Kitchen Remodel: A long overdue update!

In the words of Bon Jovi "Woah, we're half way there, Woah, livin' on a prayer
Take my hand, we'll make it I swear, Woah, livin' on a prayer". 

Yes, we actually are half way through the remodel (and I really hope we actually stay on schedule). Last week Ben and I decided that we are very much over the remodel. It was probably one of the most difficult weeks thus far as the mud/tape guy was at our house every evening until 10pm, and our house was a complete disaster. I don't think there was one part of our floor that was not covered in dust. This remodel is really testing my ability to ignore the mess. 

This remodel is so different from anything we have ever done before because we have hired out a good portion of the work. We did this for 2 reasons, first we work all the time, and we do not have the energy to come home every night and work on the house. Secondly, if we did this remodel on our own it would take us 6 months and while I love my husband dearly I don't know if our marriage would survive a 6 month renovation. This one is already wearing on us both, we are sick of the mess, sick of doing dishes in a bath tub, sick of not having anywhere to hang out in our house except our bedroom and our "den" (a bedroom next to ours with 2 chairs and a TV) and sick of spending most weekends working on the house. All very first world problems, I do recognize this :). 

The best news is we have finally made a major milestone in the renovation....we are putting the kitchen back together. It finally feels like the end is in sight. 

Enough words already, lets cut to the good part. The pictures!!!

The sliding door to the backyard is gone!

Drywall starting to go up!

The fireplace before

The fireplace after 2 coats of primer. We still need to update the stone on the front,
change the doors and finish painting but it is a start!

The great paint color debate. I will never buy a sample color of paint again.
I am just going to pick a color, trust my gut and go for it. This confused me more than it helped! 

My dad and Ben painting the ceiling this past weekend

We picked a color and I love it. Rainwashed by Sherwin Williams

The Kitchen. I didn't paint where the cabinets are going. 

The latest development, the wood floors finished being installed today!
I forgot how nice it is to have actual floors in the house!

This past weekend my dad was an amazing force of energy and helped us paint the kitchen, dining room, living room and hallway. Thank goodness for him, or we would not be nearly as far. A huge thanks also to my Mom who came over on Sunday did all kinds of random tasks for us including folding laundry which allowed us to finish the painting project. Parents are awesome! 

The floors now are getting sanded and stained over the next week and a half. Then the next challenge begins, actually assembling our cabinets from Ikea and beginning install. YAY! I am hopeful that we will have the cabinets installed by the end of April and will be able to order the countertops. We have made a ton of progress but we still have a lot to do! 

Cheers,

Ali 

Living Swiss Family Robinson Style

When I envisioned this project my big worry was how to survive without a kitchen for a few months. We are 2.5 weeks into not having a kitchen and I can say I really don't miss my old kitchen. I kind of like my "Swiss Family Robinson" kitchen (It really isn't that bad, we have running water and electricity). What do I miss? Only 2 things, my dishwasher and the kitchen sink.

Ben and I have become pros at washing dishes in the bathtub. I bought 2 deep dish tubs from Target and dish drainer and our guest bathroom upstairs has become the "Dish Room". Besides the first night, it has been no problem. The first night of dishes a pyrex container slipped out of my hands and shattered in the tub. I was more concerned for our freshly refinished tub than about the glass everywhere. We got lucky and the tub was fine, and Ben and I spent 10 minutes picking up glass from all over the bathroom. I really do miss the luxury of a dishwasher, but we only had one for our last year in Mound so we are used to washing dishes.

My cooking has changed in my mini kitchen. First, because we come home and work on the house and spending an hour on dinner is not really an option and also because I am now limited to one "burner". I have made pita pizzas, spaghetti, a few frozen skillet meals from Trader Joes but I haven't been too adventurous. Ben and I are fortunate enough to have wonderful family that have dropped off frozen meals for us as well that we can just heat in the microwave. We are very lucky!!

If you ever have to live without a kitchen, here are the key products you need to survive besides a refrigerator, microwave and toaster:

1. A hot plate,  here is the one I ordered. It works great! It would be nice to have 2 or 3 but that seems excessive for a temporary kitchen. :)

2. A toaster oven, I have an awesome one that is a convection oven. I have made brownies and scones in it and they turned out great!!

I also use my crock-pot a decent amount and I use the crock-pot liners from Reynolds and this saves a ton of clean up!!

Here are some pics of my temporary kitchen:

Toaster oven, scones baking!!

Our counter / table :) 

The new appliances on half the room. YAY for getting to use the new fridge!

I use my new oven to store pyrex and baking sheets, etc right now!

The kitchen looks mostly the same as the last time I posted, except there is no drywall or ceiling anymore. The good news is the plumber is coming out next week to move the pipe that is in the way of where the cabinets need to go. After that the carpenter needs to come and take out the door, and put in the new window and the electrician needs to work his magic. Then we need to start putting everything back together. In the meantime, Ben and I are going to install a new door to the garage, scrape the ceilings in the living room/dining room and work on picking out lights and tile for the kitchen. I have already adjusted our end date of this project to be June 1. It could be May 15 but I am trying to mentally prepare myself for June 1.

Some days I just stand in the dining room and stare at the empty, torn apart kitchen and try to imagine it. It makes my head spin to think of all of the work to be done, but I am excited for the end result. :)

Cheers!

Ali

A disaster....

If you need a laugh tonight here it is. I was in my temporary kitchen whipping up some tacos for dinner and talking on the phone to my mom. Next thing I know I hear Ben yell an expletive and I hear a sound I can't place. I yell "what is that" and Ben yells water. I look and there is water shooting out of one of the kitchen water pipes flying across the entire kitchen. I quickly tell my mom I have to go and drop my phone. First I try to stop the water with my hands, I know this will come as a shock but that didn't work. My second thought is towels, again water shooting out like a faucet across the room, not helping. Next I grab the huge garbage can in the room and turn it on its side, but the water just kept running out. Finally, I grab a garbage bag and manage to get most of the water to spray into that. After about 5 minutes (which felt like 2 hours) Ben finally found the main water shut off and the water stopped. At this point, I am dripping wet, the tacos are done cooking and the floors are dripping with water (and dripping into the basement since there are holes in the floor).

Ben comes upstairs and we look at each other and start laughing.

Turns out Ben was trying to drill a hole near the water pipe to lift the floor board over the pipe but it didn't really work when he hit the pipe. We moped up what we could with old towels, and turned on 4 fans to dry out the house. Ben is currently working on fixing the pipe so that we can turn the water back on for the house.

I just keep imagining what I must have looked like trying to stop the water and I can't stop giggling. :)

I am sure this wont be the last disaster.

Cheers!

Ali

Kitchen Remodel (Demo Edition)

One thing Ben and I discovered while we were living with my parents is that we are not good at downtime. So it is not surprising that as soon as life returned to 'normal' on Monday, I walked in the door to fine Ben tearing up the laminate flooring in the kitchen. Demolition had begun. We are now 7 days into the demo and we have worked on it everyday except Friday.

There were some fun surprises (that is sarcastic) like finding some beautiful green cobblestone linoleum in our kitchen, and a pipe in one of the soffits that now a plumber needs to re-route. While this project is a little overwhelming at times, we are hiring out parts of the work so that helps to make it a little more manageable. The most exciting thing this week was finally using our new fridge (it has been at our house since December). 

I will let the pictures of the demolition speak for themselves....

First what we started with, painted counters, a sticker back splash, tiny drawers, terrible pantries...

The flooring, only one of about 5 colors of wood in the house

I am hoping to widen this doorway

The wall to the kitchen is coming down, hello open concept!

No. Words.

Stickers!

Now for the demo pics:

The first layer of linoleum

The second (and thankfully last layer!

The first hole in the wall

Our temporary kitchen complete with hot plate, microwave oven, microwave toaster and crockpot.

Bye bye soffits!

Creeper!

After 7 days, looking into the dining room

From the dining room

We have a long way to go......

I am a girl who hates mess, so I am trying to not have a panic attack about the mess. We are close to being done with demo, it will be nice to start putting it back together. I am going to put a finish date of April 1, 2016 (might be a little optimistic!).

Cheers,
Ali 

A quick bathroom redo!

As usual I am behind on blogging! December flew by, and January led to some unexpected life events which derailed our house projects for a few weeks. Now life is back to "normal" which means we started demo on Monday evening. :)

Before Christmas I decided I wanted to give our upstairs bathroom a face lift. I loved the tile on the floor, the fact that there are double sinks, but little else about the bathroom. First step was hiring a company to re-glaze our bathtub. It was a hideous beige color and we could tell that had been "re-glazed", but obviously a DIY project gone wrong. We used the same company we used when we did this in Mound and they did a fantastic job. Once the beige was stripped off, Ben informed me that the tub was "baby poop green"...haha. The only downside was that is was an extra $200 to remove the lovely DIY job the previous owners had done. Totally worth it for a sparkling white bathtub!

I also sanded all of the cabinets, put three coats of espresso paint on them, and 3 coats of clear coat on them. In addition I ordered new hardware for the cabinets and got the hardware for a steal from Amazon (1/2 the price of Lowes). Putting the new hardware on went smooth until the last cabinet. With the new hinges one of the doors was now too wide, I ended up sanding down the inside edge of the door 5 times before it finally closed. I still need to repaint that edge of the cabinet....that hopefully will get done within the next year. :)

Ben and I had a romantic few days of painting the ceiling, and painting 2 coats of blue paint on the walls. Not exactly the shade I had in mind (I was picturing something a little more chalky teal) but once there was one coat on, Ben told me we weren't changing the color. I think the color looks fine now that we are done.

Ben replaced one of the lights, the outlets and light switches and we were done. I would love to get a new counter in the bathroom but at this point it is good enough.

Here are some pictures of the transformation!

The before pictures:

The cabinets before

Notice those classy hinges!

The tub before...yuck!

The original color around the edge

 The After...

All done!

New hardware!

Bright white tub!

New outlets/switches!

This was a nice 1 week project that wasn't too labor intensive. This week as I mentioned earlier we began demo on the kitchen. The kitchen project is bound to be full of interesting experiences and is by far our most complicated project to date. Updates on that coming soon.

Cheers,

Ali

Simple Updates

As usual I am behind in my blogging. Excuse any misspellings as I have been up since 7am, hanging with a 4 year old and 2 year old (the adorable nephews). We took no naps today, played hard, had a few melt downs, had more laughs and thankfully the little people are in bed sleeping by 8pm. I think my favorite moment of today was when we were making homemade pizza for dinner and the 2 year old was dipping his fingers in the sauce and eating off the adults pizza (his was already in the oven) and I said "okay, you can lick it one more time", he looks at me and then sticks his tongue out and licks the pizza. I forgot how literal 2 year olds are.

With 2 days of hard work and a lot of elbow grease our house was looking much better that it was when we closed. The day of closing, my mom and my little brother came over and helped us clean, and tear out all of the carpet in the house, with the exception of the basement. On Saturday, we had a huge crew of help to move and clean and by the end of Saturday our new house was definitely feeling like a home.

We have now been here over a month and there are still many days where we can't find something. I am still missing the charger for our hand held vacuum, I have no idea how my kitchen is organized and we are about to undertake a major renovation so I am trying to embrace the chaos (for the record, I suck at this).

Here are some pictures for your viewing enjoyment.

First the before, some lovely carpet:

After, our awesome wood floors and Christmas decorations!

I am going to try to get caught up on blogging this week, because we are also starting the kitchen remodel this week...yay!! 

Cheers!

Ali 

Oops...we did it again!

The whole time we lived at our last house, I vowed that the next house we bought was going to be 'turn key'. "Ben, I am willing to paint, but other than that I am done with projects". Well, that didn't quite happen. We put our house on the market the Tuesday after labor day and it was sold on Thursday. We were thrilled, because keeping our house clean for showings was old after having done it for 2 days. :) Now the fun began, or so I thought, looking for new houses. The first day we looked at 15 houses, and we loved one of the houses, it had been on the market since June, it had been at the same price since July. We wanted to make an offer, but we wanted to make sure our inspection at our current house was fine before we made an offer. The house sold the very next day, Ben and I were pretty disappointed.

The search continued, I looked at houses on my day off with our realtors, who we really liked, which was good since we were going to be spending a lot of time together. After a few weeks, I had looked at 70 houses, and there was nothing we wanted to buy. I think there as maybe 1 or 2 other houses that we looked at twice. We were now into October, 3 weeks from moving and had no prospects for houses. Our realtors suggested that we expand the area we were looking to buy in since, I had exhausted all options in St. Louis Park, Golden Valley, Hopkins, and New Hope. They wanted us to look in Plymouth, which I believe my response was "I will live in Plymouth over my dead body". I have nothing against Plymouth but the whole point of moving was to get much closer to the city, and Plymouth still seemed very far out. Well Ben saw a house online, fell in love with it, didn't tell me about it and casually asked our realtors to add it to the list of houses to look at. The night before we went to look at houses, Ben let it slip that he loved this house, the yard was great, it is by a school, the street is quiet, and "It has a 4 car garage!".

The house was in Plymouth so I was less than thrilled, also after looking at the pictures, the kitchen was hideous. I had basically decided I would humor Ben, and go look at the house but that was it. We went to the showing we looked. The house was much bigger than I wanted, but it had a few nice things, 5 bedrooms all on one level (that were all decent size), a big living room and dining room, an attached garage. There were many negative things, it had ugly carpet in half the house, and everything was outdated, the project list was terribly long. If it hadn't been for Ben's deep love for the house, I probably would have walked away. I really hated the house, I couldn't picture living there, but over the next few days I started to research some projects, decided I would consider it, and we did a second showing. The second showing my parents, my aunt and uncle and my cousin were there. It was wonderful to have them all look at the house, but I was beyond over whelmed, my project list was multiplied by about 80. :) We did decide it was a house we could grow into, it had good "bones" and we were going to make an offer. The house had been on the market since the beginning of summer, had dropped the price on the house by $40k, but was still over priced for all of the work it needed. We made an offer $35k less than current price of the home, knew our offer would get rejected but that was my caveat for buying the house. We had to get it at a price where we could still afford to do all of the projects it needed. The buyers countered back at 10K under asking, not surprising, and Ben and I left to go to Washington DC for 10 days.

We decided it the house was still for sale when we got home we could talk about making another offer but while we were in DC we were taking a break from houses. Ben was super nervous the house was going to sell, I was still working through house renovation plans in my head. We got home from DC, they sellers had dropped the price by $15k, and I went to look at other houses. Ben and I were pretty sure the sellers were not going to come down to the price we wanted. At this point we were 7 days from moving out of house. While I was out looking at other houses, our Realtor casually mentioned that the sellers realtor had called and wanted to know what they could do to get the deal done. I found a house that I really liked that day, it was a lot less projects but also a lot smaller than the house we had been negotiating on. That night Ben and I decided to look at the house I liked, and then the house he loved again. We decided to make another offer on the project house. The sellers countered again, and at this point I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much money on the house that needed projects.

We packed up our old house, moved most our belongings into 2 storage units and moved our necessities into my parents house. We were going to live with them for 6 weeks and if we had no plans after 6 weeks, we were going to move to an apartment for the winter. We cried when we left Sandy Lane, it was the house where we fell in love, realized we could survive renovations together, and where Ben proposed. That house was a labor of love, and when we left it, it was a beautiful house. The fact that we had no plans for a new house, made it a whole lot harder. We continued to look for houses to come on the market, but nothing was coming on the market. After about 2 weeks at my parents, we went to an open house on Sunday that my aunt had alerted me was going on, it was in Golden Valley, it seemed to meet the requirements of what we wanted. We went to look at it, and it was disgusting. It smelled, it was dirty, it was smaller than house we had been making offers on, and it was $20k more than what we were currently at in negotiations. At that point, I realized that we were not going to find another house, which as much space as the Plymouth house for the price we were at in negotiations. On our drive home from the open house, I turned to Ben and said, lets buy the Plymouth house. Ben was a good sport, and made sure I wasn't just saying that because we had no other options, and then he was soooo excited! I was finally sure we wanted the house, so I called our realtor and 20 minutes later we signed papers to buy this house on our phones in the parking lot of a grocery store.

We survived the inspection without any terrible news, began really planning for the projects and prepared to move in. Moving weekend went really well becuase we had wonderful friends and family that all came to make the weekend a success. A special shout out to those who helped clean, it was a disgusting job and we really appreciate your help. So now I am sitting here writing this from our couch, at our new house, full of projects, in Plymouth. Ha!

The good news, there should be plenty of blogging happening about projects in the future.

Here are the pictures of the house from when it was on the market:

Th e master bedroom, nice blue carpet...right? 

The Kitchen, painted counter tops, sticker black splash....

For the record, now I really do love our house, and I am very glad we purchased it! We have already done some projects, so stayed tuned, more posts to come!

Cheers,

Ali