Goings on in the kitchen.....(part1)

When I went to clean out the kitchen cabinets and found plenty of mouse droppings I decided that cleaning them would not be enough....if they had gotten in before, they could do it again...so we decided to tear out all the bottom cabinets....so this is after getting the countertop off.

And after we unscrewed the old cabinets from the wall and got them out of there...I could show you the nasty close-ups of mouse skeletons and mouse poop and maggots....but you'll just have to trust me on why we NEEDED to tear out these cabinets! They will be made use of in Jason's workshop in the basement.

These are the new cabintes we bought...just the cheap unfinished ones, and I painted them a cream color.

And I painted the top cabinets the same color for now. Hopefully someday new top cabinets will make it onto the priority list, but they're fine for now.

Since they had added plywood to the rest of the floor AFTER the cabinetry was installed, we had a bit of un-even-ness that needed to be filled in, so we added new plywood under the cabinets, and filled any holes in the floor or walls where critters might be able to get in.

:) This is one of the pieces of plywood. :)

This is the new cabinet configuration to include the dishwasher.

Here is where the pregnancy brain kicked in....when I re-configured the cabinetry to include a dishwasher....I didn't even think about the sink hole in the old countertop...heh.

Jason chopped off part of the counter to make the sink fit...so it's a little short on the refridgerator end...but it's just temporary until we get a new countertop.

:) I re-did this plumbing. I also installed that new faucet in the picture above. (I don't need to hear from any plumbers about how wrong this is, ok?) :)

This is the old range hood....

:) And this is the new one the boys installed for me a couple of weeks ago....it makes a big difference to me. :)

This is just part one of...probably 5 or 6 of the kitchen....but I've got some painting to do today, so the next part will have to wait until later this week...and there is plenty that hasn't even been done yet. :) But it's a start!

Dining Room

The next room I painted was actually the bedroom....but...I don't have pictures of it, so this is the dining room. I wanted to do something that would go nicely with the living room, since they're connected, but still something different. All my china cabinet stuff is pink and green...and since green works a little better with the living room decor (and Jason is not as much of a fan of pink as I am), that is what we went with. Jason helped me pick the color of the room...and originally we had chosen the color that we ended up with...but then I doubted it...and somehow we ended up going with the BRIGHTER green....which Jason liked, but it was just TOO green for me, so after two days of painting it BRIGHT green I went back and got the paint a shade lighter and re-did the whole thing.

So the first picture up there is after I started painting the lighter color over the brighter color. Even after the lighter green I wasn't sure I liked it, so I decided I needed to make a little trip to JoAnn's for some fabric, and found this green and cream stuff that I loved, and whipped up the curtains...after getting the curtains up I liked the color way better...I also think that once there's stuff in the room the green won't be so overwhelming.

Jason said that he doesn't think having long curtains on a short window is odd...he just thought it was weird to have long curtains in the living room and short ones in the dining room. ...but I think I kinda like it. :) Variety is the spice of life.

Living Room

The living room is the first room I worked on, mostly because I knew exactly what I wanted to do in there. When I was re-upholstering our couch at this time last year I found this fabric that I really loved for curtains and pillows in the living room, and picked the couch fabric from there, and I always wanted yellow walls to go with all of it...but since we live in a boring beige apartment....well...the walls are boring and beige. So I picked a bright and cheery yellow for the living room walls. It took some getting used t...cause it is quite bright, but I'm totally in love with it now. And the curtains I just took over from our apartment and hung as-is...so they're long. I need to hem them, but what do you think, a couple of inches...or a couple of feet? I love the fabric so much that I don't mind them being way longer than the window...but Jason thinks it's odd that they're long when the window is so little.

So give me your opinions...long or short on the curtains?

After next weekend hopefully there will be furniture in there to show you!

:) Lets try it this way!

Here are the "before" pictures that I took of our house...I didn't take anything too detailed because...well...it's a bit yuckier that way. Before we start different projects we take more close-up pictures of the general nastiness. :) So, lets take a little tour!

When you walk in the front door, if you turn to your left, there's a few stairs that lead up to the main part of the house.

If you turn around there's the front door. :) duh.

Going straigt from the front door is the storefront part, which will eventually be the office. The carpet is REALLY nasty in there, so we might not be using it right away...and the walls are too high on the one side for me to be able to paint on my little stepladder....and Jason is the one decorating the office anyway. He said I can have the bedrooms if he can do the office. :)

So, after you walk up the little flight of stairs, you come to the living room, and pretty much the dining room, as there is a big open doorway between the two.

And yes, that's a closet in the dining room. Odd, I know, but I don't mind too much, good place for the vacuum and for games and storing Christmas decorations. I just don't like the mirrored sliding doors, so those will have to go...but out of four sets, this room has the only un-broken pair, so they might stay for a few months.

Off of the dining room are the bedrooms...and this is the inside of Hannah's closet, it's actually pretty cute...but it will probably be re-painted to match the rest of the room.

This is Hannah's bedroom...right now though, it looks much worse than this, since it is like the purgatory of the house, heh. Since I can't do anything in there until Jason figures out how all the water got into the globe on that light fixture, things from the rest of the house that are disassembled and waiting for a proper home (or burial) go in there.

This is our bedroom...no fun or exciting stories here.

The next few are of our kitchen. It doesn't look THAT bad in the pictures...but it is. It's actually the biggest room in the house, which is a major plus, but it also needs the most work. Right now it is in UTTER dis-repair, but it's got to get worse before it gets better, right?




This is the bathroom...it needs a lot of work too, but since there is no food prep or storage going on in there...it can certainly wait.


From the kitchen and bathroom you go down a couple of steps to the mudroom/laundry area. For those of you not from Wisconsin, a mudroom is where you take off your snowy/muddy boots. :) Heh...as far as I can tell. :)

And this is where the washer and dryer go...and it actually looks much BETTER than this right now! :)

This is the back door....where you come into the "mudroom" to take off your coats and boots. :)

And this is the view out our mudroom window...our small backyard and garage out there. (it was raining that day...you know...the day I found that we had a few leaks and that the whole house smelled like sewage when that basement floordrain backs up!) :) But that's fixed now, so it's all good...oh, also, I didn't take a picture, but the door to the basement is also off the mudroom.