The House on the Hill Blog

Renovating a house from the 70s in the South.

Get out of my dreams and into my car

And by car, I mean house.

Seriously though, I have been absolutely drooling over white kitchens for the longest time. Sometimes I day dream about them…that’s a little weird but hey, we’re all a little weird sometimes, am I right? I don’t know what it is about a white kitchen, maybe how clean they look or maybe it’s how open and airy they seem to make a room feel. Whatever it is, I want it. Who wouldn’t want to cook in one of these beauties?

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These are just a few of the hundreds of white kitchen pictures that I’ve been ogling lately. Keep in mind that for now we’re just painting the cabinets and then we’ll move on to installing a backsplash, adding new lighting, and maybe one day we can even expand our space a bit (or maybe that plan will just have to stay in my dreams forever).

One thing that I know we’ll be making room for is a baking station – hopefully we can make it look as pretty as Jenny’s from Everyday Occasions:

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Anyone who knows me knows (or should know) that I absolutely love to bake and I’m stupid excited to have my own little corner of the kitchen. Jenny’s baking station is not only gorgeous but functional and incredibly organized which I love.

Progress has slowed a bit in the kitchen since Kyle is out of town for a work trip but we should have all of the painting done this weekend which means next weekend I’ll be able to do the cabinet reveal! Until then, I’ll just keep getting some inspiration from my BFF.

What do you think about white kitchens? Too trendy? Classic? Boring?

The List – Part One

So if you’ve been following along, you know that we gave our laundry room a face lift and that we’re currently working on phase one of our kitchen. You can also see from what I’ve posted on the House Tour page that our house could use lots of updating. I thought it might be helpful for you guys if I posted a “to do” list of sorts – giving an overview of our master plan.

Now, I love a good list – seriously, next to spreadsheets, amortization tables, and DIY projects, a list of any kind is my all time favorite thing – but I know that too many boxes to check off can be overwhelming for you and me both…but mostly me. So to keep you guys from dozing off (and me from having to check myself into a mental facility), I’m just going to do a broad plan for “Part One” of our whole home makeover which focuses on the downstairs.

PHASE ONE (of a million)

Front Porch

  • Sand and refinish the wood
  • Change light fixture
  • New front door
  • Add some greenery
  • Make it look less like a cave

Entry

  • Create an attractive entryway (table, lamp, art, etc)
  • New flooring
  • Pretty up the hall closet

Half Bath

  • New flooring
  • New lighting
  • New toilet
  • New vanity top
  • New mirror
  • Paint

Living Room

  • Figure out what to do with the pine paneling
  • Make the fireplace look less groovy (did I mention our house was built in the 70s?)
  • Create a sitting area
  • Revamp media stand
  • Disguise ugly railings

Study (formerly dining room)

  • Add storage
  • Add seating
  • New Light
  • Find or build a piece to use as a bar but that doesn’t look like a bar – this ain’t a frat house
  • Tables/lamps/general decor

Kitchen

  • Paint cabinets
  • Add backsplash
  • Change lighting

Dining Room

  • Build table
  • Paint old chairs
  • Reupholster old chairs
  • Find additional chairs
  • Add storage
  • New light fixture

Laundry Room

  • Paint walls
  • Paint cabinets
  • Add counter
  • Storage for keys, sunglasses, wallets, etc

General

  • New doors
  • Window treatments
  • Art

Phew! I’m worn out just from typing that list. We don’t really have a deadline for any of this, we’re just trying to do what we can as we have the time (and dolla’ dolla’ bills, ya’ll).

What do you think? I didn’t want to go into too much detail but I promise that I have some exciting plans for these spaces! Next time, I’ll share a little bit of the inspiration behind our kitchen plans and hopefully the reveal isn’t too far off.

Until then,

Jess

The quick kitchen remodel that wasn’t so quick after all

Once upon a time, we decided to do a “quick” kitchen makeover. You know, just slap some paint on the cabinets and throw up a backsplash, no big deal! Now, we look back and laugh and laugh and laugh at how naive we were. “Quick” has now turned into 5 1/2 weeks of not doing much. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

Here are a few of the listing photos of our kitchen:

Cabinets and stove coffee bar Full Kitchen kitchen window and sink

And here it is a mere four hours after closing – progress!:

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Look how happy I look here – so excited, so blissfully unaware of how long I’ll spend without kitchen cabinets:

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We were able to get all of the doors down that night but since then, life has gotten in the way and we’ve only been able to work sporadically. It’s tough to muster up the energy and motivation to work on kitchen cabinets after you’ve both been working all day and we’ve spent far too much time at home improvement stores instead of at our own home on the weekends. One day after we had made a good bit of progress, we decided to step back and admire our hard work. That’s when we decided that we didn’t like the direction we were going in and all of the bottom cabinet bases would have to be re-painted. Womp, womp.

If you look really hard, you can see that originally we were going for a two toned look – the bottom cabinets and pantry were going to be a light blue and the tops were going to be white. We decided the shade of blue didn’t go well with the shade of gray we had on the walls and it wasn’t enough of a color difference to be the pop of color we were looking for. It just wasn’t coming together like the image we had in our heads:

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We decided the best thing to do would be to go all white and as of today, our kitchen looks like this:

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We still need to finish priming the insides of the cabinets, add a second coat to everything, and then prime and paint almost all of the doors and drawers (plus paint over the blue that’s still on the pantry). Unfortunately for us, Mother Nature has decided to be a bit moody this weekend and we’re worried that it’s a tad too cold to paint in the garage where all of the doors are currently living.

Hopefully we’ll be done soon and I can show you a good before and after! I think it already looks a hundred times better and the light cabinets make the space feel so much bigger.

So, have any of you tackled a project like this? Was the outcome worth all of the work and waiting?

One room down…

…all of them minus one to go.

One of the very first rooms we started working on in the house was our laundry room. This is the place where we access the garage from the house so we knew we wanted it to be a functional space for both washing clothes and storing our keys/sunglasses/random assortment of daily items.

Here’s what we started with:

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And BAM! This is what we have now:

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I really love how it turned out and it didn’t take much effort or money. We painted the cabinets white and the walls a calm grayish blue color (Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams). It feels so much more pleasant  and clean now than it did with the yellow/beige that was there before, don’t ya think? We also added a counter ($60 for 6ft at Lowe’s – cut to the size we needed), a couple of his and her baskets for keys and mail, and a lamp from Target. The small green container is an old vase we’re using as a trash bin for lint and random pocket junk.

I say it didn’t take much effort but to be completely honest, I only did the painting. My dear, sweet husband installed the counter and let’s just say I heard more than a few grumbles and five dollar swear words coming from behind closed doors.

Jess

The Ugly Duckling

Hi there!

Since this is my very first post, I’d like to tell you a little bit about who I am and a little more about the house Kyle and I fell in love with.

Let’s start with little ole me, shall we? I’m an early twenties Southern gal married to a guy born and bred in the great white North. In terms of design and decor, our styles may not always mirror one another’s but we know how to compromise. I enjoy having my steady desk job but I get most of my excitement from crafting, baking, and most recently from designing and decorating every last inch of our first house.

Speaking of the house, let me introduce you – but first I have a secret. Our house is an ugly duckling. Phew, glad that’s out of the way. Allow me to explain. I love our house – major L-O-V-E, but as a proud homeowner I have to be able to see my house as it is, not just how I would like it to be. We got a crazy good deal on this baby. She’s a 1970’s 4 bed, 2.5 bath, 2600 sqft contemporary style with a lot of potential that was on the market for quite some time. The inspection gave us no reason to fret and the appraisal came back solid. A few people have wondered why nobody else snatched up such a great opportunity and I often reply “Oh who knows, maybe it’s because the lighting was bad in the photos” or “Could be the fact that our neighbors are actually power lines.” Deep down inside, I know the answer. She. Is. Ugly. The house is just not the most attractive from the outside – not a ton of curb appeal. But c’mon, people! That can be changed! Even if she’s not currently the prettiest girl at the ball, she’s my baby and I love her. We have some major plans to make her inner beauty shine on the outside but since the trees here grow leaves instead of money (ugh, I know right?), we’ll be taking on small projects little by little.

Without further ado, please meet the house on the hill:

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I hope you stick around to see what we do with the old girl!

Jess