2-Stepping Through Our Kitchen Remodeling

Remodeling the kitchen has been like a country 2-step dance. The steps are simple and the music is slow but put the two together and I still end up getting off beat. We knew what we wanted to do to the kitchen (well, ha, the whole house for that matter) but throw in time and money (a lot) and it starts to get a little off beat. :) But it's all getting done and so worth the dance!

 Well if you saw the last kitchen post, you'll remember that the kitchen was completely gutted! I can happily say that took place BEFORE we got married and moved in! The next step was to put in new cabinets, a sink, & dishwasher. A shout out to both of our dad's for their skill in helping with that! And now here am I with my first, but far from the last, staining project.

 Danny's helping stain the cabinets while I get the doors.

 Ta da! Here's our humble little cooking area!

 And here, we've added some backsplash, AND my favorite part . . .  our double oven, stovetop! We saved up for 6 months to get that, and used my grandma's old electric skillet (that even SHE didn't use anymore ha) in the meantime!! Talk about having creative meals when you can only microwave and use an electric skillet. It's was like college all over ago, although I'm pretty sure I had better facilities in college. :) Even though I don't cook now as much as a good Harding wife (ha) should,  I do appreciate it very very much . . .  and so does Danny ;)


The dance isn't over yet, keep looking for more kitchen updates. Trust me it gets better! :)



Between the Walls

While putting up new drywall, we figured out that there use to be a door way from the master bedroom to the living room that got covered up. So I thought it would be fun to put something in that gap in the wall before we covered it back up. As you can see from the picture below I found a Jack head that I thought would be good to put in our "time capsole".

Just incase, Mr. Jack would ever be discovered by future owners (we, ourselves, are finished with tearing down this wall!) I thought it would be appropriate to date when our friend was put there. So it reads: "Jack was here! ~2011"

Here's a view of Jack's new little home before Danny covers him up with dry wall.

We've since had mice problems in that corner. Hopefully those mice respected Jack's space and didn't think he was something they could eat.  :P

Living Room

The living room before....

 not terribly bad, probably one of the better looking before rooms.

 The ugly bookshelf was one of the first to go. (Although because of my love of bookshelves, a section of the bookshelf was salvaged and put into one of the guest rooms.)

 During the distruction of the room. Ha we don't do anything simple. See our window replacements. We got them for a third of the price on sale at Lowes! Yay for good deals!!

 Check out this solid wood wall. They don't make walls like this anymore! Ha funny story about this wall but that's another post in its self!

 Mom's great idea to insolate the outside wall! So we did!

 The SOMEWHAT after...
Still need some touch up paint, finish trim, and REAL furniture ha! But it'll do for now.

 Our sleeping bag works as a wonderful couch/area rug.
I try my best to decorate with what I have, the best I can. :)

 My little office/craft spot



Ooo Possum!

This is not about house building but it is house related. I came up with this at 4am yesterday. You'll understand why I was up at 4 when you read the poem. :)

To the tune of Mike Myers' Whoa-man poem in So I Married An Axe Murderer:

Ooo-possum
Got in the house,
Just like a mouse.
You crazy dude,
Ate all my food.
Made a big sound,
Chased you around.
Came every night,
Put up a fight.
You are so dead,
Shot in the head.

Ooo-possum.



*Disclaimer, we ARE animal lovers. 4 of this possum's family members have been safely caught and relocated away from our land. This guy however, put up a fight, several weeks (and late nights of fighting) and we don't always fight fair in the middle of the night...in the country. I'm just saying :)

Our Dining Room

So this was our dining room...

 Don't you love how they started to texture a wall and then just stopped. The little bit of white texture you see is what the previous owners thought was necessary to texture.

 I also loved the random paint splotches. I don't know if they were trying to touch up paint and somehow got the wrong color to touch up with, ha.

I liked the "idea" of the color in the dining room, so we textured ALL of the walls, primered and painted the room Cherry Cobbler red (it's pretty close to the color in this picture below).

 This looks orange. I did not paint the room orange, it came out a weird color on my phone. Imagine the color from the above picture with the objects below. :)

The reason you only see one section of the dining room is because that's the only finished section so far. Notice the floor isn't done yet. The right side of the room is our "garage" which is holding our tools (well Danny's tools -mine would be PINK), I didn't feel that was worth showing off ha.  

We're still working on, you know, a dining room table and such.



A Diamond in the Rough

Problem #538 - We had this dirty, ugly, smelly carpet that we didn't like.

Our wonderful brother-in-law (my future in-law at the time), made the wonderful discovery that under that yucky carpet, was more carpet, ply wood, in some places of the house we had roof shingles (yes under the carpet), and under ALL of that we found wood floor!

 The wood floor needed a little cleaning up but I was in love with it and knew we could make it work!

Here's a picture of my brother helping us sand the floors down. There was sand dust EVERYWHERE!!

So with a little (or actually a lot) of TLC this was the finished product....

Ha, the bathroom was the only picture I could find of the finished floor.

Oh, the Kitchen!

Well our kitchen wasn't that bad, but we decided we didn't want the Retro vomit green look for our eating area, no offense to anyone who does like that look. Now looking back at the picture, the green looks a little lighter and not so bad. However, Danny wanted it to go so I by no means argued.

 The microwave, didn't work...big surprise there. And the oven wasn't too bad. It looked like an older model of my parents' 1985 oven, which works great and shows it's not terribly ancient. However, the first time I tried to make a oven pizza, there was an odd burning smell. It wasn't the pizza - I can cook oven pizza. Turns out, something about the wires are wrong, could have burned down the house. Great. So no more using the oven... the one thing that still "worked". ha.

 Doesn't the refrigerator compliment the kitchen nicely.

The refrigerator has now been spray painted brown, filled with dirt, turned on it's side, and is located in the back of the land to allow Danny and guest a shooting post (target, I don't know the proper shooting term ??).

After it was decided that we would have to completely redo the kitchen, Danny took the notion on himself to take everything out. Well, I had no idea what it would look like to "completely redo the kitchen" until I walked in and saw this.....

 This was the completed "cleaned out" look.

Tune in next time to find out what ever happened to the Mayberry kitchen. Is it still like this today or does it look better?!!