Where we do our living

So, welcome to part 1 of our home tour.  I've been working on making a floor plan of our house to make the home tour make more sense.  So, after ignoring my husband last night while he was watching the Home Run Derby, and some work this morning, it's done.

It's not exactly to scale, but it gives a good rough idea of how the house is laid out.  I think our house has a good flow.  We have multiple rooms that are pass throughs.  So that means any small children that come to our house love running in circles.  

Today I'm just starting with two rooms.  One is one that required tons of work when we moved in, the other hasn't required so much work.  Both still desperately need new floors.  I'm hopefully getting new floors in the kitchen this summer.  The living room will have to wait.  And there are before and afters.  Just so we can see the massive change.

So this is how the kitchen looked when we bought the house.  Those cabinets were disgusting.  I'm pretty sure they hadn't been touched since they were installed.  Awkwardly placed (and excessive) door knobs.  And pink formica everywhere.  Ug.

Okay, so what all did we do?  Pretty much everything.  We painted all of the cabinets a semi-gloss black.  My sister and I took all the doors off and sent them home with my mom for my dad to paint and relocate the door knobs.  We installed new Formica counter tops.  They were a super bargain at Lowe's.  I mean super bargain, I think we got all of them for less than $150.  We also replaced an ugly brown cast iron sink (super heavy!) with a shiny black acrylic sink (super super light!).  We put up new backsplash -- metallic panels that are actually plastic-ish and the easiest thing ever to install.  My dad built shelves on the end of one cabinet for travel coffee mugs, my Tupperware canisters, and cookbooks.  We got a new dishwasher (actually free from my best friend) and fridge.  

I still need to repaint the window frames and when we get our new floor, the kitchen will officially be done.  And now, the living room.

Pretty ugly, but really nothing paint couldn't fix.  The worst thing was the light fixtures by the fire place.  They look like they belong in a movie theater.  There are no pictures but the overhead light was on a cord.  And you had to plug it in.  Our wonderful electrician fixed that crazy problem.  He also replaced those crazy movie theater lights.  So, now, the after.

I love the most our fire place updates.  I still need to find art.  I am pretty sure that's going to require a shopping trip with one of my girlfriends.  She has excellent taste and is good at finding bargains.  Someday I want to find a better stand to put by the TV to hold our satellite receiver and other electronics.  I also want to find a little table to put by the chair.  There is one at Target I like, but I'm too cheap.  So I'm hoping to find one on craigslist to refinish.

Anyway, just for fun, here's the view from our living room.  Our wonderfully refinished deck.  And our pond.  The pond is horribly dry, we haven't had hardly any rain since May.