Maple Glaze

The long awaited kitchen progress post! Only a few small-ish (compared to before) projects left to do in the kitchen. We used Behr's new line of paint with primer included and it worked like a dream! Straight over drywall texture, 1 coat with touch-ups, no need for toxic Kilz primer. The color is called maple glaze, but it's more of a burnt orange tone than a maple. We opted out of open shelves as we're still cooking without a vent fan and we would have had to find someone to custom build them. So next best option, horizontal shelves from IKEA. There will be a second set added above the first, and a small open cabinet on either side. These horizontal cabinets are awesome. I'll get a picture of the hinge up later, it's huge but it works perfectly.So all we have left are the 2nd set of cabinets, a range hood, finishing the kick boards,a tile backsplash, and sanding/staining the beam ends where the soffit used to be. The end is near and I couldn't be happier!
I'm going leave you with two little extras. One is this clock my mother found at TJ Maxx for 10 bucks but was pink until she saved it and painted the balls. And the other is a teapot I snagged from my grandmothers chicken kitchen last week along with some vintage pyrex.

Summer break

Have been on a blogging (and home project!) break to due to summer heat. Hope to be back shortly!

Family room shelves

These are the family room shelves right now. Excuse the mess, but after the upper kitchen cabinets came down, my bookshelves became the storage center. The shelves don't show clearly in this picture, but they are a yellowy color(and shiny!) that clashes with the beams.


This picture is the way I want the room to look. Light dove gray for the walls, white for the trim, mantle, and shelves; with dark gray backgrounds. Because I keep the reference books above and the novels in the cabinets down below, I want to frost the glass on the doors so nobody can see the high-fructose brain candy. Right now we have crummy windows hidden by curtains but we want to put a patio outside with a door that leads into this room. The windows next to this door will be frosted with shelves to let in more light while keeping the privacy. The couch and chair we already have (from Phoenix Retro Metro!), currently they are out in the front room because of the IKEA boxes.

New kitchen cabinets

We picked up the new cabinets for the kitchen!Don't they look lovely? We're installing IKEA lower cabinets in solar beech with the birch effect frame. They should look less like cardboard boxes and more like this when assembled.
Instead of upper cabinets, we're going to do open shelves. Either something like this...
...or like these from Martha Stewart's kitchen.

The kitchen

The one hesitation we had in buying this house is that we knew the kitchen would need major work. The previous owners (p.o.s. for future cursing) had most likely bought this place with the intention of doing a cheap remodel and flip. Like many other foreclosure houses we looked at, this remodel was only half done. This is the kitchen sink area.Over the dishwasher you can see where they had a tile problem. The window looks out into the garage (a former carport) and is broken. We're planing on drywalling over the window area. This photo also shows the soffit which is coming out, and the unfinished tile back splash (we will be removing this too)
This one shows the broken tile over the dishwasher better. The tile has a lip on it that sticks down quite far and they must have tried to place the dishwasher after tiling. When the P.O.S. pulled the tile to insert the dishwasher, the foam backing they had tiled over(instead of a solid surface like the plywood UNDERNEATH the foam)fell apart. Which they then left.




This next one shows what I thought was possibly the most special choice the P.O.S. made. Prefab cabinets with doors that open the wrong way, or in the case of drawers don't open at all. Not to mention the choice of color, honey-stained oak.
But then we started taking out the upper cabinets and found this.
That's right. The entire lower wall had the drywall replaced. Just the lower wall. The P.O.S. must had decided, "Hey, we're covering it these awesome cabinets! Why bother to fix the gaping hole that runs the length of the kitchen?". Clever, aren't they? So lots of drywall work in here! Which leads me to my last photo.
This is the pantry. It's going away also. We're swapping it with the fridge and putting in a tall IKEA pantry near the stove. Doesn't this thing just scream cheap stucco-ville? Luckily it has a date with the sawzall next weekend!

Mailboxes

This is our mailbox. Ugly, yes? And it's only barely functioning. The latch is broken so most of the time it is left hanging open after the mail is delivered.

These are two of the styles I'm interested in. Both are from letterboxes, a New Zealand company, but reasonably priced even with shipping. And both are locking in the back. I'm thinking the second one because the black with look better with the dark trim on the house.

Security Door

This is what the screen door looked like, except with more rust and dirt. Not quite fitting for the style of the house is it? But I have a plan!

This weekend I removed the ugly curly-cues. They only had tiny welds holding them to the frame, so we tried the dremel first. It wasn't quite able to get to the welds, so I broke out the old hammer/screwdriver combo and chiseled away. After about 20 minutes I had this...
Definitely an improvement. Next is painting. I want to do a light/light-medium gray for the house paint with a dark charcoal trim and a black front door, so I feel like the screen should have a pop of color. A dark raspberry feels like it will fit nicely. Yes?

The living room

This is the living room as we moved in. Even though it was the end of September, temperatures were still near the 100 degree mark, so most everything came into this room to be sorted later when the air was on.

This is the dining corner of the living room. Check out the amazing beams! They run into the kitchen, family room, and the add-on; all exposed. Plus the wall of windows. Only drawback there is that they are only single-paned, and as we just found out, when glass is that low it has to be tempered. It's going to be pricey to replace, but probably worth the cost in energy savings.

And this is what couple of coats of paint will do to a room.
From the entryway...
The fake Rothko painting is one my mum did for us. We call it a Rhonko, because her name is Rhonda.
And lastly the dining area...Just needs something up on the walls. The mirror used to be there but it had other ideas about that. Luckily it didn't break the glass, just put a hole in my side table, hence the vase grouping. They cover the hole and no one knows. Until I show them...which I tend to do...maybe I should stop that?

So this is the front of the house as we bought it. For a foreclosure home it was in fairly good shape. It had been unoccupied for at least 9 months. The biggest drawback to this home was the kitchen. The previous owners had started a remodel and gone the super cheap route. Cabinets that open the wrong way, drawers that won't open, tiled counters minus some edge tiles...but look at that roofline! No bad kitchen could sway me away from getting one of these homes for under 200k.