I didn’t intend to take such a long break from the blog but life got busy as it tends to do. I’ve been in a major funk pretty much since my dad passed in March and we spent a week in Montana last month and haven’t really worked on the house much since getting back. Kyle and I decided earlier this year when our kitchen had to be gutted unexpectedly that we wouldn’t participate in the Fall One Room Challenge. Yet, here I am posting about Week One.
If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge happens twice a year and involves making over one room in 6 weeks. There are both featured and guest designers and projects range from small room re-dos to full blown renovations. You can read more about it here and be sure to check out the other guest participants here.
Just in case you think I’ve gone fully off the deep end, we are not making over an additional space in our house. I decided the 6 week “challenge” timeline will hopefully be good motivation to finally finish the dining room and pantry which we started for the Spring ORC and our kitchen which has been stuck at 80% finished for a couple of months now. So while we’re technically tackling 3 spaces, we have a giant head start since we’re over halfway done with each space. That means in 6 weeks I will finally (ahem, hopefully) be revealing our kitchen, dining room, and pantry!
So let’s catch up shall we? We’ll start with the kitchen which looked like this when we moved in:
The very first thing we did when we moved in was remove all of the doors and paint all of the cabinets white. I don’t have many pictures from the White Era because spoiler alert: I still hated the kitchen.
It pretty much looked like the above picture, cluttered counters and all, for over 6 years. Then, we discovered a lot of old water damage and mold while putting in new floors throughout the kitchen and dining room for the Spring ORC. Shortly after we made that discovery, it looked a lot more like this:
Sorry that picture is so blurry. Nothing but quality here, folks!
If you’ve been following along, you know we had less than a shoestring budget to rebuild our kitchen but eventually, we got to about here:
Side note: Eventually we’d like to change out all of our appliances and replace these counters with white quartz.
The kitchen pretty much still looks like this except we have a sink and faucet now and we finished all of the tile on the stove wall among other things. I’m going to be obnoxious and hold out on you guys a little because the stove wall is looking pretty dang good if I say so myself and I want to wait until further in the challenge to show that progress. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve already seen some of what I’m talking about.
Here’s our To-Do List for the kitchen (as far as I can remember anyway):
If you’re looking into the kitchen from the family room (which is the view in that picture just above), the dining room is to the right. It’s basically one long, narrow space. What we use as the dining room was actually marketed as a “Florida room” and the space we use as the family room was meant to be the dining room. Make sense?
Not much to look at, right? All we did when we moved in was paint the walls gray (which looked more like purple), build a dining table, throw in some vintage chairs, and shove in some other random furniture. We tried to finish the dining room for the Spring ORC but that didn’t happen (see: kitchen mold disaster). Here it is at the start of the Spring ORC:
And here it is right now in all its messy glory:
Still lots to do and we’ve actually added projects we hadn’t planned on doing originally. I’m glad the big stuff is done though – removing all of the tile took weeks since we could only work a little at a time and adding the two doors were big projects, too.
Which brings us to the pantry! Originally, this was just a closet in the hallway. You can see the door in the two “before” photos for the dining room. Not sure what it was used for before we bought the house. Maybe the pantry? I don’t have a true before but here it is after we ripped the disgusting musty carpet out and laid down some loose tiles that the previous owners left.
We installed a cat door and shoved the litter box in shortly after moving in and then a few months later we added fun cat things like a scratching wall (it was a cheap jute rug that we stuck to the wall where that velcro is below) and carpeted shelves.
I can honestly smell the closet just looking at this photo. Ick. During the Spring ORC, we ripped everything out and I do mean everything:
We also moved the entrance to the dining room side of the wall and closed in the old opening. I planked most of the walls with tongue and groove pine and painted it white. I haven’t finished planking the walls or ceiling and the doorway still needs to be finished. We installed shelves to have somewhere to put our kitchen stuff but we actually need to move them around so I’ll also have some holes to patch. We have not organized the pantry at all yet, just threw everything in there to get it out of the way. Here’s how it looks today:
Luckily, there’s not too much we have to do but I’d like to leave enough time/money to make it pretty and organized so we’ll see what I end up with.
So that’s it! It’s our year to host Thanksgiving which is coming up quickly so we really do need to find motivation and get this done. I don’t have a great record finish One Room Challenge spaces (I’m 1 for 3 in case you’re wondering) but I’m determined to turn that around. Make sure you check out the other guest participants right here and the featured designers here!
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