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Kitchen Inspiration

House, Inspiration By Lindsey April 26, 2016 No Comments

Last fall Josh and I tackled probably the biggest project yet – the kitchen. I’ve been dying to share the process and results with you since we started this blog. Before diving into the details, take a look at what we were working with:

Honestly, things could have been WAY worse. The prior homeowners updated the kitchen probably back in the early 2000’s which was a win/lose for us. The big win was that the cabinets were in pretty good shape, minus some burn marks from improperly installed lights, so we decided to reuse them (Yay, environment!) and paint them to our taste. We were also really happy with the can lighting and ceiling wallpaper, which sort of looks like those vintage ceiling tiles. Literally everything else had to go – beige leaf tiles, laminate flooring/countertops, peach paint…see yah later! The wall dividing the dining room and kitchen also made the space feel really cramped. Opening it up would allow us to wrap the countertop, providing more seating with a couple of bar stools. Thankfully another HUGE win for us was discovering the wall between the dining room and kitchen wasn’t load bearing (initially we thought it was).

As we started making plans for the kitchen, we knew whatever we’d do needed to fit our home. One underlying goal we’ve had all along is to stay true to our house’s history. As a craftsman style built in 1917, our house came with some pretty great features. For example, all of the windows in the living room have original leaded glass, our dining room has a beautiful built-in hutch and the main level has original maple flooring throughout. The way we use our house today differs greatly from a family back in the early 1900’s but we want to honor the work that went into this house. What does that mean exactly? Well for instance, we’ve decided not to paint our hutch. We also restored the maple flooring. And even though we’ve had some issues with our boiler and radiator heat, we really love the charm those big radiators have.

The Inspiration

A few years ago when Josh and I were out in LA visiting his brother Sam, we fell in love with the tile at Intelligentsia Coffee Shop. I instantly wanted to use the same tile in our kitchen, and after a little digging, I found that the manufacturer was Granada Tile. Here’s the original inspiration from Intelligentsia in LA:

With that in mind, I made a SUPER quick before & after mock-up to visualize the tiles and color palette.

If you check out the Granada site, make sure to play around with their custom tile tool. It gives you a live preview of the pattern as you select colors. Pretty neat!

Unfortunately, the concrete tile turned out to be too thick to allow for a smooth transition from hardwood to tile. Plus we wanted to put in a heated floor, which added another layer of complexity. These concrete beauties ended up not being the right ones for this kitchen job, but we’re hoping they’ll find a home somewhere in our house in the future.

Once I convinced myself life could still go on without those tiles, I pulled together some inspiration and we plowed ahead. In addition to finding the right flooring, another high priority on our list was Carrara marble countertops. And our passion for marble grew stronger and stronger as literally EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. told us not to get them. But one thing you should know about Josh and I is that we’re neat freaks. The kind of neat freaks that hang out on a Friday night to reorganize the tupperware cabinet or label our tool bins. So, we were totally up for the challenge of babying our light, porous, and precious countertops.

As you can see from the inspiration board, we really wanted a timeless, vintage kitchen — something that felt era appropriate but still had a clean, modern feel. To ground the room we chose to do dark lowers and white uppers. And as stated earlier, marble was in the plan all along. Subway tile was also kind of a no-brainer for budget reasons, and with this being our first time laying tile, we wanted to lay something simple that wouldn’t leave us pulling our hair out. So really, the only undecided detail was the floors. Untillllll we found this kitchen. We loved these floors so much we decided to use the same hex pattern, but we wanted to center it between our cabinets and act like a decorative runner. Early on we found knobs and pulls from Restoration Hardware that we just couldn’t resist. These pulls are legit and totally worth the investment. So much so that the knobs might actually weigh more than the cabinet door (which is a strange feeling). To break up the black and white we decided natural wooden accents like a fruit bowl or utensil holder would do the trick.

Okay, so I promise within the next few posts we’ll reveal the final result. But, we have some interesting challenges and mistakes we think you’ll enjoy hearing about first, so stay tuned. Josh is gonna talk next about the process and a couple of the mistakes we made, including setting all the final cabinets in place, only to learn we had an illegal plumbing set up that required us to take some of them back out and knock open a wall again. Fun times, and lesson learned: Always call the plumber FIRST.

Additional photo sources: 1 | 2 | 3

Bedroom Refresh

House By Lindsey April 12, 2016 2 Comments

After ripping up carpet on the main level, hauling out the fountain in the backyard, swapping out doors with new locks, replacing a leaky toilet with a new wax seal and installing all new appliances, Josh and I finally decided to actually settle into our new home. But the dust never really fully settled for the following 6-8 months. One of the first (and probably most important) rooms we decided to tackle was the bedroom. We figured it was the one room we could find to rest our heads after the long nights and weekends of work we had ahead of us. And thankfully, the bedroom was mostly cosmetic fixes.

The first thing we started with was removing wallpaper. A lot of people complain about this part, and yah it’s kind of a bitch, but in the grand scheme of things, the right products and tools can make all the difference! We used a wallpaper remover and a scraping knife and some other random drywall knives. The previous home owners had a real love for textured wallpaper which in some instances (like on our kitchen ceiling) is pretty rad, but the bedroom paper just had to go. The following weekend we sanded down the pine woodwork, removed window sashes (also sanded) took off doors, patched holes and gouges with drywall mud and gave everything a final prep for some fresh paint.

One of the bigger challenges we faced with this project was finding the right primer for the trim which Josh will talk more about in a follow-up post. We decided to spray the trim with a sprayer we borrowed from Josh’s boss. Spraying was kind of a no brainer for us since Josh has the experience and I really love the crisp finish sprayed paint can achieve. The room already had a chair rail, so we decided to roll with it and paint the walls with two colors. Olympus White by Sherwin Williams on the top and Naval also by Sherwin Williams on the bottom. We don’t get a ton of light in our bedroom which is why Naval practically looks like black (which was the intention).

Things I’d do differently next time:

1. Pick a different primer. (we’re currently experiencing some bleed through).

2. I would also be WAY more careful when handling window sashes. Unfortunately, I leaned all the sashes against our fence on a really windy day and the wind knocked a sash over and it shattered (not something you want to spend an extra $300.00 on amidst a budgeted project).

But overall, we’re really happy with the results. Following our quick 3 day bedroom makeover, we made a trip to IKEA and completely reorganized our closet shelving unit which we’ll chat about down the road. Stay tuned for a follow-up post where Josh talks all things paint.

Move In Weekend

House, Outdoor By Lindsey March 28, 2016 No Comments

Thanks for the help with the hostas, Donna (Lindsey’s mom)!

We left off here when we wearily walked through the door of our new house after the exhausting process of buying a foreclosure. Exhausting, yet rewarding nonetheless. We mentioned a few of our first impressions of the place here, and now it’s time to talk about how silly and crazy our goals really were for that first weekend. First, remember we had all of our possessions sitting either in a truck owned by my work (which had to be used the next day) or in the garage of our previous apartment. Lindsey’s parents were around and willing/eager to help, but that was only four of us, and considering this list below, you’re totally forgiven if you laugh your ass off at what we thought we could get done…

Move In Weekend Goals:

Remove carpet from bedroom, make it a livable space
Remove carpet from living room, ditto above
Clean up the back yard, overgrown with 7-foot weeds in some places
Get new appliances installed (Fridge, stove, washer/dryer)
Remove upper kitchen cabinets
Remove kitchen tile backsplash
Paint upper kitchen cabinets in the garage
Reinstall cabinets 6 or 9″ lower, as they were initially installed with giants in mind (Lindsey is 5′ 2″)
Move ALL OF OUR STUFF in, and find a place to put it that didn’t interfere with any of the aforementioned
Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace cover to cover

Ok, so #10 is obviously a joke, but still. Cute idea with the kitchen cabinets and backsplash, right? As you’ll see later on, the cabinets alone took us four or five days when we finally got around to that project, so silly us. But can you blame us for wanting to take care of that? Those things are sooooo high up, like a full 30″ or more above the countertop.

Anyway, just about all the rest of the stuff on the list we managed to accomplish. The yard ended up being a crazy amount of work – weeds tend to reign supreme after a year of not being tended at all. Our neighbors have some vines on their fence that had slowly crept across the lot, grown into cracks in the cement, and worked their way into the walk-out exit of our basement. All told, that weekend we ended up filling 58 30-gallon lawn bags from Home Depot. NBD. Also, a friggin’ fountain in the back yard? In Minnesota? Nope. We tore that mosquito breeding ground out as fast as possible, and we were delighted to find a giant wasp nest underneath. We were glad it was only 35 degrees outside and the things were…hibernating? Do wasps do that? Whatever. Bye fountain!

Back inside, the carpet came up easily enough, although the living room pad was held down with double-sided adhesive strips, as opposed to staples (BOO!). Head lamp scraping/sanding took up plenty of time in the next week, and we eventually gave up and left the rest of the tape to come off down the road with a big drum sander when we refinished the floors. 🙂 And in the bedroom, even though our West Elm bedding from the previous post is greatly preferred, we at least got the bedroom to a spot where it’d be livable for the near term while all the rest of the dust settled!

Handmade artwork in the bedroom

Art & Design, DIY By Lindsey March 27, 2016 No Comments

Check out my first handmade weaving! I found a diy template over at A Beautiful Mess a few years back. My shoddy homemade cardboard loom was pretty much an epic fail but overall I’m pretty pleased with the results and I definitely learned a lot for next time.

After we painted and patched the bedroom walls and trim, it was time for some new artwork (don’t worry we’ll fill you in on that process in a future post). We’re still in the process of getting everything in place but wanted to share a work in progress. We love our new bedding from West Elm too!

Lip art by: Mattea Whetstone

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