This Is Our Kitchen

So at my bridal shower, which was totally AMAZING!, I had a family friend, Fran, say, "What does your kitchen look like we've never seen any pictures!"

I've never put up the kitchen because we have no plans on fixing it up for a while since a kitchen is a super expensive project. We have to wait a little while, until we can get some money saved up. As of right now our kitchen is ugly, and obviously clearance rack cabinets. But thank God it's a functioning kitchen. Mostly.

So, here we go!  A tour of our kitchen! 

 This is our mudroom. This is the first room we usually walk into  when we get out of our cars on the drive way and enter on the side of our house. There's a tiny little broom closet to the front right of the picture.

 We still have original windows in most of the house including this room. Instead of leaded glass they're zinc glass. This room is usually in destruction mode from mail, news papers, laundry and all kinds of tools. We believe this used to be the butler pantry. 

 This is still in the mudroom. Opposite the windows and long counter top. 

We didn't have a fridge so we went to Nebraska Furniture Mart and scored our cool fridge from the knicks, dents and scratched part of the store. There's a few dents that are hard to find on it, and the $1000 discount made those dents quite alright. 

 This is looking into the mudroom from the opposite side, at the green wall, take a right and it will take you to the side door to the drive way.

 A little more of our mud room. Our cool fridge and then the door that is being propped open by our garbage can is a door out to our little back porch we have. 

 So now this is looking from the mudroom into the kitchen.

Our dishwasher only washes on "pots and pans" and the door where you put the soap in doesn't exist. 

Here is that door that goes out to our back porch. Behind the two pictures hanging up is actually a window!  They dry walled right over a window! You can go outside and see the window, they left the blinds down. We'll open that window back up when we re-do the kitchen. 

Our microwave looks like something caught on fire inside and usually  blows a fuse. 

Only one of the burners on the stove top works the other three sort of keep things warm.

 Psst, check out that BEAUTIFUL Fiestaware dutch oven! *swoon* 

(Thanks Aunt Nancy!)

More of our kitchen. One of the only new windows in the house. 

Our garbage disposal shakes the whole sink and counter when we turn it on. 

There are also some screws I think stuck in it. 

Our top oven takes forever to bake anything. 

The bottom oven is hit or miss. 

We have a zillion cabinets. 

That door goes down to our basement.

To the left the open doorway takes you to our eating nook.

Here's looking at the kitchen from the eating nook door way.

Here is looking into the eating nook from the kitchen doorway.

You're also looking into our dinning room.

We have a door somewhere in the house for the door way to shut off the kitchen from the dinning room.

'

The eating nook!

The mirror just has never made it's way up stairs. It was originally bought for a bathroom on the third floor but we have come to a halt on working on our third floor for a while.

To your right the door that looks all scary was actually covered up with two huge floor to ceiling cabinets and then next to those was a desk. We pulled them out so we could open the door. From the entry way you could see the door and it was shut but you couldn't use it because they had nailed it shut and covered it up with the cabinets. Not anymore!

So this was the wall where we took out the cabinets and the desk. Right above us I put my foot through the ceiling, when I found the old servant stair case, but then once I put my foot though I realized there were no more stairs and that was the kitchen table below me. We think this was sort of servant quarters over here at one point. I also wish the stairs were still there! I always wanted a house with stairs going to the kitchen!

Here's looking into the kitchen nook from the dinning room door way.

I have no idea what was really going on in this room once before the cabinet are really strange how they are placed and we have weird rust stains on the floor. Now it's just home for the kitties food!

Looking all the way into the kitchen from the dinning room

I don't understand why they couldn't have at least ordered oak colored cabinets. There is no blonde wood anywhere in the house, so why should the kitchen be blonde? Who knows. But I can't wait to redo the kitchen, get style appropriate cabinets and floors and appliances that work! 

Sometime soon! I can't complain much, mostly everything works, enough for us to live. Plus we're really lucky to even have as much kitchen space as we do. A lot of kitchens at this time were super small. 

Hope you enjoyed the tour and are half as excited as we are to someday revamp the place!

Crunch Time!

As of today, we have 37 days until the wedding!

Which equals the beginning of panic mode for me!!! About a week ago I thought I convinced myself that the wedding will be what it will be. It will be the best it can be and to quit caring so much. Yeah, one week later that feeling has been thrown out the window! Maybe it's just a mix of feelings and stress. Yesterday I was so tired and so dirty I didn't even want to shower I just wanted to fall on the bed and pass out. Rick eventually dragged my ass into the bathroom and started the shower for me and told me I had to shower. (Thanks Rick)

Right now, I am SO STOKED on the progress we're making on the house, but I'm also SO tired of being so dirty! Yesterday, I woke up with  blue paint on my arms from painting the library, then I spent the morning putting polyurethane on the floor of our entry way, then I went to work to get covered in sugar syrup, milk, coffee and God only knows what else, then I came home and mowed the lawn. Also,  I spend each night and morning blowing chunks of wood out of my nose, gross I know, maybe too-much-info, but it's the fact. Refinishing your floors leaves your house in complete and utter dust insanity.


Enough of my crying about being dirty check out what we've been up too! What's crazy is this is only a part of what we've been up too! We've been super busy!

So this has been the perceptual state of our house for the last month since we started working on the floors! Chaos! Moving furniture from one room to another as we finish floors in each room. 

Lesson learned: If you  need to re-do your floors do it before you move any of your junk into the house. 

 Hate dust? Get over it. 

Sanding floors equal dust bomb! 

It already takes me hours to dust the whole house on a normal need to dust kind of day. Now it's going to take me a few days. Then I'll have to go back again and again as the rest of it decides to settle!

This just tickles me! Because I LOVE our dinning room! We have a lot of work to do still! But if you're a creep and spy in our windows to see our dinning room, this is what you see!

    A KICK ASS built in china cabinet and vaulted ceilings!

We still need to... get a new era appropriate light, paint/fabric/wallpaper the walls, paint or metal tile the ceiling, get new window trimmings, get glass shelves for the cabinets, find a huge rug and break down and break our bank on buying a totally AMAZING arts and crafts style dinning room table that will sit TEN people! I pray to never have enough kids to fill that table, but the room is big enough for it so why not?  My dad is working on rebuilding one of the missing glass doors for the cabinet! I'm so excited he's even using quarter round cut white oak and zinc for the leaded part of the glass! 

 I think I posted this one already, if so, oh well here it is again! 

Our guest bedroom floors! 

Done. 

Here is a view from the second floor hallway looking down into our entry way as we're working on staining the floors. As of this morning we put our final coat of polyurethane on so we can start moving furniture back in!

For a first time, do-it-ourselves floor refinishing I must admit we did a pretty awesome job. The floors are pretty trashed from the get go and for us to have gotten them to where they are now, totally floors me. <-- har, har "floors me".  

Eventually I'll have a before and after sort of post for you to see why we're so proud!

This is what we use for the polyurethane for the top coat after staining. We just used classic Minwax stain before hand. I think we're on bucket 5 of this stuff. It doesn't smell too horrible, unlike the stain, Whoa!  It's easy clean up and easy apply, I'd recommend this Rust-oleum to anyone doing their own floors! I prefer to roll it on, Rick prefers to break his back bending over painting it on with a fat brush.

We got this bad boy!

We bought this whole bedroom set when we first moved in and thought we wanted our master bedroom on the third floor. Well it didn't fit so we returned it. Six months later we're at Nebraska Furniture Mart again looking for rugs. We stop by the knicks, dents and scratched part of the store and found the bed we wanted! Now that we moved our bedroom to the second floor, the bed fits! Plus because it was once a floor model we scored this bad boy for a quarter of the original cost!

Now that we have this fancy bed, we realized it was time to work on our master bedroom.

Not a great picture, but this is the before. This is what it looked like when we first moved in. That big beige rectangle is actually three closets that jet out to the middle of the room! There's two sinks and mirrors to the left and a door going to the bathroom. Plus look at how scary those floors are! 

(Click on the picture to go see the interactive panorama picture of the room.)

This is the corner of the master bedroom without the huge closet and sinks and torn up tiled floor. 

Here it is as of right now! We continued on the over hang that "hides" the HVAC tubes patched the walls and have primed them up. We painted the other side of the room but aren't thrilled with it. We're trying to figure out if maybe we need to do some chair rail, crown moulding, wood paneling or some other kind of space breaking up kind of fun thing. 

In other non-house news!!!

Wedding time is rapidly approaching!

I found this beaut on my front porch a few days ago!!! It was a beautiful Fiestaware platter and bowls! Thanks Ann and Mary! 

I LOVE THEM!

This saturday is my bridal shower in Papillion! I'm so excited!!!

Also, this little love muffin, Rambo seems to have figured out a way to escape AGAIN.

He has Helga's collar on with my phone number so hopefully someone will call me if they find him hanging out around their house. This is ridiculous. He's gotten a taste of the wild since his last escape and made it his mission to sneak out again. :( It breaks my heart, I get so worried about what he will encounter!

Come home Rambo. 

 Off to my wedding shower!