Kitchen Makeover, Part 1
I started this post a few days ago, but of course I didn’t save it as I was working on it and the site died when I went to post it. I had forgotten some of the technical frustrations of blogging.
In late 2006/early 2007, I was finally through the first trimester and itching to work on a project. We had cabinets for the kitchen that we had purchased in the summer of 2005 that had been sitting in the basement for a long time. I was really ready to get those boxes out of the basement and get my little desk area installed. Here is the post where I talked about getting the desk installed in the basement. We had also agreed to host a leg of our annual neighborhood progressive New Year’s Party. We’ve been doing this since 2004, and it’s a lot of fun. We change houses every hour and spend two hours at the last house. You can do lots of variations, we’ve done different countries, different decades, I’ve even heard of doing different holidays and ending up with New Years at the last house. Anyway, it’s tons of fun, and since everyone hangs out in the kitchen when we have parties, I wanted to be ready!
When we moved in, I chose the light green color very rapidly at Home Depot when picking up a bunch of other things. Over the years, I determined that an aqua color would be much better with the white trim and buttercream cabinets (they have very subtle flecks of aqua in them). So, we knew that we wanted to repaint. We hadn’t done much to repair the plaster in here when we moved in (the entire house used to be paneling, and the POs ripped it down but lost interest in giving it a really nice final skim coat- in some places they didn’t even sand.). They also had installed wainscoting but had not finished it- nails were exposed, it stuck out over an inch from the wall, and the top was not cut evenly. We ripped that out, tore the plaster out behind it so that the wainscoting would sit flush with the rest of the wall, and removed and reinstalled the window trim over it. This also gave us an opportunity to insulate that wall (we have plaster on brick and very little insulation in the walls of the house). Here are a few pictures of the progress:
wall repair 
new trim 
in progress 
new desk area 
complete as of 2007 
Another big change that we made was to install roll out trays in all of our pantry cabinets. We ordered these from the same place that we got the cabinets for the basement, Just Cabinets. I cannot reccomend them highly enough- we were incredibly happy with the service and with the product, especially compared to ordering cabinets from Lowes! These have helped us stay relatively organized, even a year later- essential with a 9 month old in the house!
Another big change that we made was to install roll out trays in all of our pantry cabinets. We ordered these from the same place that we got the cabinets for the basement, Just Cabinets. I cannot reccomend them highly enough- we were incredibly happy with the service and with the product, especially compared to ordering cabinets from Lowes! These have helped us stay relatively organized, even a year later- essential with a 9 month old in the house!
cabinet organizers 
We had the paint matched at Benjamin Moore to a Weathered Glass paint chip that I had picked up, maybe from Waverly?, at Lowes. The curtains were obtained on sale from the JC Penney Catalog. Our cabinets are KraftMaid Briarwood Buttercream in birch in the older part of the kitchen and maple in the newer part of the kitchen (the birch was discontinued in 2005 in that pattern).
These photos get you up to January 2007. We have continued to make a few changes since then, which I will detail in the next post! Stay tuned!
Posted by Amanda @
5:53 pm |
Hey, it’s been so long I almost forgot my WordPress password
Hi everyone, I doubt that any of you even remember us, it’s been so long since we actually posted. A lot has happened since our marathon to finish the baby’s room before our son’s arrival. As of 6 am this morning, we actually pretty much FINISHED ALL OPEN PROJECTS. The reason that I stopped blogging is that in order to take care of our gorgeous little baby boy AND get the house done before he started walking, we had to make some hard choices. Blogging was fun, but taking extra pictures, editing them, and making the time to post in a house with no dedicated office was daunting and realistically nonessential to the renovation process. So, it has taken a long hiatus. We had the appraisal for our refinance this morning at 9 am, (and you’d better believe that I still had a paintbrush in my hand at 6 am) so I am going to spend the next few weeks of blissfully NOT working on the house to show you all of the gorgeous transformations that we have made. I’ve lurked a lot and kept up with most of you, and hopefully you have not all forgotten about us. More to come soon!
Posted by Amanda @
4:27 pm |
Shellac Attack
After we got all the trim and doors back for the baby’s room, I had a daunting task ahead of me for two reasons. I was a little worried about staining all of that old wood because I wasn’t sure how even the wood would stain. Second, we were going to shellac everything. We hadn’t used shellac before and I have a terrible record with polyurethane. The bubbles just never, ever, ever, ever, ever go away.
The staining went pretty good. We used the Benjamin Moore penetrating stain in the special walnut color. It came out really even. I will show some pictures later in the post. After the stain, it was time for the shellac. Since we had so much wood to do, all I could think about was shellac attack. That had me thinking of Shaque and a nice little coping trick.
Does anyone remember Shaque’s first Reebok commercial? I used to have a t-shirt that had the slogan from the campaign on it; “don’t fake the funk on a nasty dunk”. For some reason, my brother and I thought it was just a funny thing to say. If you don’t see what I am saying, the next time you have a tough home improvement job ahead of you just say to yourself quietly “Don’t fake the funk on a nasty dunk.” Everything will be all better. Trust me.
We used the Behlen Behkol amber flakes and their proprietary solvent. I can’t find a specific link for the product, but you can find it at any woodworking or wood supply store. Don’t even think about a box store because this is too complicated for them. We made a 2# cut for the trim. You can use denatured alcohol as a solvent, but I liked the Behlen solvent. The Behlen solvent doesn’t evaporate as fast as the straight ethanol and makes it much easier to work with.
The Behlen instructions recommend a thin coat of shellac, wait 24 hours, hit with 400 grit (wet), thin coat of shellac, wait 24 hours, hit with 400 grit (wet), final rub with their blue paste wax for a glossy sheen. We modified the procedure a little bit.
We used 0000 grit steel wool to smooth out the stain on the wood. This really brought out the color of the grain. Next was a thin coat of shellac and let dry for about one hour. After one hour we started with the second coat. This gave us the glossy protective cover we were looking for, but the wood still looked old. We didn’t want to put a ton of shellac coats, get them super smooth, and wax the surface because we want the trim to still blend in with the house. A little older of a look.
Here is a picture of the wide boards all shiny and nice.
Here is a picture of the smaller pieces of trim.
Finally, I wanted to talk a little about the wood. Originally, we were under the impression that the trim was American Chestnut. No such luck for the nightmare. What we do have is quarter sawn douglas fir? Don’t feel bad for us though because the grain in this wood is beautiful, in our biased opinions. Here is a picture of it up close.
The grain is really wide and the soft wood in between the grain has a slightly reddish-golden hue. It is really cool and really ties the room together. The special walnut stain really brought the contrast to the surface. Also, we had to have a new window sill milled because one cracked. The new piece just doesn’t have the character of the old wood. I am really happy that we did this.The next post will have pictures of the baby’s room. We still have a few pieces to put up, so I want to get that all done before I put it on the blog.
Posted by Amanda @
11:57 pm |
What has two thumbs and loves sanding trim?
Aaron Forster
That’s right! Apparently, my technique is approved by warthogs with afros. You can see the trim in the background to the right.I have been spending the past week working on the trim. The trim was dipped by a
company we found in Hagerstown. Matt did a great job! If you are in the MD area, I suggest checking him out. Tell him we sent you. Only a few pieces had raised grain, but that was unavoidable. Here is a funny story.
Amanda’s Dad meticulously took down all the trim from the room for us while I was removing the wall. After getting it all organized and marked, I called Matt to see about bringing the trim up for pricing, etc. During my conversation with Matt, I learned that they will actually come to the house and strip and stain the trim on the wall. I am not sure how much more it would have cost, but given our upcoming baby deadline we will use the help in the future. I saw some really amazing before and after pictures.
I was able to get 1 door and all of the really long pieces sanded at night. I did have to get some help on the smaller pieces, just to speed things up. It is ready for stain and shellac, I am going to do that this week. You will have to wait for that update. I won’t go through the details because it is pretty straight forward and I am sure most of you have gone through this process before. I used a combination of orbital vibrating sander and detail sander. We used a “stainable” wood filler that ultimately didn’t STAIN!!! We did test it and thought it wouldn’t be so bad, but when everything was said and done we were disappointed. I will get into that later. One of the big problems was that our house was a rental for about 30 years and it took its toll on the interior. We just had to do so much filling, but overall the wood was in pretty good shape and it wasn’t worth replacing. Plus the grain looks really cool and I don’t think you can find those patterns in new wood at a reasonable cost.
I digress. We did progressive sanding 80, 150, 220 grit. I contemplated doing the 220 by hand, but the time required to do all of the trim was just too much. The vibrating sanders did a good job and there were only one or two places with the little curly Q scratch you can get with these sanders. You don’t notice them at all, so I think it worked out pretty well. There really isn’t too much to show, but I will have more for the finishing post.
Posted by Amanda @
12:35 am |
Update and Baby’s Room
We apologize for not updating the blog in the past 6 months. As some of you may remember, our lives have been packed! The pregnancy is going well. Amanda has been doing a great job taking care of herself and the baby. In addition, she is still working, going to school, and helping around the house when she can. You can imagine that finding time for the blog has been difficult. I decided to try and start updating it for her. Unfortunately, I can’t promise the fit and finish will be as good, but I will try. I am also planning to update about once a week.
We have not been sitting around for the past six months though. The baby’s room has been the focus of our attention. The closets in our house are were disgustingly small. I guess that is because in 1915 people were less than 13 inches wide, only had one pair of clothes, or thought closets were a good way to use up the extra door. In the house the middle bedroom and baby’s room share two walls. The closets for each of these rooms were contained in the space between these two walls. In addition, the previous owner thought it would be good to run a 13″ diameter HVAC supply and return through the middle of the baby’s room closet. As you can imagine, there really wasn’t much room for us to use. We debated for a long time about what to do, until Amanda’s Dad suggested we move the baby’s room wall back 10 inches in order to widen both closets. I don’t know why we didn’t think about it before, maybe we were just too intimidated.
He came to visit and that is exactly what we did. Tearing out plaster sucks and there was a ton of dust. I do love the sawz-all. Amanda’s Dad was an expert at taking off the trim. The picture below shows the floor of the middle bedroom closet after we were done.
The dark section was our old closet floor, ~13 inches wide. The light section is where the old wall was and the little section past that is the baby’s room floor. All in all we moved the old wall into the baby’s room ~10 inches and we ended up with two wider closets. The middle bedroom is 55 inches by 25 inches and the baby’s room is 45 inches by 25 inches. Also, in the baby’s room we moved the door of the closet over to the right so that we could box in the mechanicals. It looks so much nicer. I can’t believe that it was so easy to do.
Here is a picture of the wall after we were done. Sorry about the ladder.
Here is another picture of the room.
We found someone to dip the trim and I am in the process of sanding it. I am sure that Jocelyn and Steve could sympathize. Probably one of the better connections we have found is on the doors. We found a guy that is hand stripping the wood doors for $150 a door. He does and great job and even breaks out the dental tool to remove paint from the crevices!! It is definitely worth it. I will try and get some pictures of the doors later this week.
We had our first big paint mistake on this room. It was a bear of a problem. We wanted to use a bright and fun color in the baby’s room. Something that would liven it up and we first thought a green similar to a granny smith apple would look good. While thinking about the color, Amanda found a great deal on some silk curtains from P*Barn. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a green paint that we were really happy with against the curtains. We decided to switch to a blue for the wall. (That is a baby hint for those of you wondering) It took us a while, but we finally decided on a color called honolulu blue. We thought it would look great in the room, it was light, bright, and not too feminine. Unfortunately, when we painted the room it was awful. It looked like a smurf had exploded. It really hurt your head. We were pretty upset and thought maybe the paint shop had messed up the color so we went out and got another color swatch. Wouldn’t you know that when we put it up against the wall, it was exactly right.
Our solution was to use the leftover blue from the kitchen update (another post, see we have been busy). This is a really nice blue-green that reminds of the caribbean seas you see in the pictures. The picture below is a contrast of the closet with the original smurf blue and the wall the blue-green. It really doesn’t do it justice.
Finally, I wanted to show what the middle bedroom closet looks like. Amanda picked a really cool Java Bean paint for the floor. It almost looks like the floor was stained really dark, very cool. Hopefully, we will be able to get the shelving up on Sunday. I will let you know if we get this far.
Posted by Amanda @
11:16 pm |
