Kitchen Remodel

Well hello there blog! I can't believe it's been three months since my last post. Since my last post, our 20 year old water heater started leaking. We didn't notice it soon enough, and it spread under the laminate floor we had in our kitchen and caused it to wrinkle up. Remodeling the kitchen was always in our plans with this house, but definitely not this soon. After just finishing the new living room, the carpet, the craft room (I could go on and on!) we were excited about a break in the home repair. But no, not in the plans apparently. So, the kitchen remodel started. We kept our cabinets, which are still in decent shape, but decided to update the appliances, counter tops, paint and trim...and floors, of course. As always, we had a lot of help from our family. A big thank you to my dad, for helping with the water heater and also my father-in-law, who never misses the chance to rip up something else in our house :)

Here is the floor that was ruined by the water heater. It's a little hard to see in the picture, but look close...water damage!


After ripping up the laminate...yay! Water everywhere! Including under our new carpet!!



Crosley and Larkin helping out...


The floor was so rotten that we had to replace parts of the subfloor. Good thing we know how to do this :)


Penny Lane and the floor tile...


Tile, pre-grout...



And here are the after pictures...sorry for the weird color on some of them.



We still have the old oven connected, but this will eventually be a cabinet/pantry:





So, there it is!! Ryan and I are both so happy with how it turned out. Ryan was iffy on the "white kitchen" before we started, but I think his mind has changed now :)

Some other news that has happened since my last post is that I'm pregnant! The due date is March 19th, which puts me at 19 weeks at the end of this week. We go to the doctor this Thursday to find out if it's a boy or a girl and couldn't be more excited! I've started another blog that will sorta be our family/pregnancy blog. Feel free to follow along there too! The address is http://themahoneyhouse.blogspot.com. I'll make a link at the top of the blog too.

Also, I've taken TONS of pictures since my last post, I'll get those posted soon too!

some recent pictures...

I've been running with the dogs after work this week. I'm not sure if it's the nice weather that's finally motivating me, or the Gentle Leaders that both dogs are wearing now and are WONDERFUL on walks! Here is Crosley laying in the lovely mud spot in our backyard after our run, it must be cooler than regular grass, or else he just likes to get dirty:


And on the home renovation front, my craft room is finally somewhat organized!! I got my desk and sewing machine set up, and folded and stored all my fabric...the rest is still a mess, and we still need trim in the whole room, but I don't care, I can sew again!


This is Doodie Man, one of my friends cats, he thinks he's pretty cool:


And here is Pearl, she's a prissy lady:


She's also a triangle cat (and way over saturated too, oops):


I'm going to try to be better about posting more. More often, and more pictures. Spring is here, and that means lots and lots of dog pictures!

Fresh Cut Carpet

New carpet, new baseboards and a new paint color...our house seems brand spankin' new! Now the fun of putting everything back in place :)

Weekend Work

We've had quite a busy weekend so far! Didn't start out so great for me though, I woke up Thursday morning with the flu and I'm just now starting to feel better...thank goodness for in-laws who come to help move furniture!! The carpet was installed Friday without a hitch and it looks awesome, the craft room is an entirely different room (I'll show pictures later when it's all set up, right now it's full of CRAP...again). We had to remove the carpet and patch up some saggy spots in the living room, and when we did, we found that the sub floor was basically pressed cardboard. So, we decided to just take it all out!! What a pain...so many nails (we filled two large McDonalds cups with nails), and it came up in little pieces:


Here it is with the new sub floor. And outside, you can see 9 jumbo sized trash bags full of stupid pressed cardboard ready to go to the curb:


And onto a happy picture...OUR NEW LIVING ROOM!!! Ryan's enjoying his first cup of coffee, watching a Sham-Wow commercial. It's not at all finished yet, and these couches will go back into our front room once that is finished, but I just wanted to get a picture on here of how it's coming along :)

goodbye ugly heater!

Here is the ugly heater that was hidden behind our piano in the old rec room. We've never used it, and never even wanted to. It went through the wall to the outside of the house, so when we first moved it, we didn't want to mess with it. But now, it had to go!


Can you see the squirrel damage in this picture? It's been a common sighting in our renovations! Ryan peeking through from the outside:


Ryan admiring his handy work:


Please forgive the bad color editing in these pictures, I know the wall color looks completely different in each picture!

We Like Green

So, apparently, Ryan and I like green...a lot. Not only did we choose to paint the entire outside of our house green, we now have 4 rooms within our house that are some shade of green! But, I like shades of green. They can be calming, like our master bathroom, or energizing like our kitchen. Last night we started painting the third bedroom/craft room. I had picked out paint samples from Restoration Hardware and had them matched at Lowes, all along thinking the paint for the bedroom was more of a blue. Welp, as soon as we had that first roll of paint on it, Ryan looked over to me and says "um, this is green." I tried to play it off as long as I could saying "what are you talking about, it's so blue" but all along thinking "dang it, did I really pick out another green?!" In the end though, I think it's a pleasant blue/green mix. And so what if it is green! It's my craft room and I like it :)

I grabbed these from Restoration Hardwares website, so just try to imagine a dog haired covered couch in the room, rather than this fancy one:

House Update #458

Ok, so it's not really update #458, but it feels like it! Our bathroom is finished, so now we've moved back to working on the back part of our house. The craft room is drywalled, primed and ready to be painted and carpeted. Now we're getting the rec room ready to be painted and carpeted. We had our awesome drywall crew come and patch up the popcorn ceiling and the hole that my father in law fell through. Drywall dust is my nemesis, I can't stand it and it stresses me out, so this time I tried my best to keep it contained...and it might have worked...



So after the drywall was up on the ceiling, we got the carpet out, and this is how it looks now. I noticed this morning when I let the dogs out that there is an echo in there...pretty crazy. I also noticed that this is a great surface for tap dancing, if only I had some tap shoes, Ryan would loooove that!


The dogs are definitely taking advantage of having extra couches in all sorts of odd places, like this one, in our dining room/kitchen area. Please don't judge me on the condition of this couch, I'm almost embarrassed to post these pictures!! It normally has a cover on it, I promise.


I almost can't deal with Larkin's wrinkles, so precious.


This picture seems pretty peaceful to me...if you could only see whats hiding inches out of the frame :) More updates to come!

Finished Bathroom

Since today was a snow day, I finally got around to taking some pictures of the finished bathroom. Well, I'd say it's 99% finished, still a few minor things to fix up, but those are things you can't see in the pictures :) Shower curtain is temporary, we plan on getting a sliding glass door at some point, but for now, that will do the job!

Bathroom Vanity

Got the vanity and countertop set today. It's so much taller than our last one, and I love it! It's also the same as our neighbors...hope they don't mind :)


We went to Lowes today to return a bunch of things we ended up not using. We had a stack of 18 different receipts from the past week and a half!! We're such good customers, they're sending us a gift card, so we can spend even more money there!

House Update

A recap of the weekend:

While re-drywalling the craft room, and starting from scratch on the master bathroom, my husband, Ryan, also wanted to get our attic insulated. We had someone come out to check our heater because, as I mentioned before, the back of the house is a lot colder than the rest of the house. Apparently, our attic had about three inches of insulation, compared to the sixteen or so inches that is code...oops. So Saturday while I was priming and painting my rear off, Ryan and my father-in-law took on the task of insulating the attic. Of course, we ran into unexpected things, like finding out that the heating ducts weren't really attached to the vents, meaning we were heating our attic these past three years! Here are a couple of pictures of the attic...the pink stuff is the new insulation, the beige colored stuff is the old:



Oh, and here is a picture of the hole where my father-in-law fell through the ceiling...yep, fell through. This little section of dry wall wasn't installed properly, the previous owners took the easy way out, and decided not to tape and mud the drywall...we've come to notice that the previous owners took the easy way out on A LOT of things in this house. Back to the hole in the ceiling...everything was ok, my father-in-law, being the stud that he is, caught himself before really falling on to the pile of crap that was beneath him :)


Now back to the bathroom, here is the tile pre-grout:


And here's Ryan and his dad getting the grout in...what a team!


And here is what the bathroom looks like as of tonight...all grouted, painted and light up:


Obviously I can't have a post without the dogs:


And here's a quick glimpse of me on one of the "breaks" I took while paint was drying :)



Not sure if I'll post again before Christmas, so if I don't, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!

Bathroom Remodel

It's master bathroom remodel time! Nope, craft room isn't finished yet...the drywall is up and ready to be primed, but why do that and finish a room when you can start an entirely new project?! My wonderful father-in-law took a week off of work to come help my husband with our master bathroom. We're completely, 100% starting from scratch on this, and it's going to look awesome when it's done!


Sexy hubby in coveralls? Yes, please!


Crosley and Larkin are always near by for moral support.


And this evening, I came home to this:


We just finished with dinner, and since I started writing this post they've already mixed up the mortar and have started with the tile on the floor. More pictures later!

"Non-Dog Related/My Husband Might Kill Me" post :)

To start off, here is a little history about our house. My husband and I bought our house in September of 2005. It was our first home, and we didn't care how much work we had to put into it (maybe because we knew in the back of our minds that Ryan's family was coming up on day one to help!). Every room was painted, new carpet put down in the back rec room, replaced the floor in the laundry room then topped it off with a new tile floor, and most importantly, removed the collection of forks that was VELCROED to the wall in the kitchen...yes, you read that correctly...velcroed.

It seems like we are always doing something to our house at any given time. Most recently it was freshening up the exterior with new windows, fiber cement siding to replace the awful patchwork of cedar shingles, and a brand new paint color. Before that it was landscaping (thanks again to the in-laws help) and before that the addition of a new bathroom (once again, with lots of help from the in-laws!).

One room we didn't really touch was the third bedroom in the very back of the house. About 20 years ago, the garage of the house was converted into a large living room and a third bedroom was added to the back. It had white, warped wood paneling and lovely brown astro-turf for carpet. It's a cold room in the winter, and hot as heck in the summer but worked great for me as a craft room. One weekend while I was at a trade show for work, Ryan (and his wonderful mother...the in-laws, again!) completely surprised me with a new paint job and a clean up/organization for the craft room. I LOVED it. Here is the craft room door from the rec room (oops, there's Crosley):


And here is what it looked like after the re-vamp...look at this organization...too bad it never looked like this again after that day :)


Even the old, half broken bookshelf got a new paint job and new accessories! That painting right there is another story, I started that maybe 4 years ago, it was going to be a present for my dad, but I never finished it because I'm scared of painting eyes...ha!



So, now it's demolition time again. As I mentioned earlier, this room is COLD in the winter, so we (when I say "we" of course I mean Ryan and his father) tore out all of the walls, trashed the astro-turf, found evidence of the squirrels we kept hearing in the walls, and put in some new insulation. Here is my craft room now:




Walnut/More Evidence:


Now, here comes the "My Husband Might Kill Me" part of the post. Ryan hates it when people see our house in a mess, even when it's clear that we are doing some remodeling. So, just for him (love you, dear), here is what our rec room looks like right now :)




I could spend hours pointing out things that could be thrown away, unfinished projects (my friend Hillie's shirt hanging on the chair) and things that I haven't seen in a few years...but I'll save that for another post :)