The House on the Hill Blog

You guys, the kitchen is getting so close! I mean, it doesn’t look like it and the reality is that we won’t really be done-done until August or maybe even September but it’s at least usable. Well you know, minus a sink and a range hood. And counters and drawers and a place to store our pantry goods and…ya know what? It doesn’t matter because it feels usable. We can use our oven and our dishwasher so it’s basically like a functioning kitchen. Like a functioning kitchen in a college dorm. Or like an RV kitchen. We’re getting there.

We have floors in the dining room for the first time since March/April. We still have 6 or 7 rows left to install but FLOORS! I’m hoping to finish them up over the next night or two.

Kyle glue up all of the counters over the weekend. We went through a billion different ideas for counters and decided on stacked plywood. They are looking so good already!

We opted to spring for birch plywood and we’re planning on using a medium brown danish oil to stain/seal them. I’m hoping we can get them cut and installed this week and start on the finishing process (sand, seal, sand, seal, sand, seal, until the oil doesn’t soak in anymore).

Once the counters are done we can start on tile! I feel like that’s really where the big transformation is going to happen. Until then, I still have 6 drawers to sand and paint and 4 cabinet doors to prime, sand, and paint plus we have to prime and paint the ceiling which neither of us wants to do.

Here’s what I’m hoping we can accomplish this week:

• Finish installing floors
• Finish painting drawers/cabinet doors
• Remove crown molding in Dining Room
• Prime ceiling
• Paint ceiling
• Paint french doors
• Install drawer hardware (drawers that have cured for 7+ days)
• Start putting dishes away where possible
• Install counters
• Cut out sink opening
• Stain counter waterfall pieces
• Start the finishing process on the counters

So now that you’re all pretty much caught up on what’s been happening, I thought I would talk just a little bit about our plan for the space starting from the floor and going up from there.

• Floor: We are going to carry the laminate that’s currently in the rest of the house into the kitchen/dining room. I was a little concerned about laminate in the kitchen but I think it will be fine and we’re installing it so that the last row will go by the sink/dishwasher so it will be easy to pull up and replace if we have a leak in the future.
• Cabinets: We are going to have drawers all the way around the kitchen with the exception of the lazy susan and the sink cabinet which will both have cabinet doors. We picked up the cheapest, in stock drawers from Lowe’s and will work with them for the next few years until we can afford to upgrade (remember, this remodel was not planned and we’re trying to stay as cheap as possible so that we have to finance little to none). We’re going to paint them the same color green that we are putting on the lower half of the dining room walls so that we have one color all the way around the bottom half of the space (the two spaces make up one big room). I ordered some drawer pulls from Amazon but they are coming straight from China so it’ll be another few weeks – a month before they get here. On either side of the fridge we’ll build floor to ceiling pantries with a cabinet over the fridge.

 

• Counters: The counters are what I’m most nervous about. We are going to attempt DIY-ing some wood counters using 2x lumber. If they end up working out, I’ll give you guys more details about how we built them. I’m really hoping we can start them this weekend or next week but we’ll see! Depends on how cabinet installation goes.
• Walls/Upper Cabinets: We are going to be tiling the entire wall above the counter on both sides of the “L” cabinet layout. We’re using white penny tile with a light-medium gray grout. We decided not to use upper cabinets and are going to use open shelving instead. I’m really not a fan of open shelves but Kyle likes the idea of them; I think they can be pretty but thinking about how much animal fur is floating around our house at any given moment just kind of grosses me out thinking about it on our dishes. We’re compromising by installing shelving but using it for cook book storage, canisters, and glasses that we can keep overturned (assuming our cats don’t climb up and start knocking stuff off which is a major possibility).

• Stove hood: We had a stainless steel under cabinet hood which we will be using as an insert into a new hood cover that we are planning on building out. Most of the time, hood covers are built out of wood or they can be drywalled/plastered to match the surrounding walls. We decided to try something a little different and we’re going to tile the hood cover using this patterned tile. I’m usually not huge into patterns but I thought this might be fun.

I think that’s pretty much it. We also removed the giant 70s/80s rectangle fluorescent light and replaced it with 3 recessed lights and I’m planning on painting the doors to the deck green to blend in with everything else. Then of course there’s all of the small stuff like changing out the window trim, plumbing the sink, and installing the faucet I picked up on clearance before we even knew we’d be redoing our kitchen.

Here is what I’m hoping we’ll accomplish over the next two weeks (mostly weekends):
• Install drawers
• Prime/paint drawers (already started)
• Finish smoothing the ceiling
• Build first of 3 counters (more if we can)

I know I disappeared again and I know I owe you guys a bajillion blog posts but life has been chaotic. We’ve been dealing with unexpected issues at the house, work has been the busiest it’s ever been, and unfortunately I’ve had another family member in the hospital. I finally have a moment where I feel like I can take a break so I thought I would catch you up on what’s going on at the house.

In my last post, we were in Week Five of the One Room Challenge and I was semi-confident we would end up with a half-finished dining room and a finished pantry. BOY WAS I WRONG.

What we ended up with was an unexpected kitchen renovation.

If you follow me on Instagram, you already know all of this but for those of you who don’t, here is a run down of everything that has happened since my last post.

• As we were finishing up tile removal in the kitchen to prep for new floors, we found a bunch of old water damage. It was clear that there had been some sort of major sink leak before we bought the house. The leak was fixed and new tile floors were put down over the water logged particle board subfloor. Unfortunately, all of that subfloor was unsalvageable due to damage and mold.

• Because the damaged subfloor ran under the lower cabinets, we had to remove all of those cabinets to remove the floor. We tried to salvage as many as we could but the sink cabinet was completely unusable. We had planned on scrubbing the bank of cabinets that made up the peninsula and replacing the bottom center support but the cabinet began to fall apart when we tried removing the old support and the entire bottom of the cabinets was covered in mold. We were able to salvage 3 cabinet bases but have since decided to replace two of those instead of putting in the work to convert them to drawers (all thanks to the extreme generosity of Kyle’s parents; thank you again!).

 

• While we were at it, we also took out all of the upper cabinets. We had planned on doing a mini kitchen makeover for the Fall One Room Challenge this year which was going to include removing those cabinets anyway so since we had the dumpster and we were already having to work on the kitchen we decided to just go ahead.

• We replace all of the damaged subfloor and started working on electric and patching the drywall a couple of weeks ago and now we’ve started installing cabinets and hope to start on counters soon.

I think that just about covers everything! Work stopped pretty much immediately on the dining room and we got the pantry functional enough to hold a lot of our kitchen crap while we finish the kitchen. I’m working on putting together a post on what our plan is for the kitchen and another showing how far into that plan we are but I’m also posting updates on Instagram as we are able to get work done. Once we finish the kitchen, we will go back to finishing the dining room and pantry and then we plan on taking a nice long break…of at least 2 months.

We are doing this kitchen on an extremely small budget but I think it will all come together! I’m very excited and very nervous all at the same time. It already feels a thousand times bigger without the peninsula though so whatever it ends up looking like, I know it’ll be a huge improvement functionally.

Hoping to get the next couple of posts up fairly soon but it just depends on how much time, energy, and motivation I have over the next few days.

Thanks for sticking around!

I’m just going to pretend that I didn’t totally miss my week 4 post.

WEEK FIVE!

Otherwise known to me as the oh crap we only have one week (really less than that) but three weeks worth of work to do. Honestly, we’re still working on demo in some parts of the space and we just added something else to our scope of work. I’m not confident that everything will be finished but I am confident that at least one of the two spaces will be ready for their reveal next week.

The dining room is still a gigantic mess but we got the new garage access door in! Big shout out to our brother-in-law Brandon for picking the new door up for us and coming over and helping get it installed. Somehow, we managed not to lose either of our cats while we had a giant hole in our house for 3 hours on Sunday.

We almost had a major set back here. The door got here last Friday and I got an email that it arrived “broken” with no other details but that I could come inspect the damage and see what I wanted to do. I was really unsure how in the world a solid wood door would have gotten broken in transit but I was interested to see what the deal was. Thankfully, the part that was broken was just one side of the door jamb.

We had decided to pay extra for a pre-hung door for the convenience factor but the door itself was pretty much fine so we decided to keep it and just ask for a discount because it was going to take another month to get a new door in. Let me say this, I do not have a lot of nice things to say about the HomeDepot.com customer service (not just over this issue) but our in-store customer service team is amazing. First, the dot com representative tried to give me 5% back on what was essentially an unusable door jamb when I could have purchased the same exact door without the jamb for $70 less. By keeping the door I was going to have to buy a new door jamb which was going to set me back $50. The in-store rep pushed and got me my $50 back and then they comped us the new door jamb kit. It all worked out in the end. We still have finishing work to do but it’s in which is major! Here it is from the garage side:

The pantry has also started to see some serious progress.

Going into the final week (where most people are styling and shooting their spaces), we still have a ton to do:

DINING ROOM:

• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath – In Progress
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten – In Progress
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim – In Progress
• Paint walls – In Progress
• New blinds
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)

PANTRY:

• Finish demo
• Have exposed pipes cut and capped – probably not before the ORC is over
• Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
• Frame new entrance in dining room
• Close up old entrance in hallway
• Install lighting
• Add light switch
• Hang/finish drywall in pantry – In progress
• Build cabinets and shelves – No cabinets, just shelves
• Lay flooring
• Paint
• Add counter – change of plans, not doing this anymore

Those to-do lists don’t even include all the little stuff like patching nail holes, sanding down the old base plate in the pantry, caulking, etc. There’s a lot to do and only one more weekend to try to make a dent. Go check out what the other guest participants are up to here! And check back next week for our finished pantry and what I’m expecting will be our partially finished dining room.

Week 3! That means we’re halfway through.

Well, it’s the halfway point for the One Room Challenge but I’m definitely not halfway through with our dining room and pantry. IT’S OKAY I’M NOT PANICKING.

I know! I know. It looks like we’re never going to finish. I had planned on moving everything out of this room to do the floors, paint, and new trim but honestly there’s just nowhere else to put this furniture right now so we’re having to work around it.

We actually have gotten a good bit done in the last week although the air register that needs to be moved for us to really make headway on the pantry remains where it’s been. That’s okay though, we came up with an alternate plan today that will make everything easier and we’re dropping OG off at my mom’s for an afternoon this weekend so we can really crank out some work. I’m hoping Saturday will bring us a mostly put together pantry. Any by “put together” I mean like, I hope we most of the walls covered and the new entrance framed in. We’ve gotten some drywall installed here and there but that new entrance is crucial and it’s a two person job. I did at least finish getting drywall up over the old entrance to the closet. It’s not taped, mudded, sanded, or painted but at least it’s finally closed up!

This week I also got up one coat of the green paint on the lower half of the dining room walls. I’m planning on painting one coat on all of the new trim before we install it and then just doing a second coat on everything all at once (and a third if I have to). The window trim and baseboards will be replaced but I don’t want to take down what’s there until we’re ready to install the new stuff.

Other than the pantry, the floors are the other big thing that need to get done. It’s week 3 and yes, I’m still removing tile but I’m having to do it in sections and I only have short time spans to work. We haven’t even talked more about the new garage access door and the last time I checked, the door hadn’t even shipped yet so I’m starting to get a little nervous on that front. As of now it’s supposed to get here at the end of the month which doesn’t leave us much time to get it installed and all of the trim work done.

Here’s how our dining room to-do list is looking:

• Clean out room (move my workstation upstairs, move out furniture and random crap) – NOPE. Working around the crap.
• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath – In Progress
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim
• Paint walls – In Progress
• Paint Ceiling
• New blinds
• Paint armoire (this is a maybe right now) Taking off the list
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)

It wasn’t technically on the to-do list, but I did manage to find a small piece of furniture to put next to the new door to the garage where we can drop our keys and mail. We’re picking it up next week!

Let’s see if we’ve done any better in the pantry:

• Finish demo
• Have exposed pipes cut and capped
• Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
• Frame new entrance in dining room
• Close up old entrance in hallway
• Install lighting
• Add light switch
• Add outlet (this is a maybe right now) – Decided against this
• Hang/finish drywall in pantry – In progress
• Build cabinets and shelves
• Lay flooring
• Paint
• Add counter
• Find antique door for entrance – I don’t think we’re going this route anymore but we’ll see. Right now it looks like we’ll be building custom doors but maybe not in time for the reveal.

Make sure you go check out all of the other participants right here! Week 4 is usually when things get really crazy and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s that time again!

This will be our 4^th One Room Challenge but we completely failed to finish our spaces for #2 and #3. I’m hoping to turn things around with this one though. If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge is a biannual event where designers, bloggers, and Instagrammers work to finish a space in 6 weeks. It’s not a competition, but instead it promotes community. It also gives you a deadline which can work as a major motivator if you have a space you are wanting to re-do or finish.

If you’ve been following along, you know that we were already attempting to renovate our laundry room but after several setbacks, the laundry room renovation turned into a laundry room and separate pantry renovation. I’m guessing you guys think this will be our One Room Challenge space and you would be right and wrong.

The budget we started with has been cut down a good bit since I ended up needing several hotel stays, several tanks of gas, and food while traveling when my dad was in the hospital (for those that don’t know, my father was recently hospitalized for about a week and a half after suffering a major heart attack and has since passed). Because of that, I have decided to put the laundry room on hold for just a little bit while we work on the pantry. We still have a couple of things we’ll have to do in the laundry room to make our other spaces work but trying to finish the pantry and laundry room completely in 6 weeks especially when I’m not sure how the budget is going to shake out just seems like I’d be setting myself up to fail. Both projects will add function to our house but the pantry excites me more at the moment. So for now, I’m sticking with our closet-to-pantry project.

Here’s how the closet (which we used for our cats) looked a few weeks ago:

And here is where we’re at now:

Here is our pantry to-do list:

• Finish demo
• Have exposed pipes cut and capped
• Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
• Frame new entrance in dining room
• Close up old entrance in hallway
• Install lighting
• Add light switch
• Add outlet (this is a maybe right now)
• Hang/finish drywall in pantry
• Build cabinets and shelves
• Lay flooring
• Paint
• Add counter (this is a maybe depending on the cabinet/shelving configuration we decide on)
• Find antique door for entrance (fingers crossed!)

So now you’re probably thinking “You’re just doing a pantry? Really? What are you doing with the other 4 weeks?” First, keep in mind that we’re building up from the studs here and we only really get to work on our house on the weekends (and one of those during the ORC is already full meaning no work will get done). Second, since we’re adding a pantry where there used to be a closet and re-configuring the layout so that the entrance is in the dining room, I thought it might be fun to add the dining room into our ORC plans. All we’ve done to the dining room since we moved in is paint it 1.25 times and change out the ceiling fan for a light fixture (the room was marketed as a “Florida room”) so it’s probably about time to make it look decent.

Here’s a listing photo from when we first saw the house:

And here it is right now in all of its glory:

The dining room project will be pretty small but I’m hoping it will have a big impact. Eventually we’ll change out the crown molding, add a couple of windows, add built-ins, and change out the existing window for a sliding door but that’s all down the road. Here’s the initial to-do list for the One Room Challenge:

• Clean out room (move my workstation upstairs, move out furniture and random crap)
• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath (already started)
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim
• Paint walls
• Paint Ceiling (this is a maybe since the ceiling continues into the kitchen and down the hall into the foyer)
• New blinds
• Paint armoire (this is a maybe right now)
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)
• Bring furniture back in

So, that’s the plan! I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a design plan 100% nailed down but I’ve picked up some paint samples and have an idea of what I want. I really can’t design the pantry until we’ve got the new entrance framed out and the old entrance closed in but I have a rough idea of what I want to do in there, too.

Now go check out what everyone else is up to here! There are always so many gorgeous transformations that come out of the One Room Challenge and I can’t wait to see them.

Y’all it has been a week. I am super pumped it’s the weekend!

-Tomorrow I get to see my best friend and her girls (and her husband I guess. HI, TOM). It’s been way too long and I’m excited to finally meet her baby girl who was born at the end of last year.

-OG had the flu last weekend and it wasn’t as bad as I feared but still not great. As much as I love being with her, I think we were all glad to get back to our schedules on Tuesday. I even went into the office for a few hours just to get out of the house (I normally work from home on Tuesdays).

-I’m planning on talking about our new new laundry plan next week since our old new plan isn’t going to work. You can read about that here if you missed it.

-The wall mural I ordered for the laundry room was delivered this week and it’s gorgeous and I love it but it won’t work in the laundry room now. Any suggestions?

-We are coming up on our 6 year house anniversary! Sometimes it feels like we haven’t done anything in this house and then I look back at pictures and realize we’ve actually done quite a lot. I’m planning on putting together an anniversary post next month with a few before and after photos although we don’t have many (or maybe not any) true afters. Lots of “in progress” shots that are far better than the before.

The fact that we’ve lived here almost 6 years is huge. My family moved from house to house when I was growing up (I lived at over 20 addresses by the time I was out of college) and it’s been nice to be so settled. Sometimes we talk about putting our house on the market because we could make a good deal of money off of it but then where would we go? We’ve both agreed that while this might not be our forever house like we intended it to be, we’d have to find something pretty special to make us move. Either that or we’d have to outgrow our house.

-I am one of those rare people who doesn’t like to travel. I’m really a homebody and crave the comfort of being at home on my sofa but I have the strongest sense of wanderlust right now. Like, if I could pack up today and go I think I would. I’m desperate to get back to Alaska. We went on a cruise in 2013 and I’ve wanted to go back ever since but lately it’s pretty much all I want to do. It’s definitely out this year but maybe next year? We’ll see. Of all the vacations we could go on it’s probably the most expensive so it would probably come down to a big house project vs. a vacation.

Here’s a shot of the Mendenhall Glacier from our last trip:

Happy weekend!

Well, there have been some interesting developments in the laundry room renovation. We started getting plumbing quotes over the weekend to move our washer from its current location to the newly planned laundry nook. As a reminder, here’s the current floor plan:

And the floor plan we had settled on after our initial floor plan didn’t work out:

After looking into everything, it turns out that the only place to really have the washer downstairs is right where it is.

WOMP WOMP.

I won’t get too into the specifics, but basically the way the plumbing would have to be run into the nook would cause us to lose about 8 inches from the back wall which would make it way too tight to comfortably do laundry. The nook was already going to be cozy and losing 8 inches just makes it nearly non-functional. We do potentially have the option to move it upstairs which is appealing since that’s where all of the bedrooms and full bathrooms are but the only place for it there is our bathroom which would work but our bathroom is already on the small side and I don’t really want to have to squeeze another function into that space.

So, the fact that we have to leave the washer and dryer where they are is bummer number one. Bummer number two is the garage entry. We had hoped to slide the garage access a few feet to the right so that we could add cabinets to the current laundry room to give us some much needed storage. The problem with that is that the spot we wanted to move it is actually the worst possible spot to move it because there’s so much going on structurally. Beams, posts, etc. So not only can we not move the washer and dryer into their little nook but we also can’t move the door which means there’s no room for cabinets. Sure, we could put one large floor to ceiling cabinet where the old hall closet/bench was but that wouldn’t make the space feel any bigger and could potentially cause even more space/bottleneck issues. And then there’s bummer number three; the ceilings. The ceilings in the old cat closet and the laundry room are about 6.5′ which means they are super low. I think standard ceiling height is 8′ and even that’s a little low for me but it’s what we have in most of the house. I don’t know what mess somebody did to this house but the plumbing is crazy and unless we want to basically change the plumbing layout in our entire house, we can’t raise the ceilings much. We can maybe get 2″ through most of the space.

What does that all mean? It basically means that we can’t do much of anything that we intended to do and I tore all of the drywall down in the old cat closet for almost nothing. I mean, the drywall really needed to be done because as you can imagine, having a closet dedicated to cats caused some unpleasant lingering odors.

BUT! Not all hope is lost. The problem with the existing laundry/garage access combo is that it’s just too small of a space to accommodate both. We also desperately need more storage but that’s just a bonus of any new floor plan at this point. So, if we can’t move the laundry we’ll just have to move the garage access. New floor plan #3:

To be completely transparent, we think we can easily move the garage access to the back wall of the garage into the dining room but we don’t know that for sure. We’ll have to open up the wall to make sure we’re not dealing with anything too structural but if we can move it, we’ll be able to keep the laundry as is (which means no big plumbing cost) and we’ll be able to add about 5ft of cabinetry which means lots of storage. Coming into the house from the dining room will actually be great for bringing in groceries and it only slightly changes the future plans we had for the room so even though I had some initial hesitation there, we’re starting to get really excited about this possibility. We are not combining the existing laundry room and the cat closet anymore so instead that cat closet will become a pantry (more storage!!) and we’ll move the entrance to it to the dining room side as well instead of the hallway. We do have one air vent that will need to move to make this happen but that’s really it. I would love to find an old weathered half lite door to use for the new pantry or maybe buy a new one and make it look weathered.

The downside to the new laundry plan is that there isn’t really much wall space to use that wallpaper that I ordered so right now I’m trying to decide if I’m going to use it somewhere else (the new pantry maybe?) or if I’m going to return it. The upside is that now we get two spaces to design and we have an opportunity to try to learn/improve some new skills.

Remember when I said this project was going to be slow? Well, now it’s going to be on pause for a bit because we’ll have to do some clean out in our garage before we can get to the area that we need to open up for the new access into the house. We won’t even have a chance to start doing that until next weekend because this weekend is already packed. I’m thinking we might actually save this project just a few more weeks for the Spring One Room Challenge but there will be lots of planning and investigating in the meantime to make sure that this plan will even work.

Fingers crossed!