3D Tour

Occasionally when I talk to my oldest sister on the phone about kitchen design she responds with a lot of "uh-huh's" and "hmmm's". I can tell that she's trying to sound like she understands, but then we laugh about how she has no clue what I'm talking about. This post is for her and for people like her. We met with a cabinet guy the other day and I was SO excited to see his drawing for our new kitchen. He is such a stellar guy, you can even see how he drew up the living room and dining room on either side of the kitchen. Step inside and welcome to the future left side of my home. :)

This is what you would see as you enter the living room from the entry way.

This unit of cabinets will serve as a pantry.


This hanging unit of cabinets is something he drew up, but we have decided NOT to go with it. It does limit our storage that much more, but with it being right next to a pass-thru we don't want it to obstruct traffic in any way. The glass cabinets on the left are ones that we are recycling from the old utility room. The island will be custom made from a friend of ours in Raleigh.

The only difference with this picture is that we forgot to include a dishwasher! I know we're living in a 1920's house, but this girl does not do dishes 1920's style. It will be sandwiched between the sink and the fridge. I just bought a matching set stainless, Jenn-air fridge and dishwasher off of Craigslist and I think they will look great next to each other.

Although lovely, I don't think this hutch will fit on this wall with our big dining room table. So, we'll have to nix that also. Yes, that means that even more lost storage, but I think we have a piece of furniture that is smaller and will work fine instead. Once we get our table out of storage and can take true measurements, we may decide later to do this.

We've Got Hang-Ups

Doors that is....They're all hung up! This was the "before" picture.

And this is the "after"! I love the stark contrast against the white. Some of you have mentioned the lovely putting green on the front porch and that is a hole in one straight to the dumpster. The white curved railings we hope to sandblast the paint off of that and repaint them black probably. I'm taking suggestions of what to paint the shutters and the cement color of the floor now (the part that is currently red). I'm thinking a grayish blue for the floor and maybe a navy for the shutters? I also like a yellow too for shutters so like I said, I'm totally open to any ideas you have!

The door at night in the dark. We decided to ditch the storm door for 2 reasons. 1. The porch is deep enough we don't feel like we need it. 2. The new door looks cooler when it's not hiding behind glass.

Close up

The hardware is an antique pewter we ordered online. We didn't want to do black and we didn't want shiny silver either so we felt this was a good compromise and are VERY happy with it.

We decided to do regular tempered glass for around $60.00 as opposed to $300.00 worth of custom glass with iron work. That's something I want to learn down the road and I think once I could figure out how to do the iron work I might be able to create the lattice look that I want right on top of our current panes. I plan to hang up cute little farm-y curtains though so people can't see right inside.

It even looks good with watermelons casually leaning up against it.

Our next hang-up is this lovely window covered by the sheer curtain. This window seperated the sitting room to the sunroom. The only way to access the sunroom was to go out the front door and through the entrance on the front porch.

Well, that window has since been replaced by this lovely set of french doors!

We found this set of doors on Craigslist and couldn't be happier with them. Apparently Will feels the same. :) They're a little bit taller and a little bit more narrow than the norm and fit perfectly in the room.

With the fireplace on the left and the french doors on the right, I have a feeling this will be one of my favorite rooms in the house. Both doors open and I can just imagine the lovely breeze coming through the open sunroom windows as I lie on my chaise reading my books (aka-blogs) :). Actually, I don't have a chaise but I did find some SA-weet velvety seafoamy pair of side chairs the other day at Habitat. I hope they can go in this room.

And since we're on the topic of decorating, the color on the top is the one we chose to paint with. It's called Hazel by Sherwin Williams. I'm not normally a fancy paint brand kind of girl, but the Labor Day special was 25% off so we splurged on this color and our main color for the downstairs. As for the wood on the walls around the house, this wall had some termite damage as you can see by the discoloration. Being an exterior wall (or at least used to be before they added the sunroom) we were not too surprised. We've had the house inspected and although we don't have a current problem with termites, we can pay a little bit for a treatment and prevent them in the future. All to say is, we love the look of exposed wood on the walls, but this one might get covered back up with sheetrock.

Pottery Barnwood

I'll give you a little sneak peek of what I'm currently working on... Does this look familiar? It's in PB's new fall catalog of decorating vintage style, which of course I love! I loved this horse wall art, but I'm not really a horse person. So, it got me thinking...

I have a ton of wood pulled down from the walls of our house. Most we plan to use for flooring, but we had salvaged a bunch of smaller pieces for me to use for crafty projects like such.

I got to work quilting together some of the wood, piecing them together so that the seams wouldn't match and it would look like we had taken it straight off the wall in one unit.

After I nailed them into a thin piece of luan plywood, I freehanded a favorite place of mine and home for 21 years onto the boards getting braver each time beginning with a pencil, pen and finally a paint pen.

Once I was happy with the final product, I took some leftover ceiling paint and painted everything but Alaska. I absolutely would not use the pen again to trace as it was bleeding through every coat of paint. After about 4 coats of paint, I finally learned my lesson and put primer on. Why do I always do that??? After a few more coats of primer, I was happy with the final product and really this isn't even the final product! We still need to cut it down to square size and I plan to distress it a little like the PB version. $199.00 saved and I got exactly what I wanted!

Surprise Package!

The other day I had three boxes come in the mail filled with goodies from my friend Sara! She lives up in Ohio and had some goodies that she didn't need anymore and thought of me.

Look at all my treasure! Well, this is just 2 of the boxes and my Chick-Fil-A sweet tea that just finishes the country, southern tone of it all.

Aren't these scales SA-weet? Can you say bookends? Thank you Sara!!

I changed my mind

Annnnddd, I switched up the kitchen again. I'll blog details later. Nothing drastic. Let's just say that the island is now an island and the stove will sit in front of the chimney (on the kitchen side of course).

Goodbye and Hello

Goodbye nasty ceiling tiles.

Hello vaulted ceiling! (those vertical beams won't be staying...)

Adam and I have been busy (hence the lack of blogging) getting down and dirty in our soon to be dining room. We are so thankful to live with his parents right now who are able to put the kids down and be at home so we can slip away and get some stuff done on the house.

Underneath the ceiling tiles, we found old beadboard ceiling. They came down like toothpicks so there wasn't anything salvageable.

Under the beadboard, there was insulation. The first time Adam and I discovered this, we were not prepared for this and left after 30 minutes with the black lung hacking up and covered with fiberglass shards from the insulation. It was awful. As you can see, I came prepared for the next day.

We enjoy doing this kind of stuff together. Adam likes having me help him even though the other day when he whacked me on accident with a board he admitted it was the first time he's ever heard someone say "owie" on the job. Ha ha.

Often, we take the kids over with us in the evening when we want to check on how progress is coming with the jobs our contractor is taking care of. Soon, Will will be crawling all over this kitchen floor.

Our LVL beams came in to replace the walls we took out. I really want to play these beams up and Adam said they're not able to be stained. So I want to paint them brown to make them look like wooden beams and Adam is skeptical because then they'll just look like I painted them to make them look real wood. I looked up faux painting, but I'm not sure about that. It might look to faux. I'd love some suggestions or any affirmation for anything that I just mentioned. The ceilings are 10 feet high so I figured if they look that bad, they're still high up there and not close up for anyone to notice.

View of the living room, the kitchen (with the ceiling fan) and the dining room with the new vaulted ceiling!

My plan for the fireplace is to cover up as much of that brick with a mantle and clean up the rest. If anyone has any good advice of fireplace/soot cleaners, then do share of what and where to find it. As for the chimney, I'm going to clean that up with a wire brush and air compressor to get all the loose dirt off. As far as sealing is concerned, I've read everything from poly, to evaporated milk (or was it sweetened condensed?) to good ol' regular brick sealer. I don't want anything shiny, but just something to hold all the mortar in place and not end up in my pot of chili.

Almost Ready for Harvest!

They're purple! That was a surprise to us. My mother-in-law and grape aficionado wannabe :) did some taste testing tonight and is pretty convinced that they're Concord grapes. We live in Concord, NC so I figured concord grapes in concord sounded pretty appropriate.