planning the kitchen

Oct 30, 2016

I felt like Joanna Gaines when we were planning the layouts of our house, except I didn't have the fancy 3D layouts she did. I had Excel, of course not to scale but that's not the point. Above shows the layout of our bathroom and kitchen before we started demo in September. It was a small kitchen that was engulfed in metal cabinets and the bathroom was bigger than what we needed.

Most of the planning has been on our toes planning. We tear down a wall and think "hey! we should do this instead! We planned made the bathroom smaller so the kitchen could be wider, we removed the hallway closet that was never used, and tore down the wall to the third floor to create a more open space. The bathroom off of the kitchen isn't the ideal but with what we have right now, it works and it's so pretty!


Now this showcases what we have planned for our kitchen:
It's a little bit bigger AND it has a place for us to eat at the IKEA island that I have wanted for so long! We will be using the bar stools I bought for my old apartment, which is great because it will be able to slide underneath when we're not using it. I bought two hanging globes to sit over it for extra lighting and we added five recessed lights around the ceiling. One sconce will sit over the farm house double-bay sink. All of the cabinets are pull drawers so that we are able to see everything inside them.

The fridge will be new and we moved the stove to the opposite wall. The microwave is recessed into a cabinet next to the fridge, hopefully it will also be white but clean looking! In order to save money we opted out of upper cabinets and decided to do all open shelving. It keeps it more open and clean, as well as allowing for less clutter.


As for the end of this weekend, we ripped up the remaining subfloor and put some new stuff down. Liam wired all of the recessed lighting and I was so excited! I made sure to FaceTime my mom to show her, that's how excited I was to see it! This kitchen is going to be beautiful and I can't wait to show it all to you! Have a good Sunday night everyone, I will be plopped in front of the TV watching my Cowboys!

kitchen mood board

Oct 21, 2016

Painted Post Kitchen

We have been on a short break from getting the kitchen redone, six weeks to do the bathroom and move took a lot of energy from us both, but since it was critical to us living there, we pushed ourselves. Now, as much as I love cooking and a great kitchen, we both needed a break. So the past couple of nights Liam has been catching up on school, we've gotten to sit down and watch TV on the couch together, and go to sleep between the normal hours of 10pm-12am.

The past few nights we have been trying to figure out what we want in the kitchen and what we don't want. We, of course, have a differing of opinions but I let him have his bronze everything in the bathroom so now it's my turn (although there were bronze drawer pulls at Lowe's I liked, oops). We created a mood board for the bathroom, so we had to do one for the kitchen! All of the kitchen cabinets, countertop, sink, and faucet have been picked up from IKEA, Sheila helped us with that trip and all of those boxes have been patiently waiting in the storage unit. This gives you an idea of the direction we plan on going towards.

The kitchen isn't huge, we gained some space by moving the bathroom wall over to make the kitchen large, something that worked in my favor! We are going with a very bright white kitchen, a lot of what is on my Pinterest board. I love the modern look of open wood shelves, white cabinets, and butcher block counter tops. It has been my dream kitchen to do butcher block with a subway tile backsplash. Liam has some experience with laying the LVT so this will be another experience! We made sure last night that I had the ability to reach the cabinets, but we are still disagreeing on the where and type of some of the shelving. Most of our appliances are white, if we could have gotten them stainless, I would have but it was not in the budget and we already had white appliances.

Decent sized kitchen island with stool so we have somewhere to eat and Liam can still do homework while I cook us up something nice! Hanging globe lights with recessed lighting and hopefully a chalkboard menu so I can see what we want for the week :) Let's hope this kitchen looks as good as it does in my head!

Have a great weekend everyone!

we built a bathroom

Oct 10, 2016

Guys! I know you have been waiting for this moment for a long time because guess what? I have been waiting a longer more painful time for it to come together. Are we finished? Not quite yet, but we have a working toilet, bathtub, lights!

Our appliances arrived on Friday, unfortunately (but actually fortunate) there was no stacking kit for the washer-dryer so we could not bring it upstairs. This turned out to be okay since we were not really ready for it yet with no floor trim and no caulk on the tile. I was really hoping for a completed bathroom but I will take the working toilet, we can wake up in the middle of the night and not have to walk outside to his dad's apartment to use the bathroom. Also, if I had to go, it meant he had to wake up because I was not going downstairs alone at 2am! He loves me.

Now the walls, the walls [enter heart emoji face].
Liam was a bit skeptical on my color choice since it sounded dark. Black Pepper, but I was pretty confident that it would look great... and it does! It's so crisp and beautiful, we have beautiful walls in our new bathroom. Look at it, see how pretty they look.


Okay, so there's the walls, let's move on to the floors [enter double heart emoji face].
It is sooooooo pretty! You know it's pretty when someone mistakes it for real ceramic marble tile. Liam's stepdad came to check out everything when we were about to install the tile he said we could not use the hole saw because it would crack the tile! Surprised? It's luxury vinyl tile! It's grout-able and so so nice looking. We are stoked with how it came out and could not be happier with the choice we made.


Can you guys believe how much we have accomplished in five weeks? This makes me so happy! It almost makes up for how terrible Rutgers did this past weekend, it definitely makes it worth me not driving home to see us get demolished. Well, we're close and we're so happy. Liam installed LVT and a door for the first time this weekend so he's patting himself on the back. I built our TV stand and we now have cable so I can go back to watching football and my dream induced HGTV.


As you can see below, we are almost at our finished product. The empty space by the window is where the washer and dryer will go and we have to think about some storage next to the window for various laundry-bathroom items. How pretty does that floor look with grout in it? SO PRETTY. Oh yes, funny story: that hole for the dryer vent? Liam had updated it yesterday because I told him I was hearing noises in the bathroom (I was scared to go in there) and he thought I was crazy (still does). But when I heard it again he went into the bathroom and a bird as trying to get into the house! So he changed the vent trap, now it won't happen, phew!

I showered at my own place this morning! HOORAY! We need to hang the mirror, add a wall heater, update the light fixture, and reconfigure the plumbing to the vanity. We can't use the vanity yet, but that isn't as critical as the toilet and shower. The Project Manager last night wanted nothing to do with helping out.



Have a great week everyone!

reno week 5

Oct 5, 2016

Friday will be the five week mark for this renovation and although we have done a great job, we have not completed the bathroom. We are a little harder on ourselves than other people because everyone raves about how much we have accomplished and all we can see is how far behind we are in our timeline. As things got busier, we stopped using the timeline.

When we sit down and really think about what we've accomplished in the last five weeks, it is A LOT. Yes, we did not complete the bathroom before I moved in, but what did we accomplish?
  1. Moved all of my things into storage while renovating
  2. Cleaned my apartment (while shedding a few tears of exhaustion)
  3. Tore down a bathroom and partially a kitchen down to the studs
  4. Removed all the debris and excess junk
  5. Added new plumbing
  6. Updated the electrical
  7. Painted two bedrooms
  8. Put in new subfloor and insulation
  9. Built a new wall, drywall, and mudded
  10. Not killing each other
Yup, #10 is important. Liam is much more level headed than I am. We hit a lot of bumps in the road and roadblock. We visited Home Depot and Lowes at a minimum 30 times in the last five weeks. Thirty is probably a generous number, it was probably way more. The last photos showed how we finally built a wall, put insulation and a bathtub, and insulation. Welcome to what we have this week:





Look! It's ready for paint!


Soon, it will be painted ceilings and walls, than a floor! We have many more steps to go through but we're almost there. As one of my friends stated, so close, yet so far away. If you're wondering where we shower and use the bathroom because obvious we don't have one, his dad's apartment works downstairs and I have awesome friends who let me shower at their houses so I don't smell when I come to work.

It is going to be a very beautiful bathroom, it will be the best bathroom we have ever used since we built it. For me, that's a big deal. I built this! Really Liam built it and I supervised handing him tools, but WE BUILT THIS!


This is the project manager who keeps us in line when we get off track. She runs a tight shift.

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