KITCHEN!

So lets just pretend that it hasn't been 3 months since I posted last. I could give you a whole long list of rambling reasons why this blog got away from me but none of them would be interesting and none of them would really explain the insanity of 2 fluffy dogs, 3 contractors, and 109 boxes of Ikea cabinets.

So shall we just get on with it then?

The biggest thing on our plate right now has been the kitchen renovation. We took out a load-bearing wall in our kitchen and that opened up the space a LOT. It was necessary to open up the room enough to add an island, which was a huge priority of mine. I remembered all of those late nights over Christmas vacation that I spent making cookies on my mom's island. It truly became the center of our home, and an island was something I had my heart set on.

After we took out the wall, our room looked something like this:

 

 Basically a big empty room. You can see our old small island in the middle of the room.

Next came the big decisions with cabinets. David and I looked at Lowe's and Home Depot. Lowe's offered a fairly good customer service experience but their final quote came in just shy of $11,000. This quote didn't include any fancy cabinets (like glass doors) and all the cabinets were just a standard 36" height. Home Depot informed us they were phasing out their custom cabinets and wouldn't even build us a quote so... yeah. We didn't pursue a kitchen with them either.

Then came Ikea-- who I had suspected would be the winner all along. The cabinets have fabulous reviews, come with a 25 year warranty, and are infinitely customizable. They offered glass doors and 39" upper cabinets with in-cabinet lighting, and we could build in pretty much any option we wanted. The best part? We purchased during a 20% off sale, and our total came in right about $6500. The bad news? We had to assemble them.... ourselves.

That is 109 boxes of Ikea cabinets.

The pros: they were extremely easy to assemble. Truly. Once you've assembled one of them, you can do the rest without needing instructions. The hardware is high-quality and you don't need any hand-man skills to put them together.

We went with the 39" Lidingo cabinets, and I picked a mix of glass doors and solid doors. I chose all drawers for my lower cabinets, including my island. These features (glass fronts, taller cabs, and drawers) were the most expensive options Ikea offered so our total was higher than yours might be if you went with a more standard cabinet.

The cons: our order was missing several pieces, and the nearest Ikea is in Round Rock (almost 3 hours away). Each missing piece necessitates a harrowing trip up IH 35 and many rounds of battle with a kitchen associate after waiting in line for 2 hours to talk to them. Arguing about missing 4 Harlstaag hinges when you have spent close to $7K on cabinets really leaves a bad taste in your mouth. "Order them online!" you are probably thinking. "It will save time!" you are insisting.

This is where I tell you that 2 weeks after we ordered our kitchen, Ikea discontinued their current line of cabinets, meaning all hardware and pieces suddenly became SUPER in-demand. Nothing is available online anymore, meaning you must drive yourself and your grumpy husband up to Round Rock EVERY time you realize you need one more little thing.
 

After many nights spent in the Ikea cabinet factory, David and I are currently sitting here with our project:

 

Upper cabs are just sitting right now until we get countertops installed. You can see the glass front cabs on the right, those will have lighting added also.

Another view that shows the lanterns over the island.

Here is my GORGEOUS slab of soapstone for the island. I cannot WAIT until this gets put in!!!!!! I decided on a pencil edge to minimize chips.

The perimeter countertops will be in honed carrara marble. Similar to this (not our slab).

Its been a ton of work, but we are nearing the finish line! Next time I will talk about details like where we got the lighting, cabinet hardware, and choosing marble countertops (when everyone tells you not to!)

Insanity

Up until this point, David and I have done all of the renovation ourselves.

All of the plumbing, all of the wiring, all of the painting. But there were some obstacles that were too big for us to do on our own. We knew we would have to call in  contractors when we got to the kitchen renovation.

Kitchen? What kitchen? Oh, you didn't realize that our house DIDN'T HAVE A KITCHEN WHEN WE BOUGHT IT?! Nope. The previous owners got foreclosed on and TOOK THE KITCHEN WITH THEM. This left David and I scrambling 2 weeks before we moved in to amass enough Habitat for Humanity cabinets to function for a year or so.

With Habitat for Humanity Cabinets above. 

I painted out all of the wood to match which helped a little bit. The previous owners did leave a few of the lower cabinets, so I sewed burlap curtains for the doors because oh yeah... they took the doors and drawer fronts too.

A view of our fridge on the wall that seperates our Living Room from our kitchen.

My poor husband in our war-zone laundry room. The washer and dryer stuck out into the middle of the room, which is long and narrow.  His face really says it all doesn't it?

Anyone who has ever done a kitchen renovation knows how pricey they can be. Anyone who has ever met me knows what kind of taste I have. Both of these factors, combined with a house that had almost nothing to work with in the way of an existing kitchen has added up to a HUGE renovation. Sometimes you can limp along and update things without doing a full gut-job. You can repaint cabinets, switch out hardware. But that is assuming you HAVE cabinets, or that you HAVE hardware. We had neither, so we had to start from scratch.

The first thing on the list was to remove the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room. This is the floor plan of our 1st floor, pre-renovation:

I knew from the moment we first toured the house that the red wall had to go. It's the wall you see above that the refrigerator is on. It made the kitchen feel small and choppy, and the island was so narrow, I could only fit the width of the sink and nothing more. It wasn't an actual working island-- more like a sink just floating in the middle of the room.

The problem is that the red wall is load bearing. That means that it is carrying the load for the floor joists upstairs. In renovation sometimes you can just go knocking down walls like crazy, and other times they are load-bearing and you have to re-support that weight if you remove the wall. Unless you want your 2nd story to come crashing down.  Which we did not....

So in came the contractors... We have hired them to do the following:

• Remove the load bearing wall and open up the kitchen to the living room
• Relocate the doorway into the laundry room
• Put up a fence around 2 boundaries of our property
• Remove a false soffit in the entryway
• Frame in a pantry
• Add tons of electrical

Our new layout will look something like this:

It's not a huge change when you see it just drawn out, but it feels SO MUCH better already. The blue boxes in the laundry room are the washer and dryer. David and I relocated them last weekend. It took us almost a week to re-run all the plumbing underneath the house. Our timeline was not helped by the addition of 2 days-old kittens that we found underneath the floorboards in the laundry room. I had to stop, bottle feed them for 2 days, and then get them to a shelter before we could continue.

And here is where we are as of this morning... The washer and dryer have been relocated successfully. You can see my antique farm sink waiting to be installed.

This is the view looking into the kitchen where the wall USED to be. Today the contractors are going to put up a beam that can carry the weight of the joists overhead.

Until then we are living in a state of chaos. Our new kitchen cabinets from Ikea arrive on Saturday, but of course we are not even CLOSE to being ready to install them. If things are quiet on the blogging front, please understand that we are up to our ears in sheetrock dust over here and sometimes its hard to get the energy to update.

Soon I will write a post about choosing cabinets, and what the final vision for the kitchen will be.

Jumping in-- and making it work.

So here we were, eyeballs deep in the renovation of the worlds biggest home. It was like the Winchester mystery house-- behind every door a new horrible surprise awaited. Only instead of charming doors-that-lead-to-nowhere our home's surprises included a scorpion infestation in the shower line, a septic line plugged up with concrete, and a gray-water line that had been blocked with a brick.

Photos from the Winchester "Door to Nowhere" and "Stairway to Nowhere"

On top of that, our AC compressors had been intentionally mis-wired, all the kitchen electrical had been cut and tampered with, and the house was missing all of it's interior doors and toilets. And lightswitch covers. And window coverings.

So with no plumbing, no electrical, and a few painted walls... we moved in. Y'all it was scary.

We were going from a cute, completely new apartment in Gruene (land of Pat Green and Lone Star) to a ramshackle 5 bedroom orange monstrosity in the land of armadillos and meth addicts.... you're welcome Canyon Lake tourists association for next year's tagline.

We moved in exactly a year ago, and things have taken a turn for the better since then-- but it was a long, hot, expensive summer.



I learned that re-using things you already have can go a long way in the interim to making your house feel like home. The front door has terrible dated 1980's brass sidelights. I hate them. So I grabbed some louvered shutters my dad had given me and screwed them directly into the door frame. It was a fast update that covered up the offending panels without costing me a dime. We got the exterior lights from Lowe's as a wedding gift :)

I don't have a before picture, but it was very similar to this:

We hung a flag, we planted ferns, and these small changes made it feel more like home.

At first I was so overwhelmed with the horrible orange paint inside the house, I was scared to have ANY color at all. But the longer we lived there, the braver I got. After I retiled the mantle and installed the new surround (made from salvaged and reclaimed lumber from old homes in SE Texas), I got bold. 

Boring mantle before

Peacock mantle now!!!

My advice is that it's just paint. It's cheap and easy to paint over it if you make a mistake. And lest you think I am some sort of decorating goddess-- ask David how fun it was to completely repaint our bedroom ceiling when the "soft aqua" I picked out turned into "Crest Toothpaste" on the ceiling. It's just paint-- don't be scared in your own house. Aint nobody got time for that.

So it's been a year, and from here on out I will update on the current state of renovations instead of trying to catch you up on everything that has come before. Enjoy this tour in pictures from our last 12 months:

Entryway

Mantle Tiling

Move-In Day. Oh my God.

Concrete countertops over tile 

A few other important things happened along the way:

Rehearsal Dinner

And at the end of the day, we live here. No amount of armadillos and meth-addicts can make this not worth it....

In our yard at dusk.

Sunrise over Canyon Lake.

Easy and Cheap(ish)-- We paint ALL THE THINGS!

Luckily (or unluckily) for us, I was working part-time in the paint department at Lowe's when David and I bought the house. Every single wall downstairs was painted semi-gloss orange. The neighbors told us the previous owners had a home in New Mexico and they were trying to recreate the Adobe look in our Texas farmhouse. Naturally, instead of BUYING a southwestern style home, they just painted everything orange and called it good enough.

This is Southwest....

This is just.... orange.

So we started with paint. It was something fairly easy that we could do ourselves, we needed to do a TON of it and my Lowe's connection meant I often had access to mis-tinted paints at a huge discount. Also, during a time when our septic was failing, the A/C units had been pillaged and hot-wired, and the hot-water line busted IN THE FRONT YARD as we pulled up with the U-Haul, it was important that David and I were able to take control of the renovation in a small way. We couldn't fix all of the many MANY issues that were adding up into the thousands, but we could grab a $39 gallon of paint and feel like we were making headway. 

The thing we weren't prepared for was the sheer VOLUME of paint it would take to make a dent in our home. The Living room took 18 gallons alone. Everything needed to be primed, and then several coats of paint. Don't tell me to use 2-in-1 paint with primer, because we did that. Don't tell me to use a more expensive type of paint because we did that too. Orange semi-gloss is impossible to cover. There was no solution except many many coats. 

Here are the overhead beams in the living room getting their first coat of stain. You can see here that we have primed the walls and ceiling. 

Remember those awful cedar stairs? They got stain and about 412 coats of white paint to match our trim. Here is a before-and-after shot. Start to finish, the stairs took about 72 hours and a case of beer. Painting like this is exhausting, because it requires you to contort yourself to fit those little bitty spaces. 

Painting the woodwork in our house was a huge challenge. I really dislike natural woodwork (except in the case of Victorian houses where it was never painted) and every windowsill, doorframe, and moulding in our house was raw cedar. It took 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of Valspar paint before it looked okay. 

Bedroom after. Color: Valspar Ultra in "Notre Dame"

Ceiling is a super-pale blue called "Watery" by Sherwin Williams. 

The front office got painted a super-dark greenish gray that was a custom mix I did at Lowe's.

Everything else we painted white until we could decide on more permanent colors. For what it's worth I learned a lot about painting. I got very VERY good at "cutting-in", and I swear I will never use Behr paint again. I love Valspar Ultra and Olympic ONE from Lowe's, but the Olympic ONE has since been discontinued. The Olympic ONE (if you can find it) is great for highly-textured walls like ours because it is thinner yet very pigmented. It sank into all the crevices of our knockdown texture, and gave really good coverage. 

Valspar Ultra is wonderful also, and it's handy that they can mix any color from Benjamin Moore, Martha Stewart, etc. if you just know the paint name. All the finishes in our house are Flat or Eggshell because I  just prefer the matte look. 

David and I estimated that we have spent close to $3,000 just on paint alone. We started painting the exterior also before we realized we couldn't get high enough on our ladders. So since last July, the Orange Monster has affectionately been called the Creamsicle, since it is now (to our neighbors DELIGHT) two-tone. In these pictures, you can really tell how ORANGE it was before. The listing photo made it seem sort of a dusty-tan or peach but it was ORANGE.

Next time-- we decide what to do about our plywood floors....

We were either very stupid or very smart....

The closing process drug on for weeks, during which time David and I couldn't get our hands on anything in the house.

We took possession towards the end of May, and then started teaching summer school just a week later. That meant our weeks were completely jammed and we crammed 6 months of reno into about 7 weekends.

During this time, we had no central A/C (previous owners had taken the compressors) and no working plumbing. It took a complete septic overhaul to the tune of $1400 before we didn't have to pee in the woods anymore.

But before I get into the details of what we tackled first, let's take a tour of how the Orange Monster looked on Day 1. Let me be clear: David and I STOLE this house. We paid almost $100K less than tax value (and it was probably undervalued to begin with). We would not/could not have taken on a project like this unless the financial gods had thrown us a bone.


Downstairs you walk into a large entry.

There is an office to your left, and a master bedroom with ensuite bathroom. Towards the back of the house is the living room/dining room/kitchen and the largest laundry room I have ever seen.

The office wasn't too bad. Sure the orange paint wasn't pretty, but it was liveable, and had tons of natural light.

This semi-gloss orange paint was in every room downstairs and most of the ones upstairs too.

Lets continue on to the master bedroom:

 This was taken we we first started working on painting ALL the cedar moulding. 

Here I am trying out paint colors. This hallway leads to the master bathroom. You can see the filthy carpet above. 

Off this room is the Living room, and here is where the WTF'ery really gets turned up a notch (or six). The laminate flooring that is shown in the office picture had been ripped up in the living room. There wasn't much appealing about it, so I wasn't sad to replace it.

These beams were one of the biggest selling points! I fell in love with them. 

I should note here that it's now been a year since we ripped out the carpet and laminate and I'm still living with plywood floors. I will feel so high-class when I don't live in daily fear of a splinter. 

 Living room looking into dining room. The blue is the underlayment from the ripped up flooring. 

HAHAHA. This was the kitchen. Where do I start?!

Upstairs there were 4 more bedrooms, another fireplace, and 2 more bathrooms. I'll just give you a brief photo tour so you can truly appreciate the previous owners design-sense. 

The cedar stairs in all of their glory.... ugh.

I'll leave you to marinate on those images in all of their peach and orange glory. David and I were completely overwhelmed and completely excited with all of the potential of this home. It didn't have my green shutters, but I could see the great bones through all of the disaster.