Thursday, August 18, 2011

Our new kitchen... and other fun things

I am so sorry that I have failed, once again, at updating our blog on a regular basis. Sam and I have been so incredibly busy! On top of finishing another semester of school, we had two funerals on back-to-back Saturdays in July because there were two deaths in my family exactly one week apart... but on different sides of the family (my grandpa passed away and one of my cousins was killed), AND THEN we did some home improvement on our kitchen! The home improvement included: laying down 98 tiles, new cabinets under the sink, bruised knees, dirty clothes, about 20 trips to Home Depot, and an incredibly messy house just to fix a $7 part. And yes, you heard me right... only to fix a $7 part. What the heck?!

Here is what happened... a couple of weeks ago I went to the sink in our kitchen and right after I stepped in front of the sink, my socks were soaked. I looked down to see that a LOT of the carpet in front of the sink was all wet. And I could not figure out where the water was coming from. Awesome right? I showed Sam and LuAnn (Sam's mom) after dinner and they figured out that the water heater was leaking and somehow came into our kitchen. Luckily, all we had to do was replace the plug to the water heater and we were good to go (hence, the $7)! Except that somehow we didn't stop there. We pulled up the carpet with the intention to let it dry but then discovered that the tack strips were coming up with the carpet and that it was just a mess underneath the carpet. LuAnn had been wanting to tile the kitchen downstairs for a while (we live in her basement apartment) so she figured now was a good time to do it. She also wanted to get new cabinets for one side of the kitchen, so we replaced those too. Basically, replacing the $7 part turned into a huge project. Quite funny if you ask me. It was my first time ever doing a project like this so it was quite an experience. I enjoyed it for the most part though. And to see the finished product (well mostly finished product) it was all worth it!!


We didn't really take pictures before we started the entire thing (with all of the stuff in the kitchen) but here is what it looked like before we started tiling (with the new cabinets already in)...





We signed the last tile before we put it in...


 Us putting the last tile in...


 Tired and dirty after a long day of hard work...


So this is what our house looked like for 5 days. I did not love the mess. I do not handle messes very well. I was stressed out about it most days and just avoided the downstairs all together.


Our new cabinets!! Plus a little bit of the tile.


Our new kitchen! Don't worry, it's not done yet. The back of the counter has to be replaced and so does all the molding along the floor. But it looks so pretty! And is SO much nicer! We are loving the tile.


Just a few side notes, here is a little project I did the other day that took hardly any time at all. I have been wanting a cute centerpiece for our kitchen table so I stole this idea off of this blog and thought I would give it a try.

Not too bad right?! The lady got the idea from Anthropologie and let's be honest, who doesn't love Anthropologie? I know I do. But their stuff is way too expensive for me. I thought this was a cute idea and it really was super easy.

As another side note, here are some darling pictures that Sam has taken lately of our cute nieces and nephew that we adore:

Lucy Goosey (aka Lucy)

Whitters (aka Whitney)

 Chewy/Baby Matthew (aka Matthew)... he fell asleep in my arms... how cute is that?!