Kitchen Island Color Help

After months of hunting, we're picking up a used version of this island that I found on Craigslist. It was originally black, and the owner painted it white, but didn't do a great job, so it's going to need a bit of TLC. Since it will need to be repainted anyways, I've been thinking about different color options. Here are my thoughts:

1, 2, 3, 4

Red could be fun - our front door is red, and I love the idea of bringing this color into our house a bit. However, I also have lots of pink in my living room, dining room, and porch (basically, every other room on the first floor), so I'm not sure if this is the best choice. 

Green is on the walls in my entryway and half bath, and I have a cute new chair in my living room that's green and white, so it would be fun to incorporate a bit more of this color into another room. 

Navy is an interesting option, too. A lot of my house is light in color, and it might be nice to have something a bit darker in the mix. The walls are pale blue, and I always like when rooms have layers of the same color in different intensities. (This sounds like I really know what I'm talking about, but let me assure you that I do not!)

And finally...good old white. I have paint that matches our cabinets exactly. That's definitely the path of least resistance! 

Thought?! I clearly need help deciding!

Dining Room Re-Do

Oh, the dining room! We naively thought that the dining room would be one of our easiest spaces to give a little make-over to. Strip the wallpaper, pull up the carpet, add some paint...not too bad! But as I mentioned before, the wallpaper was actually covering paneling, which was covering up crumbling plaster walls. The built-in hutch was nearly impossible to strip, and the floors were in very rough shape underneath the carpet. 

When we decided to re-do our kitchen, we also opened up the wall between the two rooms, re-did the plaster on the walls and ceiling, and Peter installed the new hardwood floors, which are the same in the whole first floor now.

The walls are painted Silver Mist by Benjamin Moore, which is the same color as the kitchen for continuity. That rug is Dash and Albert from the clearance sale they have each summer in Pittsfield. It might end up in the nursery eventually, if I find something more substantial at the sale this year to put in the dining room instead. 

The hutch got painted in Simply White by Benjamin Moore, which is the same color I've been using on all the trim and doors throughout the house. And the chandelier was replaced with one my Mom had been using for a while, but was sitting in her basement. I gave it a coat of white spray paint to spruce it up. (But I failed to cover up the sockets before doing it - don't make that same mistake! Peter had to clean them out to make all the lights work again...). The art work over the side board is a painting was picked up in Brazil years ago, and the one above the chair was purchased to celebrate our first anniversary.

We are gearing up to host some dinner parties (of the come-over-for-take-out variety, let's not get too ahead of ourselves!).

What's Cooking

I currently have a lightly snoring newborn on my lap, so it seems as good a time as any to check in with an update on our kitchen renovation. I hesitate to call this a final reveal since there are still a few things we'd like to do (like add an island, hang window treatments, put shelves in the pantry, and eventually install a tile back splash), but it's pretty darn close! 

We were able to set it up just three days before I went into labor, so it hasn't been cooked in very much (by me, at least - my mom and mother-in-law have both put it to good use!), but I still marvel at how bright and functional and pretty it is now. 

The issues with the original kitchen are almost too long to name. The lay-out was horrible - only one wall of cabinets, and the counters were the same depth as the upper cabinets, making it nearly impossible to use them as a work surface. The stack pipe for the house went through the middle of the one wall of cabinets and counter space, which was ugly and obviously impractical. And the cabinets themselves were a disgusting brown, peeling linoleum. They were always kind of greasy, no matter how much I wiped them down. 

To plan the kitchen, we played around with the Ikea kitchen design software quite a bit to get a sense of different lay-outs. We tried all kinds of different placements for the appliances and cabinets over a few months time period. It's not the most user-friendly program, but it's so nice to have a visual of the space to review.

Once we settled on the basic lay-out we liked, we set up an appointment with a Home Depot kitchen designer, who helped us create a mock-up with Martha Stewart Wainscott cabinets in picket fence. We looked into laminate counter tops (they've come a long way!), but for a kitchen our size, the price difference between that and granite was only a few hundred dollars, so we ordered granite from Home Depot as well in azul platino. It took a little over a month for the cabinets to arrive after we ordered them, and during that time, our contractor demoed the kitchen and floor, replaced the old window, opened up the wall between the dining room and kitchen, and added new plaster to the walls and ceilings. 

For the appliances, I found our fridge and microwave on Craigslist, and we ordered the stove and dishwasher from Best Buy when a good sale was going on. I painted it Silver Mist by Benjamin Moore, which I wasn't sure about at first, but now absolutely adore. We picked up the Liberty knobs and pulls at Home Depot.

We had originally ordered custom trim to go over the cabinets, but in our funky old house, the ceiling is far from level, and our contractor thought that the chunky trim would only draw attention to that fact. We returned it, and he added plain wood trim that goes to the ceiling, which I painted in Martha Stewart picket fence (the color match for the cabinets). It's not 100 percent perfect, but I like the look of it much better than if it were to stop before reaching the ceiling.

Just for fun, here's a shot of the first dinner Peter made the night our appliances got installed - linguine with clam sauce! (I had already started eating clams when I thought to snap a picture, ha!). My only request was that it be something we couldn't possibly have made in a crock pot or microwave :)

Hooray for the end

(cute onesie)

Hope everyone had a lovely spring weekend! It was beautiful here, but Peter and I were trapped (kind of by choice...) inside, finishing up the floor and trim downstairs. I'll share some pictures soon! Our contractor very, very nicely had been letting us borrow his power tools for this project, but he is coming by today to pick them up. Hooray for the end of dust!!!

Our counter is taking longer than we hoped to come - we're currently scheduled for next Tuesday, and then appliances go in after that. Last week, I called and tried to give them a bit of a sob story about how I'm having my first baby any day now (kind of), and if there was any way they could move us up, we could be available at a moment's notice. The woman was unmoved. "Umm, I'll make a note..."

In between all that sawing and gluing, we went on a super fun date to State Park on Friday night, and then met friends for dinner at Russell House on Saturday. At Russell House, we were able to sit upstairs where the windows were wide open and it was breezy and still light out when we sat down at 7:30. Glorious. We'd already paid for parking (something we're usually allergic to, but it was a lovely concession to celebrate working all weekend/being 37 weeks pregnant) so we extended the evening a bit to sit outside in Harvard Square and share a concrete from Shake Shack. All in all, an excellent eating weekend.

I had my ultrasound on Friday, which sadly confirmed that the baby is still breech. It also looks like a frog in a jar at this point, it's face all mushed up against the top of my stomach. Poor baby. I'm doing all kinds of weirdo things from Spinning Babies, but we also have an external version scheduled for Thursday. I honestly had no idea how involved that procedure was, so I'm having some second thoughts. (If you had it, or have any stories about someone who did, I'd love to hear! The only things I've come across are tales of woe about it not working and inducing labor early, so...not really what I'm hoping to hear).

My mind has been spinning out of control, imagining an emergency c-section on Thursday while my house is in ruins and all my baby stuff is still at my parent's house in Connecticut. But the end is here (ish), whether I'm ready or not. And it truly doesn't matter if that second coat of paint makes it onto the dining room trim or not. My parents are coming up this weekend to drop off all the baby stuff regardless, so it will be in my cozy nesting fingers soon enough.

And, of course, I could still be pregnant a month of now! I have a feeling this stubborn child will be born a Taurus, so I think I've got until at least next week until we say "hi ;)"

The Pinnacle

This week, I think the house reached the pinnacle of chaos that it can contain. Almost nothing is where it belongs. Our temporary quarters have been worked and re-worked to accommodate ever changing areas that need to be accessed, and my brain is turning to mush. 

And yet. I really think this is one of those "it's always darkest right before sunrise" kind of moments, because even though it looks totally insane, the end is very, very close. Our kitchen cabinets are all installed, but the appliances are hanging out in the dining room. Our furniture is all over the place because Peter's laying down our floors, which are about three-quarters done as I type. And we made tons of progress on the upstairs this weekend, thanks entirely to my parents. I get overcome when I think about how much they've done and helped these last few weeks.

On Friday morning, Peter and I left for work while my mom stayed at our house (with our worker bees!) to paint the walls and trim in the baby's room. That afternoon, my dad came and he painted all the trim in our hallway upstairs. Then Saturday, we all painted the trim and walls in the dining room, hung curtains, and moved around tons of furniture. Gah! Do you see what I mean?! They come and do these terrible jobs, and they are cheerful and happy and bring us donuts. It's beyond amazing, and both Peter and I feel so incredibly lucky.

This week, the appliances will go in, the template for our counter top is being made, we'll finish up the floors, and continue to set up the baby's room. Because goodness! We've only got about a month until this baby is expected to make it's debut :)

Bits and pieces

Happy Friday, my friends! I hope you've all had a nice week. Our renovations have been chugging right along, though I've been fairly terrible about documenting any of it (hence this random, totally unrelated, but much more visually appealing pic of flowers!). Yesterday we had all of our new cabinets delivered, along with our dishwasher and stove. They were all piled into the kitchen when we left this morning, but I'm hoping that the base cabinets will be installed when I get home.

Since we opened up the wall between the kitchen and dining room, I knew that those rooms would be painted the same color. They're off of our living room, which is revere pewter, and I brought home silver mist (both Benjamin Moore). After painting the ceilings, I started cutting in with it last weekend, but immediately got nervous that it was too dark and similar in saturation to the revere pewter. This was, embarrassingly, keeping me up at night. Now that the cabinets are in, though, and I know how much white the rooms will have, I'm feeling better about it. AND, it's just paint, so I should really chill out. I definitely had less hemming and hawing about the floors/cabinets/counter tops, ha ha. (But if you'd like to weigh in, please feel free...)

Tomorrow is my baby shower, which I am so very excited for. Peter's staying home to work on laying down our new floors, which is a significantly worse way to spend a Saturday. Bits and pieces of incredibly sweet gifts for the baby from family and friends have trickled in this week, which is almost as fun as coming home to wedding gifts. We received one of those playmat thingies that are all crazy colors and flashy toys dangling from above. It's so easy for me to imagine a baby lying there, looking up at it, but it's still mind blowing to me that my baby will be using it shortly.

In other baby related news, I had a doctor's appointment yesterday and they think the baby might be breech. Of course, I've been furiously googling "how to tell breech baby" and "make breech baby flip." I have an ultrasound in two weeks to check, but that feels so very far away. I feel like I can't do much of anything, just in case the baby's in the right place now? (And of course, I know that breech isn't the end of the world by any means, and that the baby still has time to flip on its own, etc., etc.). I should probably go back to worrying about paint.

I thought this post would be a quick bullet list when I started off, but I guess I had a lot of sharing to do! The only other thing I wanted to tell you was that I finally started The Goldfinch, and gosh it's good so far (though I still believe it's fairly audacious to make any book this long).

Hope you all have wonderful springy weekends ahead!

Upstairs Bathroom Re-do

Last fall, I hatched a brilliant plan - we could give our upstairs bathroom a quick make-over during Christmas vacation!

(Ha. Ha, ha, ha.)

Initially, this space wasn't anywhere near the top of our priority list because, unlike almost every other room in the house, it functioned. Hideous, yes, but functional. But because we convinced ourselves that making this room a whole lot better would just involve a series of small upgrades that we could do ourselves, it moved rapidly up the list. Plus, it made me kind of depressed to imagine giving the baby baths in that putrid yellow tub. The pictures above are from when we first moved in (that's not my curtain - they kindly included it in the sale...).

The first order of business was the tile. Now, if we were planning to stay in this house for many years to come, or if our tile was in great shape (but was just an unfortunate color), we would have either saved up to totally re-do the tile, or had it professional re-glazed. But we decided a quick and easy fix was more than fine for our purposes, especially since the tile has some cracks - I think it was a somewhat poorly done DIY when it was initially put in.

I heard about tile paint in This Old House, and thought it might be worth a shot, even though it seemed almost too good to be true. Painting over ugly tiles for a bright white finish?! But as you can see below, it's pretty darn good! I buffed and cleaned the tiles one night and filled in all the cracks with caulk, and then Peter painted the finish on the tub tiles and around the floorboard tiles (I actually left the house in honor of our unborn baby's brain cells - this stuff was incredibly toxic smelling). Then - and this is the tricky part about using this product - we left the house for a week (it was Christmas to New Years) because the tile can't get wet for a few days.

After this, the series of updates runs together in my mind, but we painted the walls a really pretty pale blue, replaced the horrible track doors on the linen closet that were never on their tracks (this task nearly broke Peter because the frame was so far from being square it was crazy!), replaced the light over the vanity, took down the huge, glued on mirrors and replaced the one over the sink with a Home Goods find, and installed a new towel bar and toilet paper holder.

We lived with it with these updates for quite some time while we shopped for, ordered, and waited on a new granite vanity top and sink to come in. Earlier this month, we finally picked it up! Right before that, I painted the awful faux marble laminate vanity base with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. I was very skeptical about this product, but it was amazing. It's strange stuff - very thick and matte - but the coverage was incredible. I did have to give it four very thin coats to effectively wipe out the marbling, but it was worth it.

The small narrow shelves to the left of the vanity had shudders that were falling off (this house is FULL of shuddered doors!). I took the measurements to Home Depot and they cut me new pieces of wood, and I bought some basic trim pieces to finish them off. I added the same new hinges and knobs to these that I used on the vanity.

The final-ish task was taking off the old vanity top and sink and replacing it. My parents were in town last weekend, so Peter took off the top and disconnected the water in the hopes of finishing the job when they were around so they could help lift it onto the vanity. The pipes were so old that they weren't standard sizes, and our new sink didn't line up exactly with these old pipes. Nightmare! After hours, Peter basically gave up called our plumber on Monday morning. The plumber assured him he was super close to finishing and gave excellent instructions, and he was able to finish the job.

I can't believe how much I've written about this bathroom update, and I know most of it wasn't exactly riveting. But I am incredibly proud of this project. My mom calls it the "painted everything" bathroom, which is fairly accurate, but it's also a place where we - and particularly Peter - did some things that we both would have happily left to professionals just a few months ago. With the electrical work, carpentry, and plumbing tasks, I feel like we made huge strides in our confidence to dive in and figure things out in this crazy old house.

And now, of course, I'm not at all depressed about giving the baby a bath in this pretty little room :)

Down to the Studs

Our house is looking really crazy these days. We're 2 1/2 weeks into the renovation, and it's basically on schedule so far (I am furiously knocking on wood now that I've typed that!). 

The kitchen and dining room had the carpeting and flooring removed, and were taken down the studs so that the ceilings could reveal what was causing our upstairs to sag. It turns out that there wasn't a load bearing wall for that entire half of the house, which was, of course, causing the drop. Three big beams were added to the ceiling, and now the floor on the second level is flatter and the house is a lot more secure. It was a sad discovery, though. We were kind of hoping that the cause was just old age and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it :)

The electrician has come to set up all the new outlets and lights in the kitchen, a gas line was added for a new stove (I am so excited to go back to gas! Cooking with electric is kind of terrible), the stack pipe, which used to be in the middle of our kitchen counter (!), was moved further back into the wall, and the wall between the dining room and kitchen was opened up. So much progress! By early next week, we should have the new plaster up on the walls and ceiling.

Here are some things keeping Peter up at night:

• Installing a new engineered hardwood floor throughout the first floor with me, his soon-to-be 33 weeks pregnant wife 
• Installing the new sink, super heavy counter top, and faucet to the bathroom upstairs 
• Keeping my somewhat grandiose time frame of when everything could/should be done in check

I would be kept awake by these things, too, if only I wasn't so tired each night when my head hit the pillow. Last night I did have a dream about taking down paneling and peeling wallpaper, though, so the renovation is successfully haunting me in my sleep. 

The Chaos Before the Storm

Sooooooo. There are a few things that have happened in the house since moving in that I've been too embarrassed to tell you about. This is because they were my fault, and they made our already crazy house even more crazy. But now that we are on the cusp of the rest of our renovation (which will address these insane things!), I feel like I can come clean.

The top two are in our dining room, and they are things I did within a week of moving in last August. I innocently pulled a piece of wallpaper off the wall to see how stuck on it was, and was horrified to realize that the previous owners had put the wallpaper on over paneling. What the what? I told Peter we need to take down the paneling so we could paint the walls, which involved taking down the (very tacky, very plastic) crown molding and trim. However, underneath that sheet of paneling was a horror show of crumbling plaster that can't be salvaged. We've been living with that piece of paneling propped against the wall for almost seven months. Gah! But the entire room is going to get a coat of new plaster, along with the ceiling. And the carpet is getting ripped up, too.

On the hutch, I took off the horrible shudders and then sprayed it like crazy with paint stripper. Over and over and over, and it still looks all chippy and crazy. I know that I could be more patient and get it clean enough to re-stain, but I'm totally resigned to painting it at this point.

The last photo captures a taste of the worst thing I've done to the house. Before we moved in, I peeled back a piece of wallpaper in the kitchen to see how stuck on that one was, and that also revealed paneling underneath. One weekend in October, Peter was away for a bachelor party, and in what my Mom thinks was a fit of hormonal insanity, I pulled off all the paneling, which revealed no fewer than six (6!!!) different wall papers throughout the room. My brilliant solution to this horrendous obstacle was to buy the biggest tub of joint compound I could find and literally cover every single square inch of the kitchen before Peter came home. It is a disaster. (To Peter's tremendous credit, he has admirably pretended that this is not a completely awful thing.)

I am really writing a novel here! Easing toward the wrap-up, the kitchen is being remodeled, starting tomorrow (Monday!!!). We got back from a glorious week in San Diego last night around midnight, and have spent all day paper writing (for me, boo), and then moving all our stuff out of our kitchen and dining room. Lots of stuff on the porch, a new-to-us fridge from Craigslist in the entryway, and a make-shift kitchen set up in the living room. By the way, I have a fun California post coming up this week, too...

Anyways! I didn't snap a picture of this, but we're also having our stairs opened up a bit so that we won't hit our heads on the ceiling when walking on the fourth step multiple times a day.  I am 30 weeks pregnant today, and this all feels a little bit insane, but I really hope our instincts are right that we'll be very, very happy to have this all done pre-baby.

Just keep cooking, baby. Please don't even think about coming early!

Half Bath Mini-Makeover

Yay, a completed mini-makeover to share! Over the weekend we painted the entryway (still being set up, but pictures coming soon!). There was half a gallon of that pretty green paint left, so I couldn't help but add the half bath to the list, too.

I did have grand plans to go with a cute stripe in here, but laziness won out. Maybe in a few years when everything else in the house is done / adorable (HA!), I'll have the motivation to tackle more creative things. But for now, this feels like a big victory - one (itty bitty) room in our house is now looking a-okay.

The before shots above are actually better than what I was starting out with because there were two truly horrible bathroom cabinets over the toilet and sink. You can see the creepy shadows on the walls where they once were. Since we have a full bath upstairs with storage aplenty, I was fine with getting rid of those cabinets down here, and there's still some storage under the sink for my blow dryer and cleaning supplies. 

This room was clearly a blank slate, and we certainly won't be don't anything major to it in terms of renovations. But if I had been the one designing this bath, I would have gone with pedestal sink to free up some real estate - it's a very narrow room. And for the love of Nancy, I would have centered the toilet on the wall (!!!).

I've tried to counteract that left-leaning toilet by centering the art work above it (obviously), but also adding a free-standing toilet paper thingy-majig and putting the tissues in the middle, too. It helps a little? If anyone has any additional brilliant ideas, I would love to hear!

New House: Entry + Living Room

Soooo, I have to say, I'm a little nervous to actually show you some pictures of our house (well, it will be ours in a few weeks - we close at the end of the month!). I think this fear stems from seeing other people post "before" pictures of their homes, outlining all the things they want to change, when really, it doesn't look that bad at all. Know what I mean? THIS HOUSE LOOKS BAD.

But, as my mom says, if something is kind of ugly or really ugly, you still have to change it. And so, I give you our entry way and living room. It needs so much love and attention, you guys.

This is the first room you walk into from the front entry. Peter's so disgusted, he had to leave immediately. This was likely a front porch that they converted into an all-seasons room, and they left some very clear remnants of it's past. For instance, they kept the original front door, a glass sliding door,and their outdoor light right inside their house. OMG I KNOW. Other horrible things to note: the paneling, the linoleum/cheap carpet combo, the gross old windows, and the tile ceiling.

This space is actually something we're planning to tackle right away, which I'm sure comes as no surprise (wait until you see the rest, though, and you'll understand why we wrestled with keeping it as is to do something else first instead!).

The doors inside will go, and we'll have a beam put up to secure the structure of the house (since that used to be the end of house, it needs some special support). The crazy windows will be replaced with two sets of double windows in the front, and then the hardwood that's hiding under the living room carpet will be carried throughout here. Down the line, I would love to think about moving the entry way to front of the house (it's currently on the side), and maybe adding a closet where that window is next to the real front door. And maybe a wall? We'll see how things progress.

Sorry for the blurry picture, but it's probably better for your eyes :) This is the living room, which is on the other side of the sliding door. As you can see, central air! Just kidding. If you turn that AC unit on, it blows a fuse for the entire downstairs. We're having it removed, and a full window will go there instead. We're pulling up the carpet (which will hopefully reveal amazing hardwoods, knock on wood, seriously, please do), and taking off the wall paper, of course.

The bigger issue is something you can kind of see here - the wall on the other side of that door is actually covering up a fireplace. It hasn't worked for ages (maybe ever?), and square footage is at a premium, so we're going to have it removed so we can open up that wall, which goes into the dining room (and it also cuts into space in the upstairs bedrooms, which is a bigger problem)

Because of these issues (and a few others with the basement and roof, eww, worst places to have to spend reno dollars), we're going to keep our apartment for the month of August and move in about a month after closing. This will be a totally magical renovation where the things I mentioned will all be completed before we move in! (Absolutely not true, but I keep telling that to myself anyways!!!)

Any advice, guys?! I know many of you have recently taken the plunge into home ownership! Should I be doing anything besides pinning like crazy right now? I hope not, because at the moment that's my pro-bono part-time job .