The Demolition: er, Remodel...Making it Ours

This post was going to to wait until after I returned to Michigan and took some more photos of the work Matt has done while we are gone....but, due to illness (Matt) and an exorbitant amount of "regular", paying work (Matt) and some impatient friends; I am going to post what has happened up to this point.

KITCHEN:

Here you see the kitchen as it was in November, just after our offer had been accepted. Notice the large center island and cabinets suspended from the ceiling. When I stood at the kitchen sink  and looked to the bar area, all I saw was cabinets. Matt and I dreamed of removing them and talked about recruiting my Dad this summer to help. Once we'd closed our good friend Dave offered to help paint the house. He came by to have a look at the house and get a good idea about work load and prep work, etc. He talked us into jumping in full boar and doing basically everything we want to do now, while the house is empty.

Thus we began removing the cabinets. The cabinets were installed in 1960, as we learned from an order slip taped to the top

of them, by the Amish. The Amish apparently make up for lack of power tools by using extra strong nuts and bolts and screws! It took us the better part of a day to remove the cabinets! Of course we had a dog and kids running around, but nonetheless it was a job. We removed the cabinets one at a time and then removed the framing.  Once the cabinets were out the amount of light in the work areas of the kitchen greatly increased and I didn't

feel like I would be cooking in a cave! We will repaint the walls and eventually (way down the road), we'll redo the floors and have the cabinets refinished. For now though, it will be the nicest kitchen I have ever owned!

DINING ROOM:

This is the wallpaper that was on the walls

in the dining room. It is actually quite pretty and I have thought 

many times that my mother would have liked it. The striped paper 

was on the lower half and the flower print on the upper half as you can see in the full room shot. Again, we weren't going to remove the paper originally because it still looked ok and I thought the removal would be horrific. However, the paper pulled off very easily and in a matter of 10 minutes it was completely removed!

Now there is a lot of prep work to be done if we want to paint it. I am not convinced that I want to. I think we'll explore some wall paper for the upper half and paint on the lower half, though you never know what will happen once the creative process begins.

Other than removing nails and spakling holes, we haven't done much. The whole house painting is planned for the 23rd and before then we have a lot to do!!! After that we have a lot to do!!! I am just feeling very thankful that it is winter and we can focus on the inside of the house before things start growing and need attention outside of the house...