The first coat...

After church on Sunday Bryce and I started preparing the kitchen for the major sanding down of all the cupboards. Here is the kitchen all covered in plastic, blocking off the rest of the house. It worked pretty well, although everything still needs dusted, most of the dust was contained to the kitchen.

This picture was supposed to show you all the dust on the counters, floor, everywhere, but as you can see there is so much dust in the air you can hardly see the kitchen!
It took 22 of these little round sanders to get the job done...
Here's how it looked after the dust settled and everything had been sanded:
All the furniture covered in plastic:

And this is how it looked last night after I had laid contact paper and started putting things back in the cupboards. And, this is how they look after the first coat of clear-coat! They look fantastic (at least I think so)! Two more coats to go in here and the Bryce will start on the cupboard doors. Those will take a little longer since both sides need clear coat and he will have to let one side dry before doing the other side.

The kitchen is starting to get back to order, at least enough that I have a little counter space and I am almost done putting stuff away from the bedrooms. Only a few more nights and everything should be back the way it was. Hopefully by the end of next week we will have the hinges and can put the doors back up!

Back to the Kitchen...

Yesterday morning Bryce started removing the paint from the actual cabinets. It is amazing to see what a difference taking away all that black is making to the kitchen!

After only three hours he had already done most of the cabinets!
Today we are getting ready to sand the cabinets, which is of course going to be a pretty big mess, so we have moved everything from the kitchen to the soon-to-be baby's room:
And here is most of our China cabinet on the bedroom vanity:
The cupboards are empty and awaiting a good sanding.
Now I better get off of here and help Bryce get the plastic up, it won't block out all the dust but hopefully it will help!

Guest Room

As part of our plan to get to the baby room we decided that our basement guest room should be finished. That way we can move stuff from the upstairs guest room that will be the baby room, to this room. Everyone already loves this room because it is cool and private and you have your own bathroom. So last weekend mom and I started painting, here are the before pictures:

I decided that I hated this light blue a couple of weeks ago, and in the picture above you can see they did a weird gray paint job on the nook where the bed goes. Here I am painting away:

Mom and I took a break to buy more paint and decided to stop at Great Floors to check out carpet prices. They were having a great deal with free installation and a sale on some good carpet, so we made an order and the carpet was put in today!

When Bryce got home this evening we put the bed back and I started decorating:


Now we have a beautiful, fresh and clean basement room for all the guests that we hope to have when baby arrives!

Carpeted Stairs

When you walk into our house there are two sets of stairs, each with 6 steps. One goes up, one goes down. These have carpet on them and I hate it. The reason for hating it is because you walk on the stairs as soon as you come in the door, so they are perpetually dirty, and dog hairs stick in that spot at the back of the stairs and it looks gross. Vacuuming stairs is really not fun and since my upright vacuum recently died and my roomba does not do stairs, the stairs are looking pretty bad.

We have decided that someday when we re-carpet the house and re-do the kitchen floors we would like to make these stairs hard wood (as well as the kitchen) so they can just be swept and no more carpet to be dirty and stained. However, there is another set of stairs in our house! I know, crazy right? Three sets of stairs!? Anyway, these stairs, again 6 steps, go down into our basement bedroom. This room has not had carpet since we moved in and last weekend my mom and I repainted this room. On a quick run to the store for more paint we decided to stop at a flooring store, just to look. Turns out they were having an amazing sale on really great carpet with free installation! So we picked some carpet, paid our deposit and waited for a measurement.

We guessed that the room was about 12 x 12. The bad news is, we guessed wrong, the good news is, it's a great size room! It actually measures more like 16 x 16 plus the stairs. So we knew the estimated cost that we were given would go up quite a bit. Today I finally heard back on the measurements of the room and these new measurements, plus the stairs, adds almost $400 to what we thought it would be. BLAST!

I'm going today to show him the color I picked and hopefully get set up to have the carpet installed this week, pretty bummed about the huge increase in price, but it will be a beautiful room! And it will be such a nice guest room for all the family and friends that will be visiting to see the new baby!

A remodeling miracle...

I believe this is the first time at "Our House" that we will be showing you a project in process. Last time I wrote about our black cupboards and trying to figure out what to do with them. Bryce took a couple of the smaller cupboards and tried sanding one and then using a paint remover on another. Both of these things worked okay, but weren't great. Then he tried scraping the paint off, and I am telling you it is a miracle, but it worked! The people who painted the cupboards black did not sand the cupboards first to make the paint stay on, so it is turning out to be fairly easy to remove the black paint. I thought for sure we would paint these cupboards a different color and live with them until we could afford to replace them. But at easily $10,000 to replace, an $8 scrapper and $7 in stain is looking much better!

I can't believe I'm going to show you the inside of my cupboards, but here they are, Bryce has taken all the doors to the garage to start removing paint. We will probably be without doors for a while, and then the big scraping of the rest of the cupboards in the kitchen will take place. So that is why you are getting pictures as we go along on this big project.

Here is the freshly scraped cupboard, back to it's original self! Unbelievable! Now it just needs a coat of stain and then a clear coat so that we can easily wipe them off.
This will be one of our more time and physically intensive projects, but I think it is also going to be the most rewarding. Getting our cupboards back to their original look will easily add thousands of dollars to the value of our home and it will totally change the look of our kitchen. I am so excited to see what they will look like when they are all done!

"I think we should paint everything BLACK"

We have recently been discussing what to do with this:

Why oh why did the previous owners have to paint everything BLACK!? I would never think to paint perfectly good wood cabinets any color, but especially not BLACK (and lets not forget the window casings, molding, railing, and fireplace that are also BLACK). When I look at this picture that music from Finding Nemo when the dentist's niece Darla walks in plays in my head. I wish I could sing it for you but I can't, it mostly scary music I guess.

Obviously our kitchen looks a little different than in this picture, you know, because we painted the walls and filled it full of STUFF. But the basic idea is we are getting close, although not quite ready, to do something with these cabinets. I also cannot wait to replace counter tops but kitchen's are expensive and so this project is going to go one small piece at a time. Tonight Bryce is going to attempt to sand one of the small doors to see if it is possible, feasible, and will not make us crazy, if we try to sand them down to the original wood and re-stain them. Although I think this would be ideal, it will also be the messiest project of ALL TIME (alright of all the time I've lived in this house, my parents have definitely had messier projects at their house when I was a kid).

The exciting news is Bryce found enough hinges to replace the current, mostly painted BLACK hinges, on all of the cabinets. He found them on Amazon and paid a total of $35 for 34 hinges, which sell for $3.00 a piece at Lowe's. That is $67 in savings, in case you wanted to know.

So although I have no after pictures for you yet, and in fact it will probably be a while until I do, I just wanted these BLACK cabinets to haunt you today as they are haunting me.

New Year, New Project!

We decided to start off the New Year at "Our House" right by starting and finishing another big project! We haven't really done a big project (like an entire room) in a long time, so it was really fun and felt really good to finish up a whole room. The Laundry Room! This is one of my favorite rooms in the house, not because I love doing laundry, but because it seems like most houses don't have a laundry room, and ours is also our second bathroom, and it's BIG. When we were looking at houses we really wanted two bathrooms, or as I kept saying, at least two toilets. So we were very happy when the house we got had a 3/4 bathroom for the second bathroom. It's great because our guest rooms are downstairs so our guests can have their very own bathroom!

This room also had some really great things about it to start with, the floors are excellent tile, the corner shower is tiled to the ceiling, and the vanity is one with a solid sink and counter top, the toilet is also fairly new, at least compared to the one in the main bathroom.

When we were inspecting the house we discovered that this toilet had been disconnected, a plumber had to fix it for us before we purchased the house, but apparently he did not feel that it was necessary to fix the dry-wall that he cut out (I don't know who this guy was but we did get a good deal, which is probably why he didn't fix the wall).

This is a before picture with the shower and toilet in it, it's hard to tell but the previous owners had repainted (mostly) this room, and when they did they also painted all of the top tile in the shower.

Here you can see why I say they mostly repainted, note that the wall to the right of the window is a tan color while the wall to the left is white.
Here is the first "after" picture! We repainted the walls the same tan that we have in the main part of the house, since we had a couple gallons left over. We scraped all the paint off of the tile in the shower as well as scraped a bunch of build up off of the bottom of the shower. Bryce put in a new brushed nickel towel bar and patched up the holes from the old towel bar.
Over here by the washer you can see where the utility sink was removed, there is rust on the wall as well as a white spot where the wall was not repainted.
Here it is all painted and fresh! Bryce also replaced the outlets and light switches to match the rest of the house and bought the cool rolling cart that is in between the washer and dryer to store all the laundry essentials.
This is a before picture, note the weird placement of the towel ring and the UGLY light fixture over the mirror (which we obviously don't use because there are no light bulbs...)
Ta-Da! A beautiful new light fixture (same as the one in the master bedroom) and a new pretty mirror (the other mirror is kinda cool but does not go with this room at all). We also got a new towel ring and moved it to a better place. Note the new outlets and light switches! This outlet badly needed replaced, I plug the vacuum in here when I do the stairs and it was so bad that the plug would keep falling out while trying to vacuum.
I have been watching HGTV a lot lately, and I am always curious how much a "remodel" costs. So for the first time I kept track and I'm going to tell you (approximately) what we spent to upgrade our laundry room.

Paint: Nothing because we used left overs, but if we had to buy new, a gallon of ceiling paint and a gallon of the tan would be about $30 a piece=$60

New Light Fixture: $25 for fixture, $6 per hurricane=$43

New towel bars: $35

Rolling laundry cart: $30

Mirror: $25

New outlets and switches: $15

Of course since we are constantly doing projects around the house we already had things like paint rollers, brushes, and trays, as well as everything to do the dry-wall. So if you were starting from nothing the cost would be a bit higher, but our total cost for this project was:

$148 (not counting the paint).

We also have our eye on a new brushed nickel faucet to replace the one in the sink, this one sprays all over and does not have a stopper, but they were out at Lowe's last night because it's only $34 and apparently everybody is loving that great deal. So if they get a new stock of them soon we will be replacing the faucet as well.

Bathrooms are often the most expensive of remodels, of course we did not have to replace any sinks, toilets, showers, or floors, which is probably the most expensive part of a remodel. Although laundry is not my favorite chore, going into this nice fresh laundry room makes the trip down the stairs much more pleasant!