House Renovations

So, after much back and forth about what to do with our kitchen now that DH has pulled out the wall, I think we have finally come to a decision about counters, cabinets, floors and backsplashes! :) Since we don't want to spent a ton of money on cabinets, we are just going to go with cheap IKEA cabinets, but I think by the time we're done with everything, the kitchen is going to look pretty sweet! :)

One thing that IKEA has is an online software, where you can plan out your kitchen and even get pricing assuming you use their products. This is what DH and I came up with for the layout of our kitchen:

If you look along the right side of the picture, it is pretty much set up the same way our kitchen was set up before. On the left, our old kitchen only had the fridge, and no counters or cupboards at all on that side. It was left all open for a dinette, but in all honesty,the living room is right next to this room, and the house is pretty small... a dinette is not really needed. So, we're going to finish the kitchen the way we feel it should have been finished, by adding in the counters/cupboards on this side. It will give us A LOT more working space, because before, our only working space was the 2 foot counter between the stove and the sink. Ugh!

This next image is the right side of the kitchen. Using my mad photoshop skills, I started to play around with this side of the kitchen a bit, putting in some appliances and stuff, all in all, I think it's going to look pretty good. We're still deciding on backsplash tiles and stuff, but we have an idea, and if I can find a picture of what we're thinking, I'm going to put it in at the end of this post.

Kitchen - Right side:

And here's the left side of the kitchen, with all the new counters filling in where the dinette used to be. Annnnnd... A LOT more working counter space!!! :)

Kitchen - Left

Okay, so that's the layout. Now, here's the fun part, here's what we're thinking in terms of style. :) I love this part, since I get to be creative, and DH leaves it all to me. Man, I love him!

Floors:

Okay, so for the floors, when DH and I first moved in, we'd already bought a vinyl tile because it was on sale. It was to originally go with the color scheme of our old kitchen, which was this (actual pic of our kitchen before we moved in):

Not a bad kitchen, but too small, and outdated. See there, between the stove and the sink? That is ALL the working space we have!! The other side of the kitchen is just the fridge and one 10 inch little useless counter.

This is the vinyl tile that we bought to go with the old kitchen (or very similar):

We thought about putting new floors in to the new kitchen and maybe using this tile for something else, but the cost of putting in a new floor put us off, especially when we have this tile, brand new, that we haven't used yet. (We bought the stuff and never put it in..)

We were trying to decide between doing a black kitchen (with black cabinets, dark countertop), but after some back and forth, we decided that in terms of resale value of our house, if we put in a black kitchen, a lot of buyers may not like a black kitchen, so we decided to keep it simple, and go with plain white cabinets, with a grey-ish countertop, and we ended up finding an awesome backsplash to merge these two colours together (where you would think they don't go). Grey with beige? Who knew.

And what do I mean by backsplash? See pic below:

What we're going to put in that area is this mosaic tile:

We had other ideas for mosaic tile in mind, but they all would have required us to change the colour of the floor, and since a new floor would have put us over our budget, we needed to find something that would tie in the grays we love with the beige tiles we already had. This mosaic has both, and though it may not be much to look at there, I assure you, with the right grout, it is fantastic!!! We found this one completely by accident, and couldn't have been more thrilled about it!!

So, if you can picture it, our kitchen will have the beige floors, white cabinets/cupboards, greyish countertop, and this awesome mosaic tile as the backsplash!!

Eventually, we will also have all black appliances. But we'll have to save up for that. :)

So for now, that's where we're at with the kitchen. We just have to finish up some mudding and put on a fresh coat of paint, and we'll be ready to order the cabinets and other stuff to get the kitchen done!! It's the only room in the house that we ever really had problems with, so I can't truly express how excited I will be when it's finished.

Before we finish the kitchen though, we are so close to laying down our new floors!! We are putting in a laminate all throughout the house. It's a nice dark 13mm laminate floor in "Volcanic Ash" colour. It's a dark brown/black floor. :) In case you were curious as to what we had as flooring before, here is a pic:

Ugh, the cheapest homebuilder el cheapo carpeting ever. It is EVERYWHERE in our house, and we're taking it all out. It may not look bad in this pic (because this pic is before we moved in), but I'll tell you that 3 years of dogs and cats have not been kind to this carpet. I can't wait until the new floors are in!!!!

Our house is going to look awesome by the time we're done with it. We're doing the renos because we don't want to move right away, so we're making the house more our style in the meantime. We see ourselves living here another five years, but who knows, we may end up loving it so much, we may never want to leave. It's not a big house, it's only 1300 sq. ft., but it has 3 big bedrooms and 1.5 baths, and if things don't work out baby-wise for us, then why move? :)