Kitchen Update

We have now completed the majority of the upstairs of our house...

Since no one probably wants to see a ton of construction pictures here are a quick before and after, as well as a list of things that we fixed. We will start with the kitchen and keep posted here for more and more updates!

Before:

In Progress:

We are in love with the way it is turning out!

The kitchen by far has been the most time consuming of our renovation. 

But has become one of our favorite rooms...and now....the list

• Cabinets removed, painted, painted painted (painting cabinets is probably the worst and most time consuming portion of the kitchen. I hated me.) coated with a gloss, and rehung.
• All walls were torn down and put back up with new sheetrock. That means mud, tape, texture and paint for our new kitchen.
• Replaced subflooring
• The warped wood floors in the kitchen were taken out and J laid down our slate tile and grouted and sealed the floors.
• We had a bar built and a custom cabinet for a wall oven. 
• New Sink
• New Faucet
• New Stovetop
• New Oven 
• New Fridge
• Installed Butcher Block counters (and have loved everything about them)
• Recessed lighting and installation of pendant lights.
• Installed floating shelves above the sink

Still left to do:

• Install the remainder of the cabinets and put the doors on.
• Install the microwave...it is still in a box. That's right.
• Install hardware (handles on cabinets)
• Add trim on cabinet bases 
• Add molding to the top of the cabinets

Our kitchen was always going to be the biggest challenge. It is considered a galley style kitchen and offered limited space. We at first decided that we were going to move the kitchen altogether....that idea got old really fast. We then decided to add a bar to offer a little more of a seating option and a lot a TON of counter space. Once we had decided the layout, we considered having someone come and spray our cabinets...our one and only quote...$7,000...yeah that is so not happening. So we removed the cabinets and decided to DIY. We had a few extra cabinets built for the space, but other than that used what we had and painted our little oak cabinets a clean, glossy white. We opted for the white to make the space seem a little larger and lighter. Painting cabinets can be described in one word. Hell. That is all i will say about that. 

At first we considered keeping the wood floors, because lets face it, that was one of the few bonuses that came with our little 75' beaut. The wood floors in the kitchen had endured a little bit-o water damage. I'm sure the fact that the sink and the dishwasher were on opposing sides of the kitchen? Smart. After a little deliberating we decided to rip out the wood floors in the kitchen and lay down a slate tile that would contrast with the pretty white cabinets. After the floor had been tiled and was about to be grouted, we had discovered that the kitchen floor was bowing in certain areas, and the subfloor needed to be reinforced. Luckily it was only in a few areas and it was able to be adjusted with only removing a few of the tiles. The room was taken down to the studs, and was put back together again. There are still a few things left to do in the kitchen, but is becoming exactly what we wanted.


Attached to the kitchen is a large dining space. The house thankfully came with the big skylights and they are before one of our favorite features! This room is still a little bit of a work in progress, but before i get to that here is the before.... 

and the after....

This room basically needed a paint touch up and a removal of the "kitty condo" that the previous owners had kindly installed for their hoard of kitties. Basically if you look above the bar counter there was about a 3 ft by 3 ft hole in the wall that was lined with a nice urine infested carpet. Tasty.  We had that quickly removed and covered and hope to never see another kitty cat room again. Pleaseandthankyou. Recessed lighting and a sassy little light fixture make me squeal when i see them. The electrician added an art light as well to light up our favorite picture. We feel fancy sometimes. Pairing that with the mustard wall makes me happy beyond words. Go ahead and judge the mustard...cause' we are in love! As for where we got most of our things in our home....we have become VIP members at the following stores:

Ikea- The as is section makes me wonder why i pay full price at any time at Ikea...yes i am aware that Ikea is already cheap....but even cheaper Ikea items are just as amazing. YES!

RC Willey Outlet Center- Our stove-top/range is a five burner touch screen little number that we got for a killer deal, and makes me feel high tech...and a pretty classy cooker. We also got our dishwasher here....and are so grateful to have a dishwasher!!!!!!!

Lowes and Home Depot- We got an amazing deal on our fridge in the as-is section at Lowe's...there happened to be a small ding in the back of the right hand side of the fridge...this = 50% off....yes please! I promise we really should have some sort of membership card to the HD. I can't even count how many runs to home depot we have had....i should have kept track, but needless to say there will be countless more as we continue to reno our house. 

How did this happen?

We are just two 22 year old newlyweds.

Buying an old house.

With intentions of fixing up this beauty.

...and have little to no experience in anything renovation.

Lovely.

We have decided to start this blog to show family and friends our progress from making this 1975 wreck of a home, into something modern and eclectic. Mucho better. When people find out we bought a house the instantly think of something more along the lines of this....

Bahahahhahahahaha!!! NAH!!! Not even close.(altough it would make us sound really amazing if so) We bought below what we could afford with full intentions of renovating our house into somewhat of a modern marvel as this little lovely above. I figured it could possibly be interesting for people to understand how we came across our house. If not. Stop reading here. Thank you.

We have been married since December 2010. So basically for the past 9 months we have lived in our adorable little duplex in Salt Lake. Although we love our little 600 square feet, and the 30 minute commute to work, in May we nonchalantly started browsing the KSL classifieds nightly in search of a future home. We honestly were not expecting to move into a home within the next year, or two, or three. We honestly just liked the idea of having our own space. A space where we could paint the walls, have two bathrooms and hang nails in the walls to our hearts content. Yeah, we are super high maintenance as you can tell.

We browsed at houses in the areas around our work, and even drove around hoping to find some homes that were for sale by owner. No such luck. We then resorted back to KSL to be our crystal ball, jimminy cricket or genie to find us our house. Everytime we logged on there was always this dump of a house listed by about 10 different realtors. It always had silly titles such as "Your Dream House Awaits" or "Real Hard Wood Floors" as the selling point. It made us giggle. We looked into it once and after seeing the pictures of the house online were completely creeped out at the condition the house was in. We continued looking and looking and for some reason kept coming back to that house. Perhaps the stained carpets and dingy walls lured us in? Anyways, we decided to call and schedule a time to see the house when we got home from our vacation to Seattle. Done and Done. Scheduled for the Monday back from our vacation.

Driving up to the house, we were able to see the full condition...and quite frankly it creeped us out. We discovered the home was HUD owned (basically meaning the people living in it lost their house and it was owned by the government). For us this was a huge bonus, thinking we could get a way good deal out of this place. Which was true. The house had dropped an additional $20,000 since it was first listed and honestly was beyond an amazing deal.While we went through the home, the first thing to hit us was not the glam 70's chandelier in the entry way, or the creepy kitty nook, but the rank smell of cat urine. I never grew up with kitties, therefore did not realize quite what i was smelling, however i now know, and i don't like it. As the realtor (Destiny, we heart her) walked us through, we....okay...i, basically kept my arms folded and didn't touch things for the fear of getting some kitty pee disease. The house was ridiculous. I mean come on...there was a nook...in the kitchen....for kitties to sit in. We were so disgusted that someone actually lived in that thing. Not to judge them, but c'mon...who has hello kittly doorknobs in the kitchen? There was a lot of potential in that house, interesting layout, hardwood floors and a large laundry room was quite enticing. But we could not get over the condition of the house. I remember as Jarrick and I walked out to our car in silence, drove to the gym...in silence...Jarrick turned to me and said, "there is NO WAY we can live in that house." Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

We were discouraged and decided we could live in our duplex for longer and that things would work out when the time was right. Jarrick and i talked with both of our parents about how disgusting that house was. I belive phrases such as "disgusting", "kitty pee" and "creepy" left our mouths far too many times. It was settled. We were not buying that thingthatisnotahousebutagiantcreepfest. Period.

After a few days and a lot of discussing with people, we decided we saw the house as more of an investment than a "move-in-ready" home. With A LOT of loving goodness and even more hard work we decided we could flip that house and make it something to look at! Ow Ow!! All the other houses would look at it with envy one day...we could feel it. Basically from that point on things were pretty smooth sailing in regards to buying a house. We realized it takes a lot of bank statements, a million documents, lots of finger crossing and prayers, and of course and a whole lot of faxing (all thanks to Jar) to get this house to become ours.

On closing day, August 29th, 2010. We bought our little baby of a house, or i should say our old baby of a house. Technically that house is old enough to be our mother...well kinda, she would have to be 14, but that is getting creepy thinking about a house being our mom. We have people asking us how the house is coming along quite oftne, and we love sharing where we are at in renovation! We thought the simplest and honestly the most fun way of going about sharing our house reno would be through this blog. Endless pictures and obviously wordy posts about our beauty of a beastly home. We hope to move in by the beginning to mid November, which is giving us about a month and a half to get the home to a "livable" state, but of course the renovating continues once we move in! We hope this will be great for everyone to watch this house transform.

Love,

Elle