The thing is, my cute little house has needed a ton of cosmetic work. A ton. We're talking wallpaper covered in blue and pink flowers with Eiffel towers embossed in it. Um...no. And there was hunter green wallpaper with mallard ducks flying around, and textured vinyl wallpaper with grapes, and bright red wallpaper with humongeous gold and green toile on it. Are you sensing a theme here? Yeah there have been lots and lots of hours of wallpaper removal. But besides the wallpaper, hands down the worst room was the kitchen. There were oak cabinets with a very heavy grain and not a pretty color, and the textured grape wallpaper was everywhere (with two layers of wallpaper underneath). The countertops were off white laminate that was yellowing badly. All the hardware was burnished gold and the two huge flourescent lights were horrible. The stovetop was in the center of the island right on the edge where the chairs pulled up to the counter, so my kids were supposed to sit with their faces 12 inches from boiling pots of dinner. Uncool. There was one tiny wall oven, and all the doors and woodwork were stained, not painted. The ceilings, like the rest of the house, were popcorn (gag). And, as much as I love brick, my kitchen floors were smooth 6 inch brick squares that were dark red and faded to a purple color on the sides. Very expensive '70's stuff we are talking about here, but I really did hate it. Also, there was a doorway with two little skinny double doors from the kitchen to the adjacent dining room that we never, ever used.
All that being said, I am rarely content when it comes to my home. I think it's because I don't work outside of it, so I'm here all the time and I obsess about what it looks like. Plus I watch too much HGTV and really like to piddle with decorating. But it was all I could do to not rip out the whole kitchen on the second day we lived here. The thing is, through a bad series of circumstances including a new job, a lease-to-purchase agreement that fell through, and a near divorce (someone else - not us) we ended up owning our new house and our old house at the same time for six months. Now I seriously hope you are the kind of family that has the dough to own houses all over the place, your house where you live full time, your little cabanna on your private island, your ski lodge in Colorado........but we so are not. We're just a couple of kids that got married young and started having babies early. Daddy works a day job and Mama holds down the fort and cooks dinner, and two houses for six months was a tough little stretch for us. So a total remodel was out of the question.
You know it funny, though. What I thought was such an awful thing at the time turned out to be one of the best learning experiences and confidence boosters we could have ever had. We did a lot of bargain shopping and learned how to do a lot - and I do mean a lot - of stuff ourselves, and today after three years and a lot of different "phases" of work, we have a kitchen that I love. So even though I do not have a lot of "before" pictures because I had not even heard of blogging at that point much less thought I would have one, I wanted to share with you a little bit of where we started and where we are now.

Then, earlier this spring, we again had a burning desire to redo stuff in our kitchen. (Plus my Daddy built me a beautiful farm-house table for Chrismas and it didn't look right in our current dining room.) The kitchen is just small and we are the kind of people to have informal company over quite a bit. Plus, the wall covering fix was getting uglier every time we looked at it, and the beadboard backsplash never did look quite right. I love beadboard normally, but I think because my installers were new at it at the time (Aaron and Johnny) the seams never really quite met up correctly and it always looked like a homemade fix. So we, with the help of two professionals this time, tore out all the sheetrock in the kitchen and got all new (paid someone to do that. we aren't sheetrockers yet) and tore down the wall between the kitchen and dining room (also paid someone. it was a load bearing wall and I wasn't too keen on the house falling down). We painted all the walls the same, ripped out all the old and put up new, much larger trim all around, and scraped and painted the popcorn ceilings. Now it looks more like a knock-down texture. The dining room had hardwood flooring in it that was pretty but it popped and cracked and wasn't something I loved. So we ripped it out and tiled with the same tile from the kitchen since it was essentially all one big room now. But us and our floors - the wood was held down with what was basically an awful black asphalt with glue in it that was thick and nearly impossible to remove. We tried elbow grease, solvents (p.s. deadly - like I couldn't move my extremities or feel my hands after two minutes of exposure to the fumes), mini blowtorches and scrapers, and finally had some success with a rented power scraper that Aaron ran the better part of a day. Then to finish the kitchen off, we took down the beadboard and put up marble subway tile and a marble and glass mix.
So now I can say that we really and truely love our kitchen. It makes us happy just to walk in there everyday. It's funny too because honestly I know a lot of people who have much nicer kitchens than mine, not to mention all the beautiful things I see on tv and in magazines, but there is something about having done it all ourselves that gives such a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Love like my miter saw,
Cassie