The mess of progress - our kitchen remodel

I watched them tearing a building down,

A gang of men in a busy town.

With a ho-heave-ho and lusty yell,

They swung a beam and a sidewall fell.

I asked the foreman, “Are these men skilled,

As the men you’d hire if you had to build?”

He gave me a laugh and said, “No indeed!

Just common labor is all I need.

I can easily wreck in a day or two

What builders have taken a year to do.”

And I tho’t to myself as I went my way,

Which of these two roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder who works with care,

Measuring life by the rule and square?

Am I shaping my deeds by a well-made plan,

Patiently doing the best I can?

Or am I a wrecker who walks the town,

Content with the labor of tearing down?

(source)

Our very outdated house has just been updated. Here is our journey:

The wall we tried to remove had a vent hidden inside. Yikes. So my awesome husband just moved it to the other side of the kitchen and closer to it's final destination. Yeah, he rocks....

The western cabinets are gone!

The ugly vent cover is gone! This was so therapeutic for me to throw away. 

The mister connecting the new HVAC vent on the other side of the kitchen. Did I mention he rocks my socks?

Chaos. Ugliness. The picture of progress. 

The wall (and vent) are gone!!!

Thank you, Electrician. I always wanted my basement to look like Swiss cheese. 

Installation begins.... THANK YOU to our friends at BC Builder's Supply Inc. !!

This GIANT fridge was always in the way of someone, something for weeks. And all the moving it around scraped up the floor. :( But it is awesome to have a GIANT fridge for our food. 

On the other side of our new BFF Tom is our added floor to ceiling pantry that took the place of the wall we removed. What an improvement! We have so much new storage space in the kitchen that entire shelves are empty right now. 

Removal of old counter tops. 

Out with the old.... I am bursting with excitement!

Instead of this ugly glued-on 80's panel of particleboard, we put cabinets on this side of the sink and extended the counter top....

... but we had to keep this weird wall dividing the cabinets because of this pipe wiring. 

The patched wall and new vent in the proper place. 

Our new design of kitchen came from the interior designer at Lowe's. He has his MA in Interior Design and we had a lot of fun with him. I didn't want to mess up this huge investment with my horrible indecision and lack of coordinating colors or something, so I asked him to plan a design based on our floor color and appliances. He suggested the layout, counter top color, cabinet color and door design. We approved and then picked our own sink, faucet, handles, and the new light fixture.

I am hesitant to post pictures of the new cabinets and counter tops because it is not quite done. The back splash tile is not installed yet. We're looking for the right person with the right price to do it. Any suggestions? Despite my hesitations, here is the most recent and updated kitchen:

Thank you to my Uncle Bill for installing the under-counter lighting!! This was a bonus for us; something we were not planning on doing but came together nicely. He even added a third switch on the wall so it is all in the wall. 

I love our new faucet and sink! Deeper sink, higher faucet, pull down sprayer head, and it even came with a soap dispenser pump, which I love! Simple pleasures...

You can just ignore the patchy, holey red wall in the background. That will be covered with the tile below.

Our new light fixture. Ug, the old one was cracked, disgustingly grimy, and SO 80's.

This kitchen always was lacking a pantry, but not anymore! This was the designer's idea to maximize storage without crowding out the dining room too much. 

This is the view from the living room. These cabinets are where I had been sitting and removing the painted panel in the previous picture. 

Although it is not completely finished, we are extremely pleased with the outcomes and updates. This house never had better owners than us; we are so good to her. ;) 

What what do you think of the improvements!?

living in a construction zone

When we bought our townhouse Jared and I knew there were both blessings and curses of owning your own home. Remodeling is both of those. A blessing because you can improve your home however you like. But a curse because it is expensive, chaotic, and time consuming. 

It has been busy around here. First, we finally fixed a leak in the upstairs window. Depending on the angle of wind, rain would drip right through the window and into the room. Yikes. It is fixed now, and we enjoy rain storms a lot more than we used to. 

We bought this bad boy fridge on craigslist and it has been a great fridge. It was a third the price of a new one, and will be great in our remodeled kitchen. 

Speaking of the kitchen, these are the old cabinets. We removed them last week and it felt therapeutic to see them hauled away in the trash. They were so gross, broken, and ugly. My house smells less like "old house." :)

this one was a beast to remove! demo was supposed to be the easy-peasy part.

My hero of a husband!! Many, many times I feel paralyzing anxiety when I think about remodeling the kitchen. We are doing as much as we can on our own, and with the help of a friend. Which is why I'm stressed. This is not where our talents and intuition lie, BUT Jared is impressing me. He is very good at research, so using that strength he's learning a lot. He's been my motivational speaker more than once, telling me not only should we do it to save money, but we CAN do it with excitement. I appreciate his optimism, drive, and hard work. Like I said, my hero!

Our new kitchen! ...sitting in the dining soon. 

Since the new cabinets arrived on Tuesday we have been working, but it is such a slow process. With every step forward we take a couple steps back. We have run into unforeseen roadblocks: a vent in the wall we're removing, not enough space in the floor to fit the new duct, buying the wrong materials, measuring wrong, working too late at night with a foggy brain, the wrong sized cabinet showed up. We're doing our best. But we sometimes learn things the hard way. Oh well. We fix it, and move forward. I'm holding on to what an improvement it will be when it's done!!

Any advice for us DIY kitchen newbies? 

I don't want to grow up...

I hope my children enjoy their childhood; that they look back and think, "I had so much fun I didn't even know I was learning so much!" Everyone, please help me remember this, because sometimes I was too serious for my (and their) own good. 

I cannot get enough of this picture. Her face and especially CHIN make me so happy. 

My kids sit and play in the backyard mud all the time. That's why the bum of their clothes look like this.

Mining for treasure

This is what my garden looked like back at the beginning of the Spring. It has definitely grown. We have eaten the lettuce greens and Swiss chard. The cabbage and cauliflower are not growing like I thought they would, though. I am still trying to figure out this gardening stuff. Oh, and the plastic snakes have done a good job of keeping the squirrels and bunnies away. They are my watch-dogs. 

These greens have grown to their fullest, been eaten, and are growing back. 

Family festival at the elementary school. We barely made it for the last hour, but the guy loved it.

front step

The front step. The introduction to my house. The first impression. The front porch is kind of a big deal. I think I finally like what I've got going on here after a year and a half and indecision. Both the functionality and beauty please me. Both need to be present for me to like it in my house.

 Gecko for good luck; a housewarming gift from a friend. A lovely sounding wind chime. Living house plants and the flowers that remind my neighbor of Dr. Seuss. The feathers we collected from the farm found a home in our spider plant tucked back there. What else do you do with one lonesome but tragically beautiful peacock feather?!?

 A yard sale bench with storage under the seat! Thank. You. It was only 3 bucks! It needs a new coat of paint that I may or may not ever get around to, but at least I have the original black paint. The owner threw it in for free. :)

 Potted sage, catnip, and now stevia and a baby spider plant have joined the front potted garden.

I really enjoy living plants but I know I have no special talent for keeping them alive, so this is a wonderful success for me. Thanks to farmer Leigh and my mom for providing all these plants!

and it begins

And the painting of our walls begins...

Can you see it? The patch I painted this week?! There was an ugly white spot where there was no paint under the giant Verizon box we removed out of the dinning room. The dinning room! Of all places, the previous folks put the Verizon battery back up box in plain sight of the front room and in the dinning room. So, it had to be moved to the basement. No biggie, except there was no paint underneath and NO information about the paint on the wall already. No color, primer, even brand left behind by the sellers. So it became my task to experiment. And it isn't a perfect match but it is certainly an improvement. And that is why they call it home improvement. :) Oh, not to mention that I filled in four holes before painting. I am so proud of my not handy self. 

food, farm, and fixing

Amazing Russian potato salad!! Thank you to Valentina from our previous ward for the recipe.
Equal parts of:

1. potatoes, boiled then peeled 
2. carrots, boiled then peeled 
3. white northern beans, cooked
4. dill pickles
5. canned beets
6. sauerkraut

Combine all ingredients, add a bit of oil and salt and pepper to taste, and devour!

The sauerkraut made for the distinct flavor and finally I found a recipe that the ENTIRE family loves that uses lots of my homemade sauerkraut. I made a giant bowl and it was gone in two days. All four of us just kept coming back for more. I should share my sauerkraut recipe, and I will...... in another post. :)

Picking raspberries down on the farm. We also took home gleaned broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, and sorrel. During our feather hunt we found a beautiful ostrich feather and two duck feathers that decorate our front porch. We LOVE our farm!

And this beast is the bush in front of the house, in the process of being trimmed to 1/4 its size. I finished after this picture was taken. She is a nasty thing, full of spider/cob webs, bird poop, little white pods that look like larva, and coated with an oily black residue. Any geniuses out there know what plant disease this might be? I cleaned it up with a trim and a power wash, but the residue and webs are back a week later! No other neighbors have bushes with this problem!