted the now de-wallpapered bathroom. 

We picked the same light fixture that we put in Spencer's bathroom, just a bigger version of it. The new mirror came from Ikea and the hardware was from Target. I really love the new hardware on the drawers. I think it makes the bathroom look updated and in style. 

And I can not figure out how to get decent pictures in a bathroom. I know the colors are all kind of off, but these were the best I could get. The wall color is Benjamin Moore Fiji. And I used the same Cabinet Transformation kit that I used in Spencer's bathroom, Expresso.  I still have half the kit left. This stuff really goes a long way. 

And one last closeup of the new hardware on the vanity drawers. 

And I am very pleased to announce that my house is now completely wallpaper free! Woo Hoo! I will never, ever buy another house with wallpaper in it unless I specify that it will be removed before I take ownership. Wallpaper removal is a seriously dirty and yucky job. 

Thanks for looking at our new bathroom!