Kitchen Renovation: The Kitchen Table

This project was EXTREMELY overdue, and was one of my highlighted projects of my maternity leave.

It felt like I was sanding for a short eternity, to be honest. It took a LONG time to get down to the base wood of the table. I chose to only do the top surface and not the legs and sides and what not. (I cannot even remotely imagine how long doing the rest would have taken me!)

I had initially thought that Teak Natural would be the perfect color stain for the table, but after doing 3 coats of stain and three coats of poly, I noticed it looked significantly more orange than the rest of the table, so after also having an issue with the poly looking like it needed to be re-done, I decided to re-do the whole thing again.

This time I went with Antique Walnut, and the match was significantly better. We LOVE it, and it's really nice to not have food particles getting stuck in the gaps that had worn out and for paint to actually be staining the wood in the parts where the poly had completely gone missing.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2015 (November 26-29)

We had an extraordinarily eventful Thanksgiving weekend this year, although would you believe that we didn't go anywhere, and only just hosted Mark's Mom the day of? It was SO very nice after a busy "Friendsgiving" the prior weekend to just settle into a 4 day weekend, and Thanksgiving Day was a fantastic opportunity to just catch up and enjoy our little family. I spent more than enough time working on laundry and dishes and just overall getting the house back in order (i.e. flip flops and rain boots swapped out for snow boots, and spring jackets in storage with winter coats in their place).

We enjoyed a relaxing evening with Mark's Mom, where I served pork loin with a cranberry apple chutney, baked potatoes, squash and green beans, as well as pie for dessert.

It was low key, which was exactly what we needed with what the rest of the weekend brought.

Friday morning we were up and out the door by 10am, making our way to Sioux Falls. We needed a couple new tires from Manly tire (en-route), as well as some extra underlayment tape, and we thought we'd make a family day of it. We dropped off the old tires, tackled Menards on Black Friday (we're well aware that we're nuts!), and then enjoyed a yummy lunch at HuHot before making our way back to pick up the tires and head to Worthington. The boys conked out shortly after lunch, thankfully, and we had a quiet ride back to Worthington.

We dropped the boys off for the weekend at Grandpa and Grandma's, visited for a short bit, then made our way home to get started on the big weekend project. I did a full recap of the project here, so I won't go into depth about that part of the weekend, but what I didn't mention in that recap was that poor Kendrick ended up getting sick while he was there, so it was kinda bummer of a weekend for him, although it sounds like they still had a blast!

We are SOOOOO very glad we got our floors finished (finally!) and have that major project behind us, but here it's Monday evening, and I'm cringing at the thought of having to get up from this chair and walk to my bed, so it definitely took its toll on our bodies! (Mark has also been popping Tylenol all day).

We have so very much to be thankful for: Far too much to list. But today I feel so blessed that I have a body that even at 6 months pregnant, I can work to sheer exhaustion. That I can still walk. That I have a warm house, more food than we could eat in a month, and two very healthy little boys (with one on the way) and a husband that goes out of his way to show me just how much he loves me. I could go on and on and on about it all, but this weekend has been a perfect mix of sheer exhaustion and thankfulness :)

Kitchen Renovation Update: The Flooring

This update has been a VERY long time coming, but Mark and I were finally blessed with a kid-free weekend to tackle this project, and I have to say that we are completely exhausted today.

I am even more stunned than anticipated with the results, and just know that we're going to love the adjustment.

The "Before" pictures don't even begin to describe how disgusting the carpet and laminate really were, but here they are nonetheless:

I mean, when the linoleum is supposed to be white, but no matter how hard you scrub it, it's still yellow, I think it's time to replace it, no? Same with carpet stains: definitely time for a change.

We worked our butts off this weekend, including from 5:30-9pm on Friday evening (after a full day in Sioux Falls, then dropping the boys off at Grandpa and Grandma's house).

Day 1 Progress:

We tore out all the old linoleum and 1/4" plywood underneath, pulled all the hundreds of staples and swept it off in preparation for laying the floor the next day.

We got started again on Saturday morning around 8:30am and worked with two short breaks for meals until 10:30pm. We fell into bed both nights just completely exhausted, sore, and achy. I got 3 slivers and we both had blistery hands from pulling all those dang nails up. SO worth it.

Day 2 Progress:

Put down the underlayment, laid the hardwood in the kitchen...

...pulled out the old carpet and padding, fixed two bad spots in the flooring, pulled out another hundred staples (although not the heavy duty kind like were in the kitchen floor), tried our best to sweep, what with the glue from the padding and all, laid the underlayment on about half of the floor, and continued about halfway into the living room. Mark had a ton of really tricky cuts this day, but did a fantastic job! The doorways, air vents, appliance inlets and stairs caused a lot of headaches, but we got most of the difficult stuff out of the way this day. But...we also realized that we were almost out of underlayment, and we weren't going to have enough.

We were back at it again on Sunday morning around 8am as well, but took a break at 9 as I had nursery duty at church, and Mark had to make a quick run to Mankato to pick up another roll of underlayment, as we were just slightly too short on that, but also to exchange some transition strips and return some tape.

We were back at it after lunch and finished the floor itself around 2:30pm. Mark spent the rest of the afternoon well into the evening finishing everything up while I went to drop off a ton of cardboard at the recycling center and pick up the boys in Worthington!

Day 3 Progress:

Finished pretty much everything, including the last half of the living room floors, trim, stairs, transition pieces, and replacing vents.

Of course, the thing about upgrading one thing really nice in your house is that everything else suddenly looks pretty sub-par. I'm fairly certain we may have to use tablecloths now until we get a new kitchen table, and our couch and love seat could bite the dust anytime soon and I wouldn't complain.

Stay tuned for more project posts. We still have the backsplash to put up at some point, and well after the baby is born, we'll probably start thinking about what we want to do with the cabinets and counter tops. It'll still be many many years before we trade up in the furniture department, as we'd rather let our current stuff serve its purpose through three rambunctious little boys without cringing at the thought of it being damaged or spilled on or what not.

Kitchen Renovation

We've just begun doing a fairly significant renovation in our kitchen, including (but not limited to) new flooring, a new sliding glass door, a new tile back-splash and upgrading our previous blinds with curtains.

Our current kitchen is much beloved, but it has certainly seen WAY better days. We're giddy for the changes ahead, although nervous that we're making the right decisions.

Sliding Glass Door

The door was beginning to actually rot out at the bottom (as are some of our windows, which is a project we foresee needing to address in the near future as well), so that was the first thing to be changed out. We hired this done, as the door was entirely too heavy for Mark to lift alone, but considering I'm now entering into my second trimester, I'm not really much help without pulling muscles left and right. It turned out to be a great decision for us!

See before:

The door itself was very dated, but the worst part was how it was rotting along the bottom from getting so much moisture in from a bad seal:

After:
The new door doesn't solve the awful flooring issue, but it does look significantly better! Still waiting for the window treatments (which I'll get to next).

Window Treatments

Of course, the natural progression with the door being replaced was to decide what to do with the blinds. I've never hated them, but they do irritate me on the level that both of our kids just love to play with them and I'm just waiting for the day when they come crashing down as a result. That, and they add NO color or warmth to the room. They also ended up cutting the doors down to about 2/3 the size they really are, since they all bunch up on one side. We decided on curtains with a rod that extends about 6 inches past on either side of the window so that we could truly open things up and let a lot more light in.

When I went to pick out the curtains, a lot came into play, but a lot of that had to do with the tile backsplash we had picked out back at the beginning of July. We LOVED the backsplash and thought it'd be great to tie in some of the colors from that across the room at the window. So here's what we went with:


Product link on Menards.com

We decided to match up the darker blue color in the tile for the curtains, so we went with these from JCP

Curtains at JCPenney

Curtain rod at JCPenney

Flooring

Flooring for the kitchen has been quite the headache, truthfully. We always kind of were leaning towards hardwood or engineered hardwood, but really started struggling with that decision when we thought about trying to match up the different colors of wood in our house: From blonde cabinets to medium-grain stairs and a different color medium-grain trim throughout the house. We initially decided to go with DuraCeramic tiles, a tile composite type product that looked really great when we ordered it (and the salesman also just raved about).

However, once we went back to pick up our order, the company had discontinued the product, which gave us pause. We should have looked up the reviews before placing the order, because had we done so, we would have realized that it had HORRIBLE reviews. We took it back a couple weeks later and choked down the 25% restock fee. We figured we'd rather be out a couple hundred dollars in stupid tax than to go to all the trouble of putting back down flooring that we weren't satisfied with.

We went back to the drawing board, and I picked up a few samples when I was in Mankato with my friend Angie once again, except this time we had a PERFECT fit! We found this flooring and it complements all the other wood in our house PERFECTLY, which is hard to envision. Not only does it go with the cabinets, trim and stairs, but it also complements our wood dining room furniture that we've got for the time being until our kids stop ruining things. (haha- will that be "ever"??)

Link to the hardwood flooring from Menards.com
In this particular picture, it looks a little more wild than in real life, but this room also appears to have significantly more light than our living room gets, and we also intend to tone it down a bit with an area rug in the TBD future.

We're really excited to get the ball rolling on the flooring, as our current flooring (linoleum and a lighter colored berber carpet) is 18 years old, stained, and very (very, very) disgusting. See exhibits A and B:


Okay, that above picture doesn't do the condition justice, as it's not a high-traffic area like the one below:

Other projects that we may possibly tackle down the road would be cabinets and counter tops, but quite frankly, we're just trying to tackle the necessities at the current time. The more urgent needs after these initial changes will be replacing more windows in the house, as many of them are starting to rot out.

Oh, the joys of home ownership :)

Stay tuned for an update in a few weeks!