My Sister's Kitchen

Over the past month, my sister and her husband (well, mainly her husband) have been completely overhauling their kitchen.  And it turned out awesome.
Here are a couple of the before shots. As you can see the first thing they did was remove the cabinets over the peninsula.
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Next came painting the walls and the cabinets in different shades of gray while giving them a much needed silver hardware update.  They also painted all the trim white and installed some beautiful new hardwood floors throughout the kitchen and dining area as it was previously carpeted.

Then, they got some beautiful black granite countertops installed, a new faucet, then got to working on the new backsplash.  Last but not least, a new range hood was installed.

Let's revisit some quick before and after shots so you don't have to scroll back up!
Before:

And after:

How pretty is that?!? The only part of the process that Rob didn't do himself was install the countertops.  The rest they were able to do themselves.  I just look at it and I am wondering if it is the same house!  So amazing!

Bathroom Remodel

There is nothing more rewarding than not only seeing your space get a makeover, but someone you know and love's space get made over as well. My sister and her family recently moved into a new home to accommodate their expanding family and it is in lets say...70's shape.  It needs a little loving.  And thankfully her husband loves remodeling and this was exactly the sort of house they were looking for to give it their touch.  The first weekend they moved in, I got to help paint their girls' room's trim, ceiling, and walls.
Rob then wasted no time tackling the kid's bathroom upstairs.  It was looking a bit like this.  Pink and green striped wallpaper, pink sink, and lovely mid-century hanging lights.  Beautiful, I know...but they wanted to make it a tad better.


Here is the other side of that bathroom with its square white tile and nothing to be bragged about fixtures for the bathtub.  This is essentially the kid's bathroom and only bathtub in the house so they wanted it to be as nice and new and not gross as possible.


He ripped up the carpet floors and replaced them with tile and ripped up the wall paper and tile around the bathtub for a more updated look.

 

He replaced the square tile with new subway tile and got new fixtures for the bathtub.  I believe this was Sam's first bath in awhile so he was pretty excited and I think talking about it a lot.  (He had showers, don't worry they don't make their children be dirty mongrels.)



Next, they added a fresh coat of green paint, painted the trim white, replaced the manufacturer's mirror and hideous light fixture, painted the cabinets, put in a new not pink sink, new toilet, and replaced the countertop.



Next came some fun accessories and the bath was complete!  How great does that look?  You gotta scroll back to the before to truly appreciate it.  Rob did this whole thing on his own.  I would love to learn to do things like this.  Like LOVE.  I just can't get enough of crazy transformations and love viewing before and afters of what normal people have accomplished on their own.




They are about done with their kitchen transformation that I can't wait to share in the near future.  They got their new countertops in yesterday so they still have some backsplash tile to complete as well as installing a few more appliance type items.  Can't wait to see their finished project!  Is anyone else just fascinated by this stuff?  I can't get enough of it!

Laminated Flash Cards

Being a SAHM, it is difficult sometimes (more like all the time) to come up with new and creative things to do with the little one around the house especially when they are at an age where they don't completely understand everything and can't fully converse with you.  I was talking with my mom the other day and was asking her, what the heck did you do with us all day?  Her answer was that we all played together a lot.  Well, what about when it was just Sarah for the first three years?  What did you do all day?  We would read all day.  You would read ALL DAY??  Yes, some days we would just read book after book.  We also did flash cards and other games.   I think the excessive reading might explain Sarah's ability to operate an ATM, memorize quite a bit of lines, and enunciate like a 10 year old for a bank commercial when she was just three years old.  "If a three year old can use an ATM, so can you!  See ya next time!  *Wink* *Wink*".  That was just the last line of it.  She was a child prodigy.  I'm not sure what happened after that.  KIDDING.

But flash cards, ehhh??  That's a thought.  So, I googled "free printable flashcards" and was opened up to a world of free printable flash cards.  The first site I clicked on was amazing.  They have anything from letters, to numbers, to shapes, to animals, and just about everything in between.  I picked the four categories I mentioned because it was already quite a bit anyway and got them printed.  I immediately knew that the minute little man touched them, he would tear them to shreds.  I needed to either back them all with card stock, which sounded like an enormously tedious task with it being over 100 of them or I could laminate them.  I just have to put it out there that it was a childhood dream of mine to have a laminator.  We would always play with the one at the bank (after hours of course) and laminate just about everything.  It was the greatest.  We also played this clue game that I will totally be playing with my kids once they are old enough to understand it.  Wait for that post in about 7 years or so.

Click here for the printable flash card site.

So, I looked on Walmart's website and sure enough they had a laminator that got pretty stellar reviews for way cheaper than I would have ever thought a laminator would cost.  All of those years I've been missing out... So, I rushed over to Walmart and got myself the Scotch Thermal Laminator along with a 50 pk of the laminating sheets.  A 25 pk of the self laminating sheets that do not require a laminator cost just as much as the laminator, so why not just buy a freaking laminator?  And then I have a laminator.  Laminator, laminator, laminator.

Set up was a breeze, it took about 5 min for the thing to warm up and I was a laminating machine.  Not to be confused with the actual laminating machine.  I did about 20 sheets right after one another and it was sooo smooth.  It was also the quietest thing in the entire world.  That was even more of a plus.  So, I cut out the flashcards, laminated them, and then cut them out again.  I immediately thought of Happy Gilmore with the old lady saying "My fingers hurt."  Cause they did.  But it was worth it and they looked great!

I let Nolan play with them when he woke up from his nap and not one got ruined and he loved the pictures on them!  So, I think the whole thing was a good investment and now I have the ability to laminate things all willy nilly...or just when I need to I suppose.

FLASH CARDS!

New Patio Blinds

Oh these don't look so bad...

 Have you ever thought to yourself, "These blinds look great, but you know what would make them better?  A little vomit on them."  Yeah, me neither.  Our blinds on our patio door came with the house.  We are not responsible for them.  They kept out light, they let us see outside if we wanted to, they are ok looking, but otherwise, they are garbage.  I never noticed how repulsive they were until Nolan started playing with them. 

Why don't you get a little close.  See the spots?  Not really?

 As I got closer to them, I can only describe my face as a look of horror.  Stains and nasty-ass grossness everywhere.  These needed to get out of our house now.  And when I say now, I mean we would keep talking about it for months, how gross they were, and then finally we tore the bandaid off.

What about now?!  That's what I thought.  And that is only a taste of the horribleness.

I found some bamboo blinds (brand- Radiance Panel Track Bamboo Blinds) on The Foundary a month or so ago and we got them and had the whole thing up only to see that one of the slats was longer than the others.  It wasn't anything that was fixable either.  It looked...not great. Also, they were a bit too see through for my liking.  They didn't look like they would be on the picture, but sure enough, they were.  I was a bit uneasy about them from the first slat but was nervous to tell Scott since it took awhile to get these on here.  And the pain of having to take such a thing down and shipped back.  So, I guess we sorta lucked out that one was longer than the others.  And when you moved them they were horribly squeaky.  Like so annoying.  We decided we just needed to take them back.  Our OCD helped us in that we knew exactly how all the pieces went exactly back in the box and I headed to UPS.  I didn't get a picture of those.

I would highly recommend The Foundary by the way.  Their mother is Hayneedle whose headquarters is out of Omaha and the shipping and returning process was so easy.  We had our money back on our credit card very quickly.  They have a lot of neat things on sale every day and we have gotten one other thing from there.  I have no complaints.

Anywho. Back to square one.  And ta-da our new blinds!  Totally kidding.  We got the bamboo ones taken down and had already put our old blinds out in the garbage so there was no way I was bringing them back in the house.  So, we settled for an awesome option of taping up these old curtains that used to be in the dining room. (Helps to be a hoarder save things in situations like this!) Yes, one was severely ripped, but they covered the windows good enough for the time being.  They ended up being up for about a month.  And some people saw them.  Oh well.  We searched and searched and searched for new blinds and I kept coming back to the Chicology brand on Amazon.  We decided to pull the trigger and get them.  They have many different colors and we found the one we thought would be the best for our space.  We didn't want them too dark so that they would overpower the space we try to keep light and airy, and we didn't want them to be too light so that they would look weird and blend in with the walls.

The blinds came and we got them hung up and they looked perfect.  It made us a little nervous, but we knew ahead of time that we would have to cut them.  After the first one, the rest were easy cause if you just carefully follow the grain of the fabric, it will be a perfect edge every time.  They come extra long so that they can fit basically any window and then you just cut them to what fits your window.  They can also be used as a room separater.  They were the exact look we were going for.  We didn't want more curtains cause it is difficult to have those on a patio door and we didn't want them competing with the curtains about two feet away on our big window above our couch.  We also didn't want the same small blinds cause we wanted to go with something a bit more modern and an actual improvement from what we had before.  I guess anything not disgusting would have been an improvement. 

This is what I was hoping those bamboo ones would look like, but these actually keep out all the light.  We aren't sitting at the table and finding that we have the sun in our eyes like we did with the original small blinds.  These keep out everything but without completely blacking out the room.  And you know you have complete privacy.  They match perfectly with the tones in the backsplash above our counters and they are a nice natural texture that adds just a little more depth to the decor of the house.  Can you tell we are in love with them?  The tops of them might need something to cover the rail, but it looks fine for now.

The blinds are also very versatile.  You can easily slide them (noise free) from side to side, split down the middle, have them all stacked on one side, etc.  They don't move so easily that Nolan slides them all over the place, but easy enough for us to comfortably move them. They also don't have a string on the side where you pull them.  Another huge plus and safety measure for the little one who constantly played with the long pulley string with the original ones.  You just move the actual blind where you want it to go.

I would say the below pictures are the closest to what they actually look like color-wise.  The other pics had the sun beating through them, so it distorted it a bit. 

Here are the blinds modeling their versatility:

 

I kept the scraps of what was cut off of the blinds as it was quite a bit of material to just toss.  They might make nice placemats or something, but I will need to figure that out.

If you are in the mood for some sprucing up your patio door, I would definitely recommend these!  You live and you learn!

Mixing Style with Function: A Toy Story

Now that little man is getting into everything, that means nothing is off limits.  Well, things are off limits, and he know they are, but he does it anyway, looks back at me, and smiles.  We are going to have some interesting teen years ahead of us.  One of the things I got rid of were the frames that I had sitting on a couple of shelves at the bottom of our entertaiment center.  I didn't want him knocking them over and having glass break or something.  Then, I got rid of the baskets full of toys on the bottom two shelves because they were scratchy and any time he pulled them out he would either scratch himself or the entertainment center.  Not a good situation overall, so the shelves have sat empty for a few months.  Does it look great?  Not really.  Does it bug me that there is all this open space with nothing but strewn about cars and such? Yes.  And these before pictures are no joke of what our living room looked like on a normal basis.  Anyone who has seen our house before I have the chance to shovel everything off to the side can vouch for it.  I'm not ashamed cause I have a child and anyone who has had one knows that as soon as you put something away, it will get dumped back out again.

Time to take action.  I was thinking what in the hurrl could I put there that would look nice but also provide some sort of function for all the toy chaos we have going on in this house.  It took me awhile, but one day last week, it hit me.  What about those soft baskets that he has in his room that we used for his toy storage in there?  I grabbed a couple to test them out and they couldn't have looked more perfect.  I sent a text to Scott with the picture because I was so excited.  So, we went to Target this past weekend to buy them, and on Sunday night, I got to organizing!

I went with two different colors to make it not seem so blah and to give that area a little interest.  It adds some style as well as function for the craziness that has overtaken what used to be our living room.  Of course, I organized each of the storage bins by type of toy.  Cars in one, stuffed animals in another, small bulky ones in another one.  I also made a point to put the heavier bins at the bottom so he wouldn't reach out and have one fall on him.  I also split his "play books" into two bins due to the fact that they are heavy in themselves. You can't even tell there are toys in any of those!  They could be filled with diamonds or small kittens. And there might be an empty one or two for growth, you would never know!

To me, it looks awesome.  At the end of the day, I can just throw all of the smaller toys in the bins.  Organized of course. Now I have some sort of inner peace when I look at the living room.  And, it also keeps him from having ALL of the toys out at once just staring at him all the time.  It gives him more variety throughout the day where he may not see a certain toy for a few days and it makes it interesting to him again.  Giving the toys some flavor.  We still have our bigger storage ottoman in the corner to keep him from the cords back there (Well, for the most part. He has managed to get back there a couple of times) and for some of the bigger toys that won't fit. Some toys that are larger do still have to sit out, but it is a major improvement.

Check out the rug we had gotten him from Ikea when we went there in July.  He loves playing on it with his cars and I think it will get more and more use as he gets older.  My mom has a similar one at her house that my nephew Sam plays with for hours, so I knew it would be a great investment when I got it! It looks great in our living room, too! ;)  It's smaller, so I can easily store it away when we have our fancy parties with the fancy people that we know.

Fun little project and not sure why I didn't think of this sooner, but I am glad I did.  So...so...happy!

A Tale of Two Tables (and Lamps)

Scott and I are known to buy cheap things to "get us by" then to later replace them with what we actually want.  Hence, the curtains we bought when we first moved here to just cover the windows (the one that has since ripped and been replaced) and now our $11 nightstands.  For some dumb reason, when we got our bedroom set, we decided not to get the nightstands to match cause it was going to be too much money, so we bought some cheap $11, not actual nightstands, but something that could hold our alarm clocks and our phones.  Maybe the occasional water or book.  Who am I kidding.  There was no room for books.  That is what the two cubby holes were for.  :) I always gave subtle hints that I would love to read before I go to sleep but I can't see with the lights off and he can't sleep with the lights on.  What. A dilemma.  I have been saying for awhile that we need real nightstands.

Before: Dinky little "nightstand"

So, we decided to head to the good ol' NFM to see if they by some chance still had that same bedroom set.  Of course they didn't but we found some that were about half the price of those original nightstands and we thought they would match pretty perfectly.  We then found a set of lamps to go with and we were set to go!!

The nightstands look darker than the headboard in these pics for some reason, but they match perfectly in real life.

This change literally transformed our room.  It is kind of awkwardly shaped, like it is too wide, so we always felt that there was too much space on the sides.  The new end tables really even it out.  Not to mention the height of the lamps are perfect and fill up the space along the walls as well so it doesn't seem so empty. 

We sleep without pillows or covers, just like the people in the mattress commercials.  Cause that is realistic.

Lights on! And now, I get to read before I go to sleep!  Everyone wins!

The Evolution of an Entry Way

Here's a story, of a lovely lady who was.....STOP.  Wrong story.  This is a story about a lonely entry way.  Every day he would see the people of the house walk by not paying any attention to him.  He felt ugly and empty and just plain sad.  It was because he was.



And scene:
I saw this desperate plea for some sprucing up the entry way, so I went in the basement to get an old TV stand to put in the area.  But it was too small and just made it look dinky and worse.  I kept it there forever and it was annoying.  I decided I needed to do something about it and went to look for a tall table to put there since the wall was so high.  The entry way needed something that would fill a higher wall, so the taller (not creepy taller), the better.  Scott and I went looking at antique stores, asked those who they knew if they had an old table to get rid of and one day, I decided to go to Hobby Lobby as they were having 30% off their furniture.  Which, they always have 30% off their furniture, but who cares.  I also had a 40% off coupon so I scored another 10% off.  WOOT. 

And I found the most....PERFECT...TABLE...EVER!!!  Exact dimensions and look I was going for.  But, I was with the little man and couldn't get it in the car myself.  So, Scott had to come bring his car to pick it up and it made its appearance in our home.  HAPPY DAY!  I will just stare at it with a big smile on my face because I am a freakin weirdo and I feel as though I now have a table that looks like it came from Pottery Barn.  But at 1/5th of the cost.

I couldn't wait to dress it up with accessories and am still working on that part of it, but found a perfect  $20 mirror that I set on top of it to add even more height to the very tall wall.   The green vase with the things sticking out was $3 at Dollar General.  They have vases like this at West Elm for about $20-$40, so I would say I got a good deal on that.

I also got a teal owl that was $4 at HyVee and my favorite- the orange-ish ceramic pineapple that I scored half off at Hobby Lobby.  I really wanted a pineapple for the entry way ever since getting back from Newport because it is a sign of hospitality and they had them everywhere.  And below, here is how it looks now, all FALL-ified!  I added a couple bags of pumpkin/gourd/leaves things at $3 a pop at DG to fill the big vase (which was filled with something different before the FALL-ification), a pumpkin candle, and a little welcome sign.  All of those previously mentioned things will stay minus the fall things year round and I would like to add some taller/brightly colored dimensional things to balance the other side.  I can live with it for now though, but I'm sure it will look different every couple months cause I don't know how to sit still.  :)

How much better does the entry way look now??  (Minus the toys in the hallway :), but hey, it gives it more character)

Operation Sink Etc.- Part Two

Now where were we...we are ready to install the sink!  Disclaimer- Scott did pretty much everything while I helped lift things, hold flashlights, and come up with brilliant ideas with my even more brilliant mind.

It was a great thing that we decided to replace all of the different parts as we probably saved about 45 min of our time not having to undo everything.  We were able to install part of the garbage disposal (which I did during a nap) and the faucet onto the new sink before we even put it in (which Scott and I did before we got started).  Saving some time and neck pain.  All he had to do at that point was unscrew the sink from the counter top, loosen the pipes, and cut the copper wire.  Once we got Nolan to bed for the night, we were ready to tackle this thing.  We started with the obvious- the cutting of the dreaded soldered copper.  It ended up being extremely easy.  He was able to cut the wire with a tube cutter majigger that the Lowe's guy recommended.  I was quite skeptical of it and even asked the guy- "This will cut the copper?"  He said, "Yep" and ran away so we couldn't find him again.  Not really, but I wouldn't have blamed him. We did all of this of course after shutting off the water and electrical to the disposal.  Unfortunately, we had to shut the water off to the whole house (because our house is awesome like that) so we basically had one shot to get this right since we cut the pipes.  I imagined us screwing up and going without water for days while we had to pay $1000 to cover any damages and for someone to have to redo it anyways.  We would have to find other people's sprinklers for water and showers for all of us and cry ourselves to sleep for about 3 nights.  Four nights would have seemed excessive, I think.

Pipes were cut successfully and the stop valves the Lowe's man recommended just snapped right on.  We were about to get other ones, but he recommended a certain type as it is much easier to install and it sure was.  They were just a few dollars more than the ones we were going to get, but worth it.  Now that we have these, we are able to shut the water off just to this supply if necessary.

See the new stop valves connected to the pipes and the part disconnected is floating above.

Once we had all of that done, we put on our handy gloves and were able to lift the sink out with everything attached out of the counter.   I did some good scrubbing around the edge of the hole to get excess caulk and other residue cleaned. We were ready to get the new sink in.

Once we had the faucet all hooked up to the sink, which was about as easy as pie, we were ready to to insert the sink with the faucet and half of the garbage disposal attached into the sink hole.  New use for that word?  I think so.  The first thing that Scott did while I held the flashlight was to screw in the sink with little screws all along the underside of the sink.  It was not an easy task as the area is quite cramped and small, but he did it and we were looking good.  Everything was going oddly well for us so far.  We can't hang a picture without something going wrong so to think everything was going well was quite unsettling. 

The next thing that Scott did was to install the basket strainer which required some plumbers putty and a bit of manly strength.  He had to insert plumbers putty just under the ring that goes about the sink so when it screws down, it squeezes out the excess and even more so when pressure is applied.

Then, he installed the rest of the disposal and we started aligning the PVC pipe in the necessary areas.  Because the sink was about 5 inches deeper than the previous one, I came up with the idea to switch two of the PVC's around which worked, but we were still about 2 inches off so Scott took one of the pipes outside and cut it so it would fit.  And it fit beautifully.  Once they did, he hammered like a beast tapped the disposal into the lock position.  He then hooked up the disposal to the dishwasher (or something) I kind of missed that part and its been a couple of weeks so my mind isn't as fresh.

The next steps were to screw in our water lines to the new stop valves, plug in the disposal, double check to make sure we got everything hooked back up, turn the water and electrical back on, and pray to God that everything was going to work and not leak everywhere.  Sure enough, we had WATER!  And no LEAKAGE!  And our sprayer WORKS!  OMG WE DID IT!  OR SCOTT DID IT PRETTY MUCH BUT WHATEVER IT IS SO EXCITING!  It took us just over 2 hours to do this.  No hiccups and everything ran smoothly.  Couldn't have asked it to go any better.  I caulked some silicone sealant along the side of the sink and we were done.

What was our labor total for doing this ourselves?  Just over $40.  The stop valves cost about half of that and we had to buy caulk, a caulking gun, the wire cutter, gloves, and plumber's putty.  And, we are able to use most of it again on future projects.  Everyone needs a caulking gun, right?  So we basically saved almost $800 by doing this ourselves.  Well, according to one company.  But still, a significant amount of savings.

Gloves, Caulk Gun, Wire cutter- yup that little thing is the wire cutter. That's it.

Let's look at some before and after pics. 

Before

After.  Before the sink basket strainer was in place.

For a little more perspective, here is the before and after with the Brita pitcher in place.  The faucet barely fit over it to fill before (and Nolan still drank bottles) and below that you now see there is plenty of room.  What.. a difference.  We knew the new sink would help break him from his bottle habit.

The sink has been in place for a couple of weeks now and we had one little mishap with the connection to the dishwasher.  The first time we ran it, it was pooling up with water.  I apparently missed a step when I was first hooking up the disposal but Scott was able to detect it quickly and thankfully was able to fix it just as easily.  We have run it about three times since and haven't had an issue again.  I love everything about it- the space and the sprayer.  How did I survive three years without a sprayer?!  I use it at least twice a day.

I love the satisfaction you get when you do something on your own.  Yeah, the sink would have been exciting if someone else would have done it, but it was even more exciting knowing we put it in ourselves and that we worked hard on it.  You never realize how much you are capable of doing until you actually just try doing it.  I don't know if we will have much DIY left with this house, but I'm hoping in the future we have a house someday where we are able to do more.  I just want to see what we can do.