My dear parents came out this past weekend to visit us… aka: to be put to work on the house. I was psyched to have my mom teach me how to wallpaper, as she’s kind of the expert on that. Think loud floral wallpaper popular in the 90s – yeah, she rocked that hard. Matt was also excited to have someone just as perfectionistic and detail oriented as himself, my dad, to help him measure and level the cabinets over and over again until they were just right.
Well, they were mostly right. We’re bumping into a few more errors thanks to IKEA, so we will wait a bit longer than we had hoped to finish up the cabinets. But we were very pleased with all that got accomplished this weekend. Enough jabbering, here are some photos of the work we accomplished this weekend, the guys hanging cabinets, and the girls hanging wallpaper. Also, HOW CUTE is the yellow bird wallpaper? Thanks, Caitlin, for the tip-off!
Also, a HUGE THANK YOU to my parents for all their help this weekend. Eight hands made lighter work, for sure.
This room off the kitchen used to house more kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator. We’re going to turn it into the laundry room. We started by laying liner paper which was a PAIN IN THE BUTT. But we were papering directly on plywood, so felt it would make a smooth surface. The next day we started papering the birds, after realizing we wouldn’t have enough to go around the whole room. So wainscoting will go 2/3 of the way up the wall, and will be painted gray with a white chair rail. I’ll also be adding wainscoting to the ceiling and painting it white. The area on the wall that we wallpapered around will have the hanging cabinets that the previous owners had up. I’m just going to paint them white. Then underneath the cabinets will be the washer and dryer. I think it will be nifty when it’s done, though it may take a while. But that’s fine, cause Matt needs time to grow to love the birdcage wallpaper!
We also got the chance to assemble our new table and chairs for the breakfast nook. We only got two chairs, because the table will slide into a corner where Matt is going to build us a built-in bench for more seating and under-seat storage.
I told you a while ago that we found original wood floors in the kitchen under 4 layers of linoleum and a layer of plywood. I believe I also told you how backbreakingly difficult it was pulling up that old floor. And then there was a layer of sticky black asbestos that had to be removed.
We opted to sand that sticky black stuff straight off. I believe I told you that we were going to hire somebody to come and refinish the floors in here. Well, we realized we’d have one wood floor in the house that looked awesome, and all the other wood floors walkin around looking pretty beat up. So we decided to be brazen and paint the wood floors! GASP!
I’ve seen this all over the place in magazines throughout the years, and I love how it looks, but would never have the guts to do it unless I had some pretty beat up floors. Which I have! We’re going to paint the floors charcoal grey with an oil-based paint and then throw some polyurethane on top for good measure. Then, if we should ever get the hankering to refinish all of the floors in the whole house, we could strip the paint, sand them a bit more and they’d be ready to go.
So yesterday we sanded. Actually, I sanded while Matt played plumber and fixed a number of other things in the house. After four hours I got it down to a level that will be paintable, and got up all of that sticky black linoleum! We’ll wait a few weeks until we’ve installed cabinets and countertops before painting the floors, but they will be MUCH easier to keep clean in the meantime. As you can see in the last picture, we have a place that needs to be filled where the wall we knocked down stood. Matt’s going to salvage some wood that would have been under the stove to fill in that hole.
Call up the Grim Reaper, and inform him that now that I have experienced the agony of drywalling a room from start to finish, I do not wish to ever live through said experience ever again.
At first I thought it was fun. I just got to stand there and hold things in place. On occasion, I’d drill a screw into a stud. Sometimes I’d even put up some spackle and smoosh it around.
And then the sanding began. Days upon days of sanding. And more spackle. And then more sanding. And drywall dust in my hair, in my ears, up my nose, in my contacts and in my unmentionables. And then I carried a box upstairs only to realize there was drywall dust ALL OVER EVERYTHING UPSTAIRS. Where no drywall had even set foot.
Now I am in the process of trying to remove the drywall dust from the floor and the ceiling and the WHOLE ENTIRE HOUSE. Two words: Fruitless Effort. The ShopVac no longer sucks anything up, my upright vacuum will most likely need to be replaced, and there is still a FILM of drywall dust on everything.
While I have some mixed feelings about the quality for the price of some IKEA furnishings, our last apartment had a kitchen outfitted with their cabinetry, and I was surprisingly pleased with the quality. Sure, they’re not custom cabinets made my the Amish (rock on!), but they hold up well under normal wear and tear. I also think they leave a lot of options for changing styles – future owners of our home would be able to simply replace the doors with ones they prefer, instead of ripping out all of the cabinets.
We looked at Home Depot and Lowes, primarily at the assembled, ready-to-install cabinets, but none of them had the selection and sizes that IKEA carried. By choosing cabinets by the Swedish masterminds, we were really able to maximize our space – a necessity in our small kitchen.
But the biggest selling point was the price. The average cost of cabinets for a kitchen of our size is between five to six thousand dollars. We wound up paying about half of that for our cabinets. There is a great deal of assembly that is required, but so far that has been pretty fun. And you get to mock the bad drawings in the cryptic instructions while you’re in the process of constructing, what feel like individual caskets for very small children. Bonus!
We will need to return a few pieces that we realized were the wrong size – our error, not IKEAS. Although they did make one error with our large corner cabinet and sent it home with us in the wrong color. Luckily, we can use a local service, ModernNash, to return the cabinets and exchange them for us.
Wow, it’s been days, hasn’t it? Well the Dell guy came yesterday to fix my computer so I can now fill you in on all the boring minutia of two lives ensconced in a kitchen renovation with moving day quickly approaching.
About half a year ago, Berlin knocked my laptop off the coffee table while it was plugged into the outlet. This did no damage to the computer except for bending the cord connection making it difficult to charge the battery. For about six months, we had to have the power cord plugged in just right, or we’d run out of juice. As you can imagine, this got old pretty quickly, and on Sunday all of our efforts failed and the computer battery died without us being able to recharge it.
The next part of the story involves my fourty minute phone conversation with the Dell support technician in New Delhi. Yes. It went about as smoothly as you can imagine. Someone has taught these usually nice Indian folks how to upsell… and HARD. He wouldn’t let me schedule the computer repair until he had gone through all of the many ways for me to upgrade my warranty… which I didn’t buy.
And then Jack showed up yesterday, Jack the funny and quirky Dell technician, and an hour later he had swapped out my motherboard for free. I am now sold on the powers of warranties.
To be honest, I rather enjoyed the few days where I was incommunicado to the world. But I know you’re waiting with baited breath to see pictures of the house, so I’ll switch out my camera lens, head over there, and snap some just for you. Besides, I have to get the dog out of the apartment for the repairman who is coming by to fix our garbage disposal which ate a shot glass yesterday. Yes, a shot glass. I am reveling in the fact that my landlord has to fix this one instead of me. Those days are numbered.
There are some days that will just make you believe in God. Yesterday was one of those days.
We had planned to drive down to the IKEA in Atlanta to pick up our kitchen cabinets. The drive is four hours one way, and at the last minute we decided to cancel our cargo van rental reservation in hopes that we could fit all of the flat packed boxes in the back of my Volvo wagon. We were skeptical they would have all of our items in stock, and figured some pieces would have to be ordered, so it seemed like we might be able to fit most of our packages in the car.
Well… SCORE! Beautiful weather, all of our items in stock, and with Matt’s packing genius they all fit into the car. Except one huge piece which we tied to the top of the wagon (he always enjoys an opportunity to use his rock-climbing knots for non-rock-climbing good). I wish you could have seen us packed like sardines into a low riding wagon with a huge box strapped to the roof of the car driving north from Atlanta to Nashville with Massachusetts plates. WE ARE THOSE PEOPLE! THE PEOPLE WITH NO PRIDE!
We also got a fun opportunity to meet up with one of my high school classmates who works at the IKEA in Atlanta. Two girls from New Hampshire meeting up in Georgia. What a small world. Or big world?
The drive home was loooooong to say the least. We hit construction and rush hour traffic which slowed us down. At one point while I was driving after dark we noticed an obstacle in the middle of the road. It was hard to make out but looked low enough to the ground for me to drive over. Until Matt shouted out “IT’S A CONE! IT’S A CONE!” And I swerved to miss it. About an hour later, a tiny little baby deer ran out right in front of me, and I was able to honk my horn and slam on the breaks to avoid hitting it. Had I been going any faster than the 55 mph speed limit we imposed on our box-laden vehicle, I might have hit the little tike.
All in all, the day could have really really sucked. But it was the opposite of suck. And I’ll take some pictures of our box-filled living room when I go over to start assembling cabinets today. We are getting closer!!!
Hey, I'm Priscilla, a New England native who has oddly enough found herself in the South. I'm married to Matt, and together we have a dog, Berlin, a cat, Mojo, and perfect baby girl named Penny. We are Nashvillians by convenience, lovers of good music by design, house renovators by accident, and non-hipster foodies by necessity. Take a stroll around and introduce yourself!
