Kitchen Cabinets and Appliances

Ikea cabinets will be a general varation of these. We would like to replace the doors with a simple gray stained plywood, but have not decided if all of the doors or just some of them will be replaced. The counter tops will most likely be white Corian....but we will see.

These are the appliances we have selected right now (sorry, couldn't find a picture of the oven because it is a new model, but it is a 30" wall oven from Ikea, made by Whirlpool) The fridge is a Maytag and the dishwasher and cook top are Bosch.

These are all changing everyday so I am sure there will be a better update to come soon...

Kitchen Layouts

We have been trying to decide on a kitchen layout after deciding that what we thought we wanted may not actually be what we wanted. Our best options are below. Obviously three of them are layouts for the kitchen remaining at the back of the house, while the top one is a layout showing the kitchen at the entry. Putting the kitchen at the entry involves taking out one of the chimneys (which is fine, we may do that anyway). The three bottom layouts work around the chimney (which we can not remove because it is venting the boiler). All four schemes generally work with tall storage encasing the refrigerator along the left wall. 1, 2 and 4 have a wall oven in the tall storage, in 3 the oven is under the cook top. I think I know my favorite, but I was hoping to get some outside feedback. Let me know what you think about the general layouts!

Our first Craigslist find!

We found this little gem (Duravit Scola Washbasin) listed on Craigslist and snapped it up for our future downstairs bathroom. It was listed by some couple that somehow had ended up with an extra sink (ooops) during their home renovation and they sold it to us for about 20% of the original sale price. Score!

Another Resolution...

I never follow through with new years resolutions, ever. That being said, I of course have a couple this year that I hope to keep up with. One big one is the "working harder, designing more, etc." resolution and I think this just might help. Unfortunately they are sold out...so I am going to make my own! A couple packs of Moleskine Cahier Notebooks and voila, one sketchbook per month. I think this will really help me keep up with things/designs throughout this whole remodelling process...at least I hope. Since we are already half way through January it looks like I have some catching up to do.

Stay tuned...

Christmas...

Before Christmas, it looked a little something like this...

So after plane delays, water leaks and a general lack of motivation, both families arrived and with the help of my parents and P's dad we were finally able to get the downstairs clean...well, clean enough to have Christmas. We ended up paying a demo crew to come and haul away the remaining debris...yes! more debris! I mean, this is not a big house people, and only from the first floor! Man. Anyway...once clean the Christmas miracle occured. I called my mom (who was out picking up folding chairs so people could sit somewhere, she is awesome) and I said "ok, it is clean, now go find a Christmas tree". This was at 4:00pm on Christmas eve. After much searching she managed to find an abandoned Christmas tree stand with 5 abandoned trees...free tree? yes please! They triumphantly carried the tree in only for me to realize...no tree stand. So I send my dad and uncle out to find one, yeah right, on Christmas eve, I don't think so. So they tried and of course they were all sold out. Here is where the magic really begins...I was carrying stuff down to the basement and stopped for a second while I was down there, probably because I was exhausted, I don't know. I was staring at this weird block thing sitting on the floor in front of me and wondering "what is that?", when it hit me. Omg, that is a Christmas tree stand. Just a little block of cast iron with a hole for a trunk and your typical two screws to tighten on either side. Crazy old Bill left us a Chrismas tree stand...amazing.

After dinner P's wonderful sister helped us (me) decorate and added a super amazing preschool teacher/elf touch by making cutout snowfakes and hanging them throughout the house. I haven't taken them down yet. They are awesome.

The rest of the holiday was much more relaxing, very enjoyable and not at all what I was expecting. It was crazy, in a good way. Everyone will no doubt remember it...that's for sure.

Post holiday there has been much more talking about our plans for this place, which I will update you on later!

More Progress...

December basically consisted of 1. a mad cleaning rush to make the upstairs somewhat acceptable to live in and 2. another mad cleaning rush to somewhat prepare the house for Christmas. Somehow in this month of mad dashes not many progress pictures were taken...maybe they are on P's camera? I blame the fact that no one wants to take pictures while cleaning. Especially when you are covered in plaster dust.




We look like chimney sweeps.

Preparation for moving in included...
Upstairs...
-painting the upstairs bedroom, bathroom and "closet" to minimize what I would like to call "the funk"...sometimes refered to as the "old man funk" in remembrance of old man Bill.
-cleaning plaster dust that managed to float up from the first floor and cover EVERY surface possible
-having the clawfoot tub refinished (by a complete idiot from new hampshire who not only managed to paint the tub, but to also paint the bathroom floor...which then created a permanent "dirt look" from all of said plaster dust that had been tracked into the area. awesome.
Downstairs...
Here is where we seriously underestimated what we were getting into. Demo is fun, until you have to get rid of said demo debris. Our first trip included a zipcar, or maybe I should say ziptruck. We loaded up that ziptruck and hauled who knows how much to a dumpster in a location which I can not reveal...we broke the rules(law?). The second trip got more intense. It included a uhaul truck (that's right, you NEVER know what people do with those things). We loaded a whole truck full of debris and drove it right into the city dump. I don't know if they had every seen someone do this considering you typically see dump trucks pulling up to the dump, but the scale guy didn't seem too suprised. Anyway, so after unloading our debris and driving out we discovered that we had unloaded two TONS of plaster, lath, wood, etc. That is a lot of junk...and it wasn't cheap either. This trip left us pretty burned out, so we put off the rest for when P's dad would come before Christmas. More to come...