Kitchen Dreamin'

Our house suffers from one of the most common ailments of old houses. The kitchen sucks - it was probably last renovated in the 70s. And we, as owners of an old house that has other immediate needs, suffer from another common ailment. Lack of time and money to do all the grand things we have planned for the kitchen - YET. The upside of this is that we have time to use the kitchen and really think about what we'll change when we do get around to the full reno. I'll have to post pics of our kitchen later but I have some pics of the stuff we would like to see.
1. Tear out the wall that divides the kitchen and breakfast nook. This will make our kitchen much bigger. Although still not big by any means. If I had to conservatively guess the dimensions of our kitchen, I'd say, with the wall demo, it will be 11' wide by 22' long. I think. See - small.
2. Cabinets and Counters - really want white cabinets and soapstone counter tops. The picture is my dream kitchen, kind-of. LOVE those cabinets. And the built-ins along the back wall with the storage cabinets under them is something I'd like to see along our back wall. And I love the beadboard. Not sure if those counters are soaptstone but I'd guess no. That's the general look though. They'll be dark like that.

(I'd like to credit where I found this picture from but I have no idea. I found it on the web somewhere last fall.) 3. Appliances - we'll go with either stainless or black. Probably stainless.
4. Tiled backsplash behind the stove ~ love this:

This tile is from Trikeenan Tile Works. We saw it on an episode of This Old House. I just love the randomness of the design and the colors will pull in all the colors of our house.
5. The latest idea I've come up with is a library ladder to reach those shelves in the picture above, along the back wall where the built-ins might be. Not sure if it would work but it would be fun.
6. Floors - thinking maybe cork or some kind of a tile.
Well, that's about it. For now. I'll post some pics of our kitchen as it is now at some point.

Window Shades

Yeahhhhh! Just ordered the shades for the living and dining rooms. It is a flat roman shade. We're going to do the inside mount. The color is more of a light cream but other than that looks similar to the shade shown in the picture. So excited.
Hopefully we'll be getting the bedroom shades sometime this year. We're going to get 2 inch wood blinds for those rooms - but really want to do some more comparison shopping before we commit.
 

Long time, no blog

Well, it's been over a month since my last post. Mostly because not that much has been going on house wise. (Why do we even have a home improvement blog, anyway?) Things have been getting back on track lately, though. This weekend we're finally ordering our blinds for the living and dining rooms. I can't wait to get rid of the nasty sheer curtains the PO's left behind. So in preparation for hanging those and getting the floors refinished (which is hopefully happening in about 6 weeks or so) we've been working on the walls again pretty frequently. Chad is filling the holes left in the exterior walls. We have several approximately one inch diameter holes in the exterior walls of the house from the insulation we had foamed in over last summer. So he fills them with plaster compound stuff and then sands them down. He has started with the built-ins in the living room so we can finally get all of our books, CD's, and DVD's back into the bookcases! yeah!!! (A special thanks goes out to all of our guests that stayed in the guest room and listened to my apologies as they made their way through piles of books and DVD's to the guest bed!) And I have been taking more wall paper and the nasty glue left behind off the walls. good times. So now I'm only left with about five walls to scrape glue off of now. That's pretty good! Between work and school and occasionally having a life it's been hard for us to get down to serious work on these walls. Hopefully by the time we hit the two year mark (in May) we'll actually have the walls painted and all of our pictures and stuff on the walls! (I really considered deleting that last line from the blog because it makes us sound so pathetic and lazy. But whatever. Sometimes life gets in the way of the house. Unfortunately.)