Work on the new place continues, but there is fortunately a light at the end of the tunnel. Martin took out cabinets we don’t need in the dining room and moved them to the laundry room. He took out a base cabinet in the kitchen and moved it in by 3 feet to make an island and open up a hallway, and moved the top cabinets that were over those to the laundry room to hang over the ones taken out of the dining room. It was old-school switcheroo but we love the end result. Antique pieces will fit into the spaces freed up in the dining room with the removal of those cabinets.
He replaced the counter top and back-splash, which unexpectedly necessitated moving all the outlets and switches on the walls over the counter tops. The counter top that we removed butted up flush against the wall, but the one we replaced it with had a 4 inch back-splash that covered the bottom half of the plugs and outlets. Once the outlets were replaced, he installed tin tiles from the 4 inch back splash to the bottom of the upper cabinets. It was loads of fun measuring and re-measuring where to cut the hole for the sink given the difference in where the base of the counter top sat in relation to the wall with the added 4 in. back splash.
It was completely worth it the extra time it took to adjust everything because I LOVE the new look. It lightened up the kitchen and gave us the vintage look we like. We used the same sink but installed a new vintage-style faucet that complements the new look.
The painting (including windows, facings and trim, the inside of closets and the laundry room cabinets) is about finished except I still have two bathrooms to paint. With the master bathroom paint job, the last vestiges of the pink that at first put us off from buying the place will be banished forever and replaced with a palette of sunny yellows, greens, and wood tones.
The next project is refinishing the hardwood floors we found under ugly pink carpeting in the living room and we are also refinishing the hardwood in the two smaller bedrooms. After finding the hardwood in the living room you should have seen how fast we dashed into those bedrooms to peek under that carpet! Finishing the hardwood will eat up a full weekend but then we will have beautiful wood floors. If all goes well, we will tile the kitchen and dining room the weekend after and then we can slow down and tweak little details over time.
My next project will be to hang custom window treatments throughout – either curtains of fabric too nice to discard that are refashioned to fit different sized windows in the new house or made from scratch for the remaining rooms. Every room will have a different type of curtain and fabrics will be different patterns, but in the same yellow, green, and cottage white color scheme.
Martin has tackled every aspect of the remodel with an open mind and has done an absolutely remarkable job. It has sometimes meant buying tools, or renting tools such as the floor sander for the hardwood or the wet saw for the porcelain tile we’ll be putting down, and sometimes we spent time online researching the best materials for our lifestyle or deciding the best way of doing something, but we are on the downhill stretch and I simply love everything he’s done. I am going to have the nicest kitchen I’ve ever had. The work he’s done means so much because he will be the first to say he isn’t experienced at this kind of work, but he’s done it and done it well.
We fell in love with the place, but most of the interior of the house was pink (including pink counter tops) and we’re just not pink kind of people. We are so thankful we bought it because we love the place more every day and the house is going to be exactly what we want. You can’t get the kind of attention we’ve put into this house from a building professional you have to love it enough to put your heart and soul into it.
Last night I made a meal that said, “Thank you, I love you”. I stuffed catfish fillets with crab meat, seasoned it up with the same attention to detail that my Love has put into the house, and served them with cheese grits topped with roasted cherry tomatoes. I made crab cakes out of the remainder of the crab meat which are in the fridge waiting to be the star of tonight’s meal along with the rest of those Heavenly roasted tomatoes. I am thankful every day for someone in my life who shares my interests and who I can laugh with even when working our fingers to the bone. At the end of the day, I know he loves me even when I’m covered in drops and splotches of two colors of paint and sporting a big glop of it in my hair. (Don’t ask me how that happened). Life is good. No, Life is Great.
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