The House on the Hill

Week Four!

In true ORC fashion, we are not on schedule to finish so I think we’re going to cut the finishing work on the kitchen and focus solely on the dining room and pantry. Still planning on finishing the kitchen by Thanksgiving (hopefully before!) since we’re hosting but since we still have floor to ceiling cabinets to plan and build, four shelves to drill out, sand, and oil, lots of trim work that hasn’t started, and only two weeks left until reveal day, I don’t think it’s happening.

That’s okay though because progress is chugging along in the dining room and I’m optimistic it will be finished! I don’t have many progress photos today since we’re still working on trim but once that’s finished things should very quickly start falling into place.

We had planned on getting our storage cabinets from IKEA last weekend but they ran out of stock the day our friend Tom was going to pick them up for us. We live about 1.5 – 2 hours away from IKEA so we couldn’t just hop in the car when they re-stocked a couple of days later. Kyle is planning on heading up tomorrow assuming they aren’t out of stock again and we should be able to get those put together and up this weekend.

Here’s the one progress photo I have from this week: partially painted trim! I got the first coat of green up on the first wall and I’m hoping to get the second coat up today and the rest of the installed trim caulked. I am in LOVE with this color. It’s Behr Northern Glen if you’re wondering and it’s the same color we painted our kitchen cabinets.

This is what I’m hoping to get done this weekend:

• Finish trim install
• Finish caulking/spackling/sanding all trim
• Paint all trim
• Prime ceiling
• Paint ceiling
• Install cabinets
• Paint garage door
• Clean pantry door
• Paint pantry door
• Install wallpaper
• Install new light fixture
• Install blinds

This would basically finish off the dining room and give us a week to finish the pantry which doesn’t need much more work.

Be sure to check out what everyone else is up to right here!

Week Two!

Admittedly, I don’t have much progress to share this week. We are slowly working on finishing up caulking and cleaning the tile in the kitchen and prepping the open shelves for finishing/installation. I’m hoping to get a lot of trim work done this weekend so I can start caulking all of that which I estimate will take me approximately 3 years and 47 days.

Since I don’t have much progress to share today, I thought I’d share a couple of mood boards and a little more detail for the two spaces so you guys can see how they work together.

First up, the dining room:

The main elements in this room will be the green board and batten wall treatment and the orange grove wallpaper. The green color we chose (Behr Northern Glen) isn’t showing true to color on this screen but the shots on my Instagram are pretty close.

We’ve also decided to purchase this IKEA Billy bookcase to replace the dresser we’re using now (which doesn’t look like it’s going to hang in there much longer anyway). Here’s a shot of the dresser (and a sneak peek at the wallpaper and green together); it’s just a cheap Target dresser that we’ve had probably as long as we’ve lived in this house. What you can’t see is the severe bow at the bottom of the dresser from the weight of all of our crap.

We’re planning on building the bookcase out a bit and trimming it so that it looks built in. We’re going ahead and splurging on this for two reasons: 1) it gives us even more storage than what we have now which is never a bad thing and 2) it keeps us from having a seam in our wallpaper. Since this paper is meant to be hung vertically, I don’t think we’d be able to match the pattern and blend the seam. The bookcase will go about where the dresser is now and then there will be wallpaper on each side of it.

Right now we have a chrome light fixture that I really like but I want to use some more natural elements in the space so we’re going to install this World Market chandelier that we purchased for our bedroom in here instead.

We’re also keeping our existing dining room table for now which we built using plans by Ana White. Eventually, we’ll get a new table and put our farmhouse table outside but for now we’re using what we already have since the table I want is $1,000 and ain’t nobody spending that on a table right now.

There’s really not much to talk about in the kitchen and since we’re making our own counters, I didn’t include any on the mood board.

We replaced all of our cabinets with these Lowe’s Project Source drawers and painted them the same green we used in the dining room. We also carried the same laminate floors from the rest of the downstairs into the dining room and kitchen.

As for the tile, we installed the white penny tile counter to ceiling on both cabinet walls which was a major labor of love and a learning experience. For instance, we learned that our kitchen isn’t square but to be perfectly honest we probably could have guessed that one for ourselves.

The black and white tile is majorly out of my comfort zone. I tend to get tired of patterns really quickly (ask Kyle how many bedspreads we’ve gone through since we moved in) but I just really wanted to do something bold…because I guess green cabinets and wallpaper with giant oranges on it aren’t bold enough? ANYWAY. Kyle (AKA the one who makes my house dreams come true) built a custom hood frame and then I tiled it with the patterned tile. It’s probably one of my favorite projects we’ve ever done and once it’s all clean and caulked I will post about it (there’s already a picture on my Instagram feed of it before grout if you can’t wait until next week).

This space has been partially finished for SO LONG now and I’m really ready to get it wrapped up. Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish at a bare minimum this weekend:

• Finish installing shelf rods
• Drill holes in shelves
• Sand shelves
• Oil shelves to match counters
• Caulk tile
• Continue cleaning tile (do as I say, not as I do: DO NOT let grout haze sit for weeks on end because it will have gotten nice and cozy and will not want to leave)
• Trim out the doors to the deck
• Trim out the wall next to the counter by the family room
• Trim out the garage door
• Add additional trim to the window
• Fill nail holes
• Start caulking

Be sure to go check out what the other guest participants are up to right here!

It’s been a few weeks and progress in the kitchen is still creeping along. I don’t actually expect us to be done until the end of August but considering we only work on it on the weekends while wrangling a toddler (several weekends of which have been busy with other obligations) and we’re doing everything ourselves, I think we’re doing pretty good. My plan for the rest of this week/weekend is to finish installing the tile, install the sink and faucet, and hopefully finish grouting the tile. We also still need to prime the ceiling but we’re both dragging our feet on that one.

Since my last post, we have finished installing the floors, finished all of the cabinet painting, installed the drawer hardware, finished removing all of the old crown molding, started installing new trim, painted the french doors, and installed all of the counters (minus the waterfalls).

Here is a sneak peek but I’ve been posting our progress on Instagram (mostly on Stories):

And here’s a master list of everything that needs to be finished. Or at least, everything I can think of.

• Prime/Paint Ceiling
• Finish gluing up/trimming waterfalls
• Condition/sand/oil waterfalls
• Install waterfalls
• Finish installing trim (crown, door, base)
• Patch/sand/paint trim
• Install shelf brackets
• Tile stove wall
• Grout stove wall tile
• Install sink/faucet
• Build hood
• Tile/grout hood
• Clean/seal all tile
• Caulk tile
• Cut/stain shelves
• Install shelves
• Build pantries
• Build cabinet over fridge
• Trim out pantries/cabinet
• Paint pantries/cabinet
• Clean/put away dishes
• Decorate

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.