True confession, with all my writing about how to reset your home, I’m still stuck in waiting mode. No resetting for me yet. Nothing is where it is supposed to be at the moment because my kitchen is in the middle of a small renovation. In reality, for those who have lived through a kitchen renovation – there is no such thing as a small renovation. With the kitchen being one of the most-used rooms of the home, any sort of disruption affects the entire house.
I’ve made mention of what’s going on in other posts, but I thought I’d give you a peek at the kitchen progress. Our home was built in 1951, and we are the second owners. Aside from home additions being prohibitively expensive, we live in the historic district in our town, and additions are difficult to get approved.
So, here is where we started. These are pictures that were taken by the previous owners when they put the house up for sale:
This is what the kitchen looked like at move in:
Along the way, we replaced the microwave with a white one, removed the wallpaper, painted the walls green (which is hard to see in the picture below), replaced the flooring with something a lot lighter and less brown, moved the refrigerator to the other side of the room, added a dishwasher (and a temporary piece of wood to extend the countertop), and switched out the knobs and drawer pulls:
The next stage for us was to add additional cabinets to the other side of the room next to the refrigerator and to replace all the countertops so they match. Of course, what this means is that first we had to remove the wainscoting because the chair rail would prevent the cabinets from being flush against the wall. And when we removed the wainscoting, we discovered that there was nothing underneath. Of course. On the plus side, one small benefit is that we were able to add a couple additional outlets and move the refrigerator outlet further over before we closed up the wall. About three weeks ago:
So here is this week’s progress:
My brother-in-law did the electrical work and put in the drywall for us over the last few weeks. I primed and painted today the walls today, and we are now ready to move on to assembling our new Ikea cabinets.
I’m hoping that now that we’re to the cabinet stage, things will start moving along a little more quickly. We will be painting (spraying!) the doors and side panels of the new cabinets as well as the doors and boxes of the existing lower cabinets.
For the next couple of weeks we’ll be doing into some deep cleaning challenges. If I leave the kitchen until the end, you’ll now know why. The goal is to be done by the end of October, so I hope to have a ‘we’re finished’ update for you early November.
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Have you lived through any renovations? Do you have any renovation stories to share?
31 Days 2016 - Reset Your Home
This post is a part of the series 31 Days to Reset Your Home, part of the 31 Days challenge. Please join me during the month of October. Each day I’ll be posting what I’m working on, challenges so you can join in, and update my progress (and hopefully hear about yours!). The 31 Days challenge is a writing challenge to pick a topic and write a post on it every day in October.
- 31 Days to Reset Your Home
- Resetting Your Morning Routine
- Resetting Your Evening Routine
- Resetting your Weekly Routine
- Declutter Week: Paper
- Declutter Week: The Left Behinds
- Declutter Week: The On Purpose
- Declutter Week: The Kitchen Pantry
- Declutter Week: Your Schedule
- Lovely Links – Oct 10
- In Other News – Kitchen Renovation Progress
- Deep Cleaning: Master Bedroom
- Deep Cleaning: Bathrooms
- Deep Cleaning: Living Room
- Deep Cleaning: The Kitchen
- After the Deep Clean
- A Good Sleep
- Another Kitchen Update
- Maintaining – How to Create a Habit
- The Art of Stress Free Productivity
- Resetting Your Email