Scraplog

The Progression: The Kitchen Part 1

Recently I realized that when I started blogging I didn’t show very many pictures of the house. Because of that, there are a lot of rooms that I didn’t show what they looked like before to what they look like now. Plus, a bunch of the rooms have changed multiple times because I like to change things… a lot :) I thought it would be fun to revisit some of the rooms in our house and show the progression of them since we moved in.

Today I decided to start with the kitchen because I think it’s the room that had changed the most and yet it’s the room that I now change the least. Make sense? That’s because we made all of the changes right at the beginning and haven’t really changed much since then. Which is why I rarely post pictures of it :)

So are you ready? Do you want to see what it looked like when we bought it? Okay, here goes:

Ummm… ya. It’s really ugly right? We didn’t live there very long before we rectified the situation! Here’s the story. We moved to Tennessee in March of 2006. Jason and our good friend Clark drove the Uhaul from OR to TN and I flew out a week later with the cat (yes, Sydney flew with me as my carry-on!). The day after I arrived we started our house hunting. I was super excited and didn’t waste any time :) The very first house we went through was the house we now own and after touring several others we knew this was the house for us. So the next day we made an offer and when they accepted, we were thrilled!

A couple weeks later my parents happened to be flying from Brazil back home to Oregon after a 2 week mission trip and since their layover was in Atlanta, they just took an extra long layout over (3 days) and came to visit us. It was their first time seeing our new state. Since we were still under contract, we asked our realtor if she could get us into the house again even though we didn’t own it yet. She could and she did! So we all went over there to show them our soon to be house.

From the beginning we had planned on renovating the kitchen immediately and so we asked my Dad for his expertise (as I’ve mentioned before he owned a cabinet shop for over 30 years). They took down detailed measurements of the kitchen and as we were talking about it he told us he thought he could build the kitchen cabinets in Oregon and have them shipped out here! We hadn’t even considered that option but of course that was my number one choice. So when they got back home they looked into it and found that it would not only work but be the best option for us! I was beyond excited to have a kitchen made by my Dad and both of my brothers also worked for him at the time so the cabinets are actually made by my brothers and Dad. And my Mom helped design it. It’s a family affair :)

While they were in Oregon building everything, we had some work to do ourselves. First, in May, we moved into the house. We unpacked some things but since we had a lot to do in the kitchen before the cabinets were arriving in June, we got straight to work on the kitchen. We began by ripping out the existing cabinets.

Can you see the lovely bi-fold doors behind me? Those were out of there in a heartbeat! There were actually bi-fold doors in practically every open doorway in the house. Anywhere that didn’t have a proper door like the bedrooms and bathrooms, had bi-folds. But no longer :)

I don’t have a before picture but there used to be a desk in this space but we thought we would use a pantry more and it was nice and deep so it gives us lots of room.

The kitchen was also the only room in the whole house that had a popcorn texture on the ceiling. It took a bunch of time to scrape it off (with a spray bottle and scraper) but it was worth it. We also figured out why they put the texture on. There had been some damage and rather than fixing it properly, they just covered it up. Not so great :) But my amazing husband fixed it. Here is one of the spots before:

We also put in can lights and got rid of the florescent that you can see Jason looking at in this picture:

Another thing we ripped out was the window seat bench. I normally like window seats but this one was ineffective since there wasn’t room for a table when the window seat was there. We decided it would be better to do away with it and put a small table there than no table at all.

The next exciting thing to happen was the wood floors. The entryway, the kitchen, and the dining room were all getting new wood floors. When we moved in the kitchen had linoleum, the dining room had carpet, and the entryway had parquet. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the floors to be really, really, dark, almost black. We searched high and low in town but no one carried them. When we started searching online, they seemed to be out of our price range. Then, after a bunch of searching, we finally found some. Besides the cabinets, this is my favorite part of the whole redo. I love the dark wood floors!

In May, I already had a trip planned a to visit my Mom’s family in Idaho with my Mom. So while I was there, having a wonderful time, Jason’s parents flew out from Oregon to help Jason lay our new wood floors. Aren’t they the best? When I got home, I was so happy to see how gorgeous they looked. Here are some pictures of Jason and his parents working hard while I was out playing :)

Okay, so I realize this post is getting really long so I will stop there for now and pick up where we left off tomorrow :) Stay tuned!