a little bit to celebrate

As of today I can finally say the major construction (and dust) is behind us, and we're now able to start focusing on finishing rooms. We have lots and lots of painting left, and then I can start getting in and really decorating the rooms. I can happily say that our living room and kitchen are finally useable, and to celebrate, Charlie brought me home my favorite flowers. Here are two peeks of our living and kitchen:

Of course, I'll be posting full reveals as soon as they're ready!

project: kitchen

Another mini-update for this week - our kitchen! There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the kitchen when we purchased the house other than a few issues with lighting and the finishes weren't really our style. We're saving up for a total kitchen redo later down the road, so for now we have just made a few changes to make it more "us".

Here is a before shot:

Here it is in progress:

We've updated the lighting with new pendants and recessed LED's. The old lighting was so oddly placed and dim, I'm not quite sure how no one managed to change it in over 40 years! We've also upgraded all of our appliances to stainless steel (wall oven is being installed soon), and modified the cabinets for a new range hood. The cabinets were sanded down and painted Stonington Gray by Benjamin Moore and we replaced the backsplash with subway tiles in a herringbone pattern. 

I still hate that floor, but you don't notice it as much now that everything isn't all beige. We still need to finish tiling the backsplash, install our new island (you can see the layout of this taped on the floor), finish sanding and painting all of the doors and drawers, paint the walls, trim and ceiling white, and update cabinet hardware. 

Just in case you're wondering, our living and dining room are still a complete disaster! I'll be sharing the progress on these areas just as soon as I can get in there. We're now on week two of not having a laundry room, and I think I'm about to have to break down and visit a laundromat soon... say it isn't so!

UPDATE: You can check out our finished kitchen in this post, and see how we updated our cabinets in this post!

new floors!

A small reno update for this Friday morning - we have new carpeting in the bedrooms! The almost brand new carpet was put in by the previous owners, but it wasn't our style and no matter how I decorated our room, it just wasn't going to work. I knew exactly what I wanted, and thankfully I found it at Home Depot for an amazing price. We also used their installers and got lucky that they had a cancellation and were able to get us in a week earlier than expected.

You can ignore pretty much everything in the room except for the carpet and furniture. I will be completely redecorating (I'll have another post on this soon), but for now we have it set up so we have some sense of normalcy in the chaos of home renovation. We had been sleeping in the guest room and had two bedrooms worth of stuff along with everything from our kitchen and laundry room piled in our living room, so I just try to avoid the rest of the house as much as possible. We're slowly clearing it out as rooms start becoming complete, but we still have a bathtub in our dining room and a toilet and sliding glass door in our entry (ugh).

This is the beginning of Charlie's "man room". In case you missed it you can see my plan for it here.

Here is the before:

I hope you have a fantastic weekend. Don't forget to check out Better Homes and Gardens Pinterest board "Everything Summer" this Sunday from 10am - 10pm where I will be joining in on a pinning party with other bhg bloggers to share our favorite ideas for summer. See you then!