The kitchen that started the chaos
The Kitchen
* I had typed out this whole entire blog post and then went to go finish it and IT WAS ALL GONE. the first sentence fits how everything about this went...UGHHHHHHHH!!!**
Alright, this kitchen. Ugh....
The kitchen was the first initial response to causing chaos. When we were walking through the house before we bought it I could see how its open concept could really help make this place feel more spacious and how when we updated it, it would make more sense with this houses layout. At that point it had this awful red-maroon fake brick that matched the fireplace on the other side of the house and it made the kitchen look like dungeon. It had dark oak cabinets and beaten down vinyl floors completed that look and all in all we figured it would be easy to update some back splash and maybe just add some new paint to the walls and worry about floors later. I mean if that was all that needed to be done...Pffftt piece of cake!
The madness happened one night after work when we were getting dinner ready and had the dishwasher going. Spencer noticed a leak and decided to take a better look at what was going on. To our awful dismay we found out the dishwasher had leaked all the way under the cabinets and it didn't take long to notice that part of the reason the floor looked rough was probably because water had traveled all the way to the middle of the kitchen. We were horrified because the stains looked pretty old and we had no idea how long this thing had been pushing water underneath this floor.
Poor Spencer, if only he knew what was to come after just tearing out the kitchen floors. This house, at first we called something like the old house with some charm, but we soon found out the more appropriate name would be forever and always "the onion house." When Spencer tore out the old vinyl there were two more layers of flooring and with that we found that the linoleum flooring on the bottom was glued to the sub-floor and it would not come off. Spencer had to scrape at it for a couple of weeks! Why didn't we just seal the linoleum and save Spence? Well, after we had pulled up the layers of flooring we discovered years of different staining that was not just from that dishwasher and it also brought out this awful. I mean AWFUL. I was pregnant in my first trimester and while other people just said "oh boy that smells" and passed it off I wanted to cut my nose off and glue my mouth. We needed it all gone. Once Spencer got the kitchen floors all pulled out and scraped off we put down this amazing product called Kilz and we swear by it. This stuff is heavy duty, but it sealed all of the smells and staining so when we found a floor to put down we knew we would be safe from anything coming up into the new flooring. *A little side note, Kilz is very powerful and we usually stayed at my aunt and uncles or a hotel for a couple of nights whenever we put it down, because it does take 24-48 hours for it to dry completely.
We did get a little side tracked on this particular project because once the kitchen smelt better, that was when I could smell the living room and all the bedrooms. Everyone kept saying the smell was gone, but trust me it is still burned into my head how strong it was so I begged Spencer to rip out all of the flooring in the house. Again poor guy...because it was the onion house and it lived up to its name in every single square ft.
After all the floors were ripped out, he decided to rip out all of the fake brick everywhere. That stuff was the literal worst. It was glued with this tar stuff and would only come off in little chunks. Cuss words were flying for a while. The demo part of this renovation was just awful. It took forever to get this place torn down to the base. People would always ask during our projects "Weren't you doing that last week?" or "You still haven't finished that?" One thing I think a lot of people were forgetting was it was Spencer as a full time worker and me as a half, actually maybe just a third at that time and we were only able to work on this during the weekends because it was winter and around here it gets dark at 4pm. Seriously it was the pits.
We had finally gotten everything torn out and primed ready for our beautiful wood floors. HAHA that kind of made it sound like picking out the floors and everything in between was an easy task. Let me just say this...People used to say if you can buy, or build a house together your marriage can make it through anything. I say, If you can sleep on a sub-floor after buying a dump, not knowing you were expecting a baby on top of renovating that trash house yourself than you are meant to be together, IF you haven't killed each other before than. I mean we loved each other very, very much, but renovations and pregnancy bring out everyone's worst emotions.
So, the snow started to come down and it was freezing. We started on putting in the flooring and would snag anyone who could be paid in food to help. All of our friends who helped put in the flooring are actual saints and probably will go straight to heaven just because they knew their friends were stupid and needed help no matter the weather. When I say it was snowing, I mean the first weekend we worked on the flooring our front porch was buried in snow and it was like a blizzard with the wind.
In order to put in the floors we had a system. I, (the MVP) would be the one to drive to the store for food and drink while the others started putting down the purple paper stuff I do not recall the name of and any installer probably won't read this so I should be fine. Once they were done, they would get started by having someone use the table saw to make the cuts, another who was measuring and one who was gluing and applying. It would go pretty fast until they hit a spot where things wouldn't line up, or measurements were impossible to figure out, but as soon as it was figured out they got back into the groove of things pretty quick. Now, you may be thinking where the heck was I, or what was I doing to help? Good question. I the preggo could not just sit and watch, I also was probably more in the way than help anyways at that point, but still I would annoy my husband to the point where he would finally come up with "kayleen jobs", you know the jobs you assign the weakest player to make them feel good and important. Hence me driving to the store for snacks and also my most important job the tape peeler. No one could have gotten anything done without me.
It took months for us to finish all the flooring, but when it was finally done it was so magical being able to walk around in my socks. I remember feeling like so much more at home when I could do that. This house seriously opened our eyes to little blessings like walking on an actual floor. Now of course there is a little terror in our home where I wouldn't dare walk in my socks now because my biggest pet peeve is crumbs on bare feet, or dirt all on the bottom of my socks.
We finally got back to the kitchen reno and decided to put in brick black-splash. Let me tell you what, If you ever think you want to renovate please consider the following...
Whenever you think a project will take a couple of days, add on a week. If you think you won't have home depot, or lowes as your second home and you won't become a regular there, think again. If you have a pretty clean vocabulary and want to keep it that way...ehhh I would say new build is your thing. You may feel like the world is ending and life sucks for a while until its all done and then for some reason your brain literally erases the last 5 hours before. You may want to account for multiple bumps in the road and driving back and forth to the store at least three times in one day.
If you have considered the following, be smarter than most of us.
We got started on the backsplash and I was so excited to have my floors and then for this back- splash because for the past three months they were these ugle uneven crap walls. If anyone has renovated an older home then they probably know what I am talking about, but there was this yellow chipped stuff that would come off and I never cooked anything because I didn't was our food to be contaminated by the uncovered walls...little dramatic I know.
The back-splash was actually my favorite renovation in this house because it was actually something I could help with. My mom and Aunt were able to help for a chunk of it and it was so much fun. Well, until they left and things started to not measure up right and a big hole in the wall that we couldn't just patch up real quick got in the way of finishing the project, it wasn't as fun then. For the back splash we would have to measure out each piece to make sure it would fit and then line it up the way we would want and keep in mind the future pieces that would go around it. It took some concentration and sometimes it would take a long while to figure out how to cut a peice and line it up around a light switch, but as soon as it was cut and everything was placed in order we were ready to lay them on the wall. We used a premixed cement to place the tiles and we loved it. You have two options when it comes to the cement you use and one you mix yourself and the other is probably more expensive, but it is already mixed. We chose the premix at first because I was pregnant and didn't want to breath in any of the powdered mix. Also, the cement I couldn't touch without gloves. Spencer kind of stuck with the cement and placing the tiles anyways. Here was our system for part one of the back-splash...
Spencer would measure, cut and place with cement and then I would go through and put the spacers in between and help make sure they were in a straight line so they would dry perfect.
When it came to part 2 of the back splash that was all me and actually I loved it. While spencer was at work I would grout. It is super easy. All you have to do it buy some premixed grout and push it into the designated "grout lines" and then scrub in circles with a sponge. After I would get further down the wall I would go back and use a damp rag to wipe off the grouted tiles to make sure no fog would be left on top of a tile from the grout. Super simple and fast.
Now our kitchen had beautiful dark reddish brown flooring and tan and white tiled back-splash. We were so happy with it and it almost felt complete. I was about 34-35 weeks pregnant when the vision of white cabinets came to me. Like why at that point in my pregnancy did I decided it was a good idea? probably because I was bored and I found out about chalk paint.
We have 32 cabinets in our kitchen...did not expect that. In my head I was like oh this will look so good and we don't have very many....gosh when would I finally LEARN!
So, I unscrewed every screw in that kitchen and laid out all the cabinets, grabbed myself some chalk paint and a specific chalk painting paint brush and away I went while jamming out to Lynard Skynard. Chalk Paint is so much fun. It gives you a rustic look and when you are painting it has a completely different texture than what you are used to. I found that brushing in the same direction and adding two to three coats helped with a truer, more bold white. It took me about three weeks to finish them, but still to this day I love them!
Chalk paint is not complete without buffing in the wax coating, so whenever you are done painting you let it dry then apply the wax. Before I started my paint job a lot of people said not to use chalk paint on cabinets because they chip over time, or discolor. My cabinets have been painted a year now and still look good, in my own opinion I would say it all just depends on the look and maintaince you are going for. I can still wipe down my cabinets and scrub a little, I am just not going crazy and it seems fine, but I also have only one kids spilling red sauce on my white cabinets and not like six. I know that if it did chip I could easily do some touch up paint.
After ripping out floors, not having a dishwasher for a year, tearing off the old brick, patching up a wall, adding back-splash and updating the cabinets our kitchen has become a place to gather and enjoy good food. It feels open, clean and you can fit a big crowd of friends in there to dish up some good tasting food! It also is a favorite spot for a one year old to find old snacks and rub his grubby hands all over. The once nightmare is now gone and in its place is a cute lil' country farmhouse kitchen.
PRAISE EVERYTHING HOLY IT IS COMPLETE.
-Kayleen
* I had typed out this whole entire blog post and then went to go finish it and IT WAS ALL GONE. the first sentence fits how everything about this went...UGHHHHHHHH!!!**
Alright, this kitchen. Ugh....
The kitchen was the first initial response to causing chaos. When we were walking through the house before we bought it I could see how its open concept could really help make this place feel more spacious and how when we updated it, it would make more sense with this houses layout. At that point it had this awful red-maroon fake brick that matched the fireplace on the other side of the house and it made the kitchen look like dungeon. It had dark oak cabinets and beaten down vinyl floors completed that look and all in all we figured it would be easy to update some back splash and maybe just add some new paint to the walls and worry about floors later. I mean if that was all that needed to be done...Pffftt piece of cake!
The madness happened one night after work when we were getting dinner ready and had the dishwasher going. Spencer noticed a leak and decided to take a better look at what was going on. To our awful dismay we found out the dishwasher had leaked all the way under the cabinets and it didn't take long to notice that part of the reason the floor looked rough was probably because water had traveled all the way to the middle of the kitchen. We were horrified because the stains looked pretty old and we had no idea how long this thing had been pushing water underneath this floor.
Poor Spencer, if only he knew what was to come after just tearing out the kitchen floors. This house, at first we called something like the old house with some charm, but we soon found out the more appropriate name would be forever and always "the onion house." When Spencer tore out the old vinyl there were two more layers of flooring and with that we found that the linoleum flooring on the bottom was glued to the sub-floor and it would not come off. Spencer had to scrape at it for a couple of weeks! Why didn't we just seal the linoleum and save Spence? Well, after we had pulled up the layers of flooring we discovered years of different staining that was not just from that dishwasher and it also brought out this awful. I mean AWFUL. I was pregnant in my first trimester and while other people just said "oh boy that smells" and passed it off I wanted to cut my nose off and glue my mouth. We needed it all gone. Once Spencer got the kitchen floors all pulled out and scraped off we put down this amazing product called Kilz and we swear by it. This stuff is heavy duty, but it sealed all of the smells and staining so when we found a floor to put down we knew we would be safe from anything coming up into the new flooring. *A little side note, Kilz is very powerful and we usually stayed at my aunt and uncles or a hotel for a couple of nights whenever we put it down, because it does take 24-48 hours for it to dry completely.
We did get a little side tracked on this particular project because once the kitchen smelt better, that was when I could smell the living room and all the bedrooms. Everyone kept saying the smell was gone, but trust me it is still burned into my head how strong it was so I begged Spencer to rip out all of the flooring in the house. Again poor guy...because it was the onion house and it lived up to its name in every single square ft.
After all the floors were ripped out, he decided to rip out all of the fake brick everywhere. That stuff was the literal worst. It was glued with this tar stuff and would only come off in little chunks. Cuss words were flying for a while. The demo part of this renovation was just awful. It took forever to get this place torn down to the base. People would always ask during our projects "Weren't you doing that last week?" or "You still haven't finished that?" One thing I think a lot of people were forgetting was it was Spencer as a full time worker and me as a half, actually maybe just a third at that time and we were only able to work on this during the weekends because it was winter and around here it gets dark at 4pm. Seriously it was the pits.
We had finally gotten everything torn out and primed ready for our beautiful wood floors. HAHA that kind of made it sound like picking out the floors and everything in between was an easy task. Let me just say this...People used to say if you can buy, or build a house together your marriage can make it through anything. I say, If you can sleep on a sub-floor after buying a dump, not knowing you were expecting a baby on top of renovating that trash house yourself than you are meant to be together, IF you haven't killed each other before than. I mean we loved each other very, very much, but renovations and pregnancy bring out everyone's worst emotions.
So, the snow started to come down and it was freezing. We started on putting in the flooring and would snag anyone who could be paid in food to help. All of our friends who helped put in the flooring are actual saints and probably will go straight to heaven just because they knew their friends were stupid and needed help no matter the weather. When I say it was snowing, I mean the first weekend we worked on the flooring our front porch was buried in snow and it was like a blizzard with the wind.
In order to put in the floors we had a system. I, (the MVP) would be the one to drive to the store for food and drink while the others started putting down the purple paper stuff I do not recall the name of and any installer probably won't read this so I should be fine. Once they were done, they would get started by having someone use the table saw to make the cuts, another who was measuring and one who was gluing and applying. It would go pretty fast until they hit a spot where things wouldn't line up, or measurements were impossible to figure out, but as soon as it was figured out they got back into the groove of things pretty quick. Now, you may be thinking where the heck was I, or what was I doing to help? Good question. I the preggo could not just sit and watch, I also was probably more in the way than help anyways at that point, but still I would annoy my husband to the point where he would finally come up with "kayleen jobs", you know the jobs you assign the weakest player to make them feel good and important. Hence me driving to the store for snacks and also my most important job the tape peeler. No one could have gotten anything done without me.
It took months for us to finish all the flooring, but when it was finally done it was so magical being able to walk around in my socks. I remember feeling like so much more at home when I could do that. This house seriously opened our eyes to little blessings like walking on an actual floor. Now of course there is a little terror in our home where I wouldn't dare walk in my socks now because my biggest pet peeve is crumbs on bare feet, or dirt all on the bottom of my socks.
We finally got back to the kitchen reno and decided to put in brick black-splash. Let me tell you what, If you ever think you want to renovate please consider the following...
Whenever you think a project will take a couple of days, add on a week. If you think you won't have home depot, or lowes as your second home and you won't become a regular there, think again. If you have a pretty clean vocabulary and want to keep it that way...ehhh I would say new build is your thing. You may feel like the world is ending and life sucks for a while until its all done and then for some reason your brain literally erases the last 5 hours before. You may want to account for multiple bumps in the road and driving back and forth to the store at least three times in one day.
If you have considered the following, be smarter than most of us.
We got started on the backsplash and I was so excited to have my floors and then for this back- splash because for the past three months they were these ugle uneven crap walls. If anyone has renovated an older home then they probably know what I am talking about, but there was this yellow chipped stuff that would come off and I never cooked anything because I didn't was our food to be contaminated by the uncovered walls...little dramatic I know.
The back-splash was actually my favorite renovation in this house because it was actually something I could help with. My mom and Aunt were able to help for a chunk of it and it was so much fun. Well, until they left and things started to not measure up right and a big hole in the wall that we couldn't just patch up real quick got in the way of finishing the project, it wasn't as fun then. For the back splash we would have to measure out each piece to make sure it would fit and then line it up the way we would want and keep in mind the future pieces that would go around it. It took some concentration and sometimes it would take a long while to figure out how to cut a peice and line it up around a light switch, but as soon as it was cut and everything was placed in order we were ready to lay them on the wall. We used a premixed cement to place the tiles and we loved it. You have two options when it comes to the cement you use and one you mix yourself and the other is probably more expensive, but it is already mixed. We chose the premix at first because I was pregnant and didn't want to breath in any of the powdered mix. Also, the cement I couldn't touch without gloves. Spencer kind of stuck with the cement and placing the tiles anyways. Here was our system for part one of the back-splash...
When it came to part 2 of the back splash that was all me and actually I loved it. While spencer was at work I would grout. It is super easy. All you have to do it buy some premixed grout and push it into the designated "grout lines" and then scrub in circles with a sponge. After I would get further down the wall I would go back and use a damp rag to wipe off the grouted tiles to make sure no fog would be left on top of a tile from the grout. Super simple and fast.
Now our kitchen had beautiful dark reddish brown flooring and tan and white tiled back-splash. We were so happy with it and it almost felt complete. I was about 34-35 weeks pregnant when the vision of white cabinets came to me. Like why at that point in my pregnancy did I decided it was a good idea? probably because I was bored and I found out about chalk paint.
We have 32 cabinets in our kitchen...did not expect that. In my head I was like oh this will look so good and we don't have very many....gosh when would I finally LEARN!
So, I unscrewed every screw in that kitchen and laid out all the cabinets, grabbed myself some chalk paint and a specific chalk painting paint brush and away I went while jamming out to Lynard Skynard. Chalk Paint is so much fun. It gives you a rustic look and when you are painting it has a completely different texture than what you are used to. I found that brushing in the same direction and adding two to three coats helped with a truer, more bold white. It took me about three weeks to finish them, but still to this day I love them!
Chalk paint is not complete without buffing in the wax coating, so whenever you are done painting you let it dry then apply the wax. Before I started my paint job a lot of people said not to use chalk paint on cabinets because they chip over time, or discolor. My cabinets have been painted a year now and still look good, in my own opinion I would say it all just depends on the look and maintaince you are going for. I can still wipe down my cabinets and scrub a little, I am just not going crazy and it seems fine, but I also have only one kids spilling red sauce on my white cabinets and not like six. I know that if it did chip I could easily do some touch up paint.
After ripping out floors, not having a dishwasher for a year, tearing off the old brick, patching up a wall, adding back-splash and updating the cabinets our kitchen has become a place to gather and enjoy good food. It feels open, clean and you can fit a big crowd of friends in there to dish up some good tasting food! It also is a favorite spot for a one year old to find old snacks and rub his grubby hands all over. The once nightmare is now gone and in its place is a cute lil' country farmhouse kitchen.
PRAISE EVERYTHING HOLY IT IS COMPLETE.
-Kayleen
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