We are doing the kitchen one wall at a time in order to be able to continue to use our kitchen. We decided to start with the most labour intensive wall. We found quite a few surprises under the paneling.
Kitchen progress in pics. No more pictures/updates until this wall is completed!
Of all the rooms in our house the kitchen is the one in most need of a facelift. Unfortunately our budget is tiny, well, now with the pandemic our budget is zero, so we can’t do all the things I would like to do. So I had to start small with the remodel and with items we already had.
I should note that the previous owners of our house were VERY eclectic with their decorating. Around the ENTIRE kitchen is a border of butterfly, flower, and chicken stickers.
Here’s a photo from the real estate listing:
Above the stove she glued rooster tiles in the shape of a triangle.
The previous owners had also used white Duct tape to cover the shelves and the paint was old and yellowing. So I removed the Duct tape, decals, and filled in the many nail holes (so many things were hung on the walls…see listing photo above).
Here’s the before and after pics of the kitchen window area:
Our next project will hopefully be painting the ugly pho-wood paneling a soft-grey colour. I’d also like to paint the bottom cabinets the same colour as we painted the cabinets in the bathroom. I’m not sure if we will redo the flooring. That was another one of our plans but I’m not sure if we will end up doing that now. Our timeline for living in this house is now shorter (hopefully) than our original plan so I don’t know if we want to spend that much money. But we will see.
With this all of this COVID-19 going on schools have closed which means I am not working currently. This is upsetting because I love my job and miss the kids but I’m using this extra time to be productive around the house.
The first thing on my list was to refurbish the microwave cart I bought into a coffee/tea bar.
The next thing on my list was to rearrange the kitchen. I really wanted a table and chairs in the kitchen so we weren’t always eating on the couch. With how our kitchen was arranged before I couldn’t fit my small table and chairs nor would I have been able to fit the coffee/tea bar. Plus it just felt so cluttered and didn’t flow very well.
So I moved some things around and was able to not only fit the new coffee/tea bar but also the table and chairs! I love it now. We’ve had dinner at the table every night since.
We have discussed laying new flooring and fixing the walls as well but with my being out of work for an indefinite amount of time we don’t have the extra cash to do that. Plus we are wanting to move sooner rather than later (*finger’s crossed*) and so we don’t want to put too much money in to the house.
There’s a lot of annoying things about this house (nothing is square or level, previous owners didn’t do things correctly or did them cheaply, weird decals all over the kitchen, etc) but I love our little house. It’s our first home as a married couple and it’s cozy and cute. I love being creative and decorating and doing home improvement projects so I’ve really enjoyed this house. Plus it’s good practice for our next house (which will also be a fixer-upper).
An Awfully Big Adventure 