Four Years Later

It was four years ago this week that we purchased our first house.  We didn’t get the keys until Labor Day weekend, but the house became ours.  It’s crazy to think about it, and to see the ways it has changed and grown in that time.  I thought I might do a retrospective…sort of a before, in progress, and the current state of things post.  Our house is still by no means finished, but we are making progress.  We have the bathroom and bedroom updates planned for this fall, and hopefully we will get through them with little Liam in tow.  Liam’s room and the kitchen are the only real “afters” so I’ll do those today (the kitchen…I did Liam’s room pretty recently)….and then our room and the bathroom with the planned updates.  And Andy’s office will just be left out for now because it’s a disgusting pit and I try to avoid it at all costs :)

The kitchen when we moved in:

And now (you are of course ignoring the things on the counter and the dishes in the sink, thankssomuch):

It’s taken a lot of time and a lot of work to get the kitchen to where it is.  It’s not perfect, but it’s ours, and it suits us.  And I like looking at it and remembering each project. 

We painted the cabinets one weekend in January a few years ago.  I showed Andy a blog that had painted kitchen cabinets black, and we both liked the look, so we went to Lowes and bought the supplies and did that day.  We were priming and painting until 2AM, and we left a space heater running in our garage to help them dry out.

Two falls ago, we were at Lowes buying new carpet when we discovered a hardwood floor that we had never seen before.  It was a third the cost of the brand they usually carried, and we loved it.  I went to the bank the next day to transfer money from our account, and we bought it that night.  When it was delivered, it sat inside the back bedroom and the living room until Andy’s parents came down a week later to help us install it.  The tile was down so crazy hard—Andy and I spent hours one Friday night using the back end of our hammers trying to get the concrete board up, and it was not working.  The next day, Andy’s dad took one look at the floor and went to rent a jackhammer.  They spent all day Saturday helping us lay that floor, and Andy’s dad came back the next weekend to help finish.

We did the countertop and sink and the door this past fall.  The original door was an interior door that stuck really badly.  Andy accidentally put his shoulder through it one day trying to get it open (also—we had a similar problem on the back door and I put my shoulder through a glass window)…he replaced it with the door the hall closet that was 2 inches two short…and we lived that way for a disturbingly long time.  The day we put the countertop in, we had to go to Lowes…we had purchased a countertop before hoping to get it installed, but we didn’t…and it warped too badly to be used, so we had to go buy a new one…that was a lesson learned.  And the sink….I knew that I wanted the granite composite, but we didn’t measure the current sink before we went to buy it.  When we got there, Andy was sure ours was at least 8 inches deep, and we bought a 9 inch sink.  When we got home, I measured our original sink—it was 6 inches deep.  But I LOVE the BIG ONE.  And the faucet—one day we were walking through Lowes (this was probably almost three years ago) and I saw that faucet on clearance for really cheap.  So I convinced Andy we should buy it, realizing that we would use it at some point in the future…I held onto that faucet for nearly two years before it got installed.

And the IKEA cabinets—our kitchen is very lacking in storage space.  I made the decision about the IKEA cabinets shortly after we finished the counter in October…and finally made it to Cincinnati to buy the cabinets the end of February with my mom and dad.  Andy and my dad put them together, and you cannot even believe how happy I was that day :)