Finally the Kitchen of My Dreams

Our kitchen has been updated since we moved in, but for some reason I have always wanted an island in the kitchen. We were shopping with my Mom one Saturday afternoon and came upon an island that my husband and I really liked. We measured it out in the kitchen when we got home and it was a perfect fit, the only non perfect thing was the price. It was $800 on sale, Yikes!

This got me to thinking and I went to one of my favorite sources of ideas, Pinterest. I ended up finding a pin/link for someone who had taken an ordinary old desk and made it into a kitchen island. I really liked the idea of using something that would normally have been just thrown away or stashed in a basement to spend its years collecting dust. The light finally came on, I had an old desk upstairs that the previous owners had left with the house. It was a very cool desk so we kept it even though we really didn't need it.

So after staying up till 4am Sunday morning drawing out plans and making cut lists to design the perfect kitchen island, my husband and I finally made it to the home improvement store to pick up a few basic materials. We had some of the materials at home already as I found some things on one of my trips to ReStore that I liked and had on hand just waiting for the perfect project.

I really loved the style of the desk we were using and I didn't want to take away from the cool detail of the feet by placing the desk on a platform to raise it up to counter level. This conundrum sent me back to the internet where I found suggestions to raise the top of the island by 6" making it counter height and creating another shelf underneath. I wasn't sure about this idea, but when I showed my husband he loved it, and so there it was, our solution to making our regular old desk a counter top height island.

Now on to the fun parts.

Here is our starting point. Just a plain old desk that was in a bit of rough shape from years of abuse.

I don't have any pics of the intermediate steps because it was late at night and to be honest I just plain forgot to take them. We added in supports, built the removable shelf, placed the legs and brackets on the new table top and then secured the legs to the base/desk.

 Please don't mind the mess as it was still a work zone.

 For the back of the desk we removed the old backing and cut a piece of 1/8" fiberboard to create a new backing. I also drilled and screwed supports into each of the existing shelves to sturdy up the desk a bit.

Here it is, the finished product.  The table top was the top of an old desk that I have had for the past ten years or so. We picked out a deep blue color that we liked called "Chicago Blues" from Benjamin Moore paints. It really makes the island a focal point from the bright white cabinets.  We also removed our old round light fixture and installed three pendant lights to give the island a little more light.

Please note, the color isn't quite as bright as the pic makes it look as the flash was on and distorts it a little bit.

 

 On the back and sides of the island I wanted it to look more like a piece of custom furniture so I added a faux wainscoting detail by creating squares out of trim.

At this point my husband thought we were done with the kitchen, boy was he wrong. He should know better, it is me after all :)

I really like the island, but for some reason now the walls just looked so plain and empty to me. I had a few projects in mind for the walls prior to making the island, but I knew that I needed to go a step farther now.

The idea came to me to install a chair rail and paint the lower half of the walls white. Me being who I am then decided to go with even more detail and add the faux wainscoting to the walls that would tie in with the island.

This was a very time consuming process as each individual piece of trim had to be miter cut and applied once piece at a time to the wall. I think this was the most painstaking process in the kitchen redo just because of the time involved. I should mention that I had to do all of the cuts with a hand saw, but if we ever do anything like this again I am investing in a miter saw haha.

Once again, I don't have any further pics of this process as by the time we got done it was well into the wee hours of the morning.

So now onto the finished room, after all that is what you have all been waiting for right?

 As you can see, the color of the island is more of a creamy blue, rather than the bright blue the pictures with flash tend to portray.

 We finally added new blinds to the windows and I made valances to give a little more punch to the room.

All of the items on the wall, minus the coat hooks, were found at our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I love the look of old windows, as you will see them located in other rooms throughout our home, so I had to have them in the kitchen as well. I used Mod Podge and scrapbook paper to create the perfect background for mounting pictures to the glass, when I get them printed that is.

The new coat rack is made from an old kitchen cabinet door that I painted with chalkboard paint. I plan on putting some pictures on that as well.  In case you are wondering, that is not our address, but rather our anniversary on the coat hooks. Our last name was way too long to spell out using hooks, so I put it above via pictures of items that resemble letters.

I don't think I have any other pics of them, but about a year ago the microwave stopped working so we replaced all of the appliances with stainless steel. I absolutely love my mini french door fridge and how much the stainless brightens up the room. * Once again the flash was on making the island look bright blue.

Finally after a year and a half, lots of hard work and just a little bit of money, our small cramped kitchen now feels open and much larger. The island has given me the extra storage and counter top space that the kitchen has been lacking, all without making the room feel any smaller.

Living Room Designed With Love

Ever since we moved into our house, our living room has been somewhat awkward to us for some reason. Maybe it is the fact that there was a front door, but no real entry way, you just walked right into a big open living room with no real direction. Maybe it was the fact that the living room felt empty and very cold due to the lack of that cozy feel that we had hoped for.

Well with the help of my loving Mom, who has been collecting stuff in her basement since I was born, and Habitat for Humanity ReStore, we have now created two new spaces in our home. Notice that I said "Our Home" as opposed to our house? That is because after a year and a half of living in our house, it is finally starting to feel like our "Home"

So back to these new spaces that we created. Before when you walked into our home from the front door you walked into a big empty area which we didn't like. Now you walk into an entry way that was created by moving the couch from the long wall out into the middle of the room. Now one would think that pulling the furniture away from the walls makes a room look smaller, yet the room now feels larger and more cozy at the same time.

Welcome to our Home

This is the new entry way that we have created simply by moving the couch and creating a hallway of sorts from the front door to the rest of the house.

 

I knew that I wanted to have some sort of display for our personal pictures and when I found the idea of using an old ladder as a backdrop I just had to find one. I ended up finding one for super cheap that I mounted to the wall, then I used it to display pictures and a monogram frame that I created. I wanted to spruse it up a little bit and include some natural elements into our home so I used branches from our cherry tree. Now it is the middle of winter so there aren't any leaves on the trees right now, what you see is actually individual leaves that I glued onto the branch to give it a little more life.

I wanted some kind of entry table, but I wasn't really sure what look I wanted to go for. I stumbled upon an inexpensive cube shelf and did a little modification to it in order to make it more of what I was looking for. I added an extended table top along with four dainty legs to make it look more like a piece of furniture rather than an inexpensive big box store item. I ended up distressing the table top along with the actual cube shelf and then I used Mod Podge to apply wooden plank scrapbook paper to the shelves to make it look older than it really is.

By moving the couch to create an entry way we now had room to include an old Sleepy Hallow chair that had been sitting in my Mom's basement for the past 25+ years. It is the perfect addition to our home and despite a few cracks in the ottoman it is in really good shape. It really ties the room together blending old with new. The small white table we found at a local consignment shop and it is perfect for holding an old silver platter/wooden bowl/plant display blending all sorts of natural elements together. 

One of my favorite elements of our new living room is the addition of lots of living plants. They help make the room feel cozy, warm and add a pop of color on the stark white fireplace.

Our living room is filled with all sorts of family treasures, including the suitcases that were my Mom's and a wooden toolbox from my Grandfather, who was a carpenter, that now serves as the perfect remote holder.

This is one of the pieces I was most excited to find in a small little local shop. It is an old cabinet of some sorts, not really sure what it would have been used for, but we now use it as our TV stand. I don't care for the look of a TV, nor do I want it to be the focal point in the living room, so I put a nice frame around it to help hide it. The frame was just an inexpensive white plastic frame that used to hold a poster that was on our mantle, now it looks like old cracked wood thanks to Mod Podge and scrapbook paper. Please note, I broke the glass so it is missing in this picture.

Well that is about it for now. I am very please with how much our living room has changed and how little money it cost to do so. I am in love with Habitat for Humanity ReStore and will try to shop there for materials whenever possible.

Move in Time

My husband and I spent the first two and a half weeks of home ownership updating our house and getting it ready to move in to. We knew that we needed to do something about the kitchen, so we came up with the bright idea to paint the cabinets white. And boy was it ever a bright idea, so bright in fact that it made the kitchen less dark and more inviting.

Before

After

What a huge difference a little bit of paint makes. We also updated the lighting, put up a new tile backsplash, and replaced the outdated faucet.

Before

After 

One of the biggest changes was that we removed the built in desk and cabinet in the corner to give room for a proper eat in kitchen.

Next up was the master bedroom. It wasn't as drastic of a change, but a little new paint, a new light fixture and a built in headboard made it feel more cozy.

 The basement also got it's own treatment as we turned a hall way into a bar area and the large family room into a family room plus dining room.

We didn't actually do this before we moved in, but I don't have enough pics to make a full page out of it.

We added new lighting, a new media stand and painted, then stenciled the wall to make it a focal point.

Our Starting Point

When we got the keys to our new house it came with some furniture that the previous owner included in the sale. Thankfully some of these items we could use, but some of them we ended up selling in a garage sale. The funds from the garage sale helped us to do some renovations before we moved in, which I might add I am so grateful that we were able to do as they would have have been even more chaotic if we were living in the house at the time.

Here is our house, on the way to becoming our home.

 This is our house. It is located on a nice, tree lined street just a stones throw from two different lakes and in a park like setting. We fell in love with the Cape Cod style house and then absolutely loved this location so it was a perfect fit for us.

However, the inside wasn't so perfect. It was really great as the previous owner to the couple we bought it from had redone the original hard wood floors, put in new windows, a new roof, siding, deck, ect. The couple we bought it from had just put in a new HVAC unit and a tank-less water heater which I have grown to love.

 

 When you walked in the house from the front door you were greeted by beautiful cove ceilings and rich hardwood floors. The fireplace is a little worn looking, but the old blue tiles really draw your eye.

 The same thing can be said about both of the main floor bedrooms as well as the upstairs bonus area.

The space was nice, the colors were neutral and really we could have just moved right in, but then there was the kitchen.

The kitchen was so dark and dated that to be honest, it almost made us walk away from the house in the first place. There was no place to eat in the kitchen and it seemed so small and cluttered. My husband and I both decided that we loved the house and the location enough to go for it anyways, figuring that we could update the kitchen when the time came.

Welcome to Our Home ReStored

Hello, and welcome to Our Home ReStored. This is the first time I have ever created a blog so bear with me as this will be a learning experience for me. So let's get started.


Let's rewind a few years back to 2009, my husband and I were living in a nice 2 bedroom condo in Northern Kentucky, we had been married for just over 2 years and we were trying to figure out where life would take us. At the time we thought we loved where we were living, but for some reason every time we went to visit family in Michigan it was getting harder and harder to leave. My husband had been working at a job he loved and we had said a few times that if it wasn't for his job we would think about moving up to Michigan to be closer to family.

Thanksgiving 2009, the news came that my husband's company was going to be doing another round of lay offs and this time he was one of the people that were going to be let go. This news didn't really come as a shock as they had mentioned it before, but it just hadn't happened yet. We found out at the time that his actual last day of work wouldn't be until the end of January 2010 so that gave us plenty of time to think about our options.

We finally decided that it was a sign that the one thing holding us to N.KY was no longer an issue so we packed up both of our cars with our essential items and headed to Michigan. My mom had plenty of room so we setup shop at her house while we both went job hunting. We knew that the economy in Michigan was one of the worst in the nation so we gave ourselves a 4-5 week time limit for finding a job and if we didn't find one in that time we would head back to N.KY.

Well low and behold another sign, my husband found a job within 2 weeks of being in town. He stated pretty much immediately and that was it, we decided to go back to N.KY and list our condo for sale and move all of our stuff up to Michigan. Despite the hard economic times and the housing crash our condo sold within 2 weeks so we felt we were super lucky.

Now came the fun part, house hunting. We started in February and spent hours and hours going over budgets, locations, schools and houses for sale before we actually looked at our first house. The first house we looked at was actually a house that I lived in from ages 2-5 and I had some strange fantasy about living there again and making the same memories with our future children. It was in kind of rough shape as it was a short sale, but we put in an offer and found out 2 months later that it was accepted by the lien holding bank. Next came the inspection, which it had a few major issues come up so we were going to submit a lower offer according to the repairs it needed.

Fast forward to May, 2 weeks before we were supposed to close, our dreams, or rather my dreams were crushed as the sellers could not provide the financial information necessary for a short sale and decided not to sell. By this time our condo was already sold and the new owner had taken possession, we had committed our lives to moving to Michigan and we both started to wonder if we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. Instead of getting upset we just moved on to looking at more houses, we were just about done when our realtor told us about a super cheap fixer upper in a nice area. We looked at it and jumped at the opportunity to buy the house for cheap and then make it exactly how we wanted it to be. We put in our offer, it was accepted and we were ready to go.

Inspection time again and this house failed even worse than the first one, in fact in order to make it livable it would take $70-80k which was unimaginable. Need less to say, we moved on from that one and continued to look at more properties. After looking at more than 40 homes we finally found it, the perfect cape cod in a beautiful neighborhood and the price was right. Bonus, the sellers didn't want to move everything so they included a bunch of items which meant we had to spend even less money on buying things to furnish our new home.

After all the waiting, ups and downs, heartbreak and joy we finally closed on our new house on June 29th, 2010. The sellers had 2 weeks to get their stuff out and hand over the keys, but they said they didn't need that long and surprisingly we were able to meet them at our new house to pick up the keys on July 3rd. I must say we spent the whole day cleaning and had my mom over for a nice cookout for the 4th of July.

And then the real work began....