This is not really how I had imagined the final reveal happening because technically it isn’t completely finished and technically we aren’t even living in our house anymore. When we first decided to renovate our kitchen and laundry room we had a pretty solid life plan for the next few years, but then midway into our renovation that plan changed and we decided to move. Now we are renting our house out to some friends […]
We thought for a long time about what we should do for our kitchen cabinets. We really loved the organization of Ikea cabinets, but didn’t really love how any of the doors looked so our initial plan was to buy ikea cabinets and then have someplace like Semi-Handmade make custom door fronts for us, so they would be a little higher quality and not be laminate. We got this all priced out, but the door […]
I have wanted herringbone floors for years. When done with a wood-look tile I think they are both classically beautiful while their durability makes them very practical. However, every time I mentioned herringbone floors to someone I receive two different responses: “Those are so pretty!” and “Those are so much work to put down!” When I told TJ what I wanted he was skeptical and tried to talk me out of it even though he wasn’t going to […]
Obviously the part of this renovation I am most excited about is the way it’s going to look when everything is finished, but the vast majority of the work on this redo is not just a facelift. It’s slithering around in the attic and crawl space doing electrical, and plumbing. Adding in gas lines and drains. Moving walls around, and coordinating the cabinet makers, countertop people, and tile people (that’s us!) and just generally making sure our house doesn’t […]
Over the last two years I’ve come up with about 30 different ideas for what I wanted the kitchen to look like. I love planning all the little details but I kept changing my mind about what I wanted, because how can you just choose what your kitchen should look like?! It drove Aaron nuts. It wasn’t like we had no direction at all, over the years I’ve been collecting things I loved that I really […]
Currently our kitchen is a strange hodge-podge of peel and stick vinyl tiles stuck on top of bubbling linoleum, awkward and hard to reach cabinets, and a really weird floor plan that doesn’t really make any sense. It’s ugly, it’s inefficient, and from the moment we moved in I’ve been dreaming about the day we would get to rip out all the ugli and make something fabulous. Ladies and gentlemen, that day has finally arrived and […]
Our house has good bones. In plain english this means that it is ugly, but some (allegedly) foolish young couple saw all the cool things that could be done to transform it into something better and decided it would be fun. There is a wide selection of projects that could be done to help transform this “good bones” house into a great house, but we thought one that would have a fairly large impact would be […]
After the great debacle of the doors our momentum took a sharp nosedive and a lot of our projects went to a standstill. Having to rip out the door frames you just spent hours painting, routing, assembling and installing is rather disheartening and really it wasn’t until I found these little beauties that I even wanted to think about working on the doors again. A lot of people will say brass hardware in your house […]
Our house came with these terrible wood veneer doors that really just made the entire thing look dated. We figured that changing out the doors in our house would be one of the easiest and least expensive changes we could make that would make a major difference in the overall look of things. Home Depot had a sale on some of their doors and we special ordered these great Craftsman style slabs and got a steal of […]
Moving is among the best, and also the worst experiences I’ve ever faced. On the one hand, we get to move into a new place! A better place! A place that belongs to us! On the other hand, you do have to actually move all your stuff and then your landlords charge you $50 because you need 20 minutes extra to finish cleaning out your fridge so you can check out, and then they don’t give you any of […]
