Our New Kitchen

Here are some images (okay a lot of pictures) of our kitchen transformation.

(this is mostly for my own documentation than anything else)

This was our old kitchen, the cabinets weren't too bad and there was plenty of storage, but with a table big enough for our family, it was pretty cramped and not ideal at all for meals with friends or family gatherings (this area has now be partitioned off to be a laundry room, 1/2 bathroom, and a mud room).
This was Alexa's old bedroom that is now our new kitchen. The window on the right is now the window above our kitchen sink. The wall on the left was knocked down to extend our house out.

This picture was taken from the back wall of Alexa's room that was knocked out. Her closet has now been transformed into a pantry (the ceiling fan has found a new home in my master bedroom).

The next pictures are during the destruction phase

The pictures below show the kitchen starting to take some shape

(The tape on the floor was us trying to figure out where to put cabinets and the island)

This is our new dining room with a large window and french doors that open to our backyard

The next pictures were almost painful to post because it was probably the most frustrating part of the whole house. Laying the flooring wasn't suppose to be difficult, but our floor wasn't level and it created many issues (we had to keep tearing up the floor and sanding some areas and cementing other areas to make it as level as possible). I think we had to take up the floor and redo it at least 6-7 times.

Just when I thought things were finally going smoothly, we had many rainstorms during the month of April and an area of our roof leaked into the kitchen (above our fridge), causing us to rip out the kitchen cabinet, tear up the ceiling, fix the roof, refix the ceiling, and rehang the cabinet. We still need to hang the molding but otherwise we are done with that project.
(Eric and Kenn tore up the ceiling, we hired someone to fix the roof, I fixed the hole in the ceiling, and Kenn and I rehung the cabinet).

This is the inside of our pantry (I built the shelves mostly by myself with a little help from Jacob and Kenn- the shelves are sturdy enough for us to climb them and lay on them if we wanted to).

(Here is Jacob building a shelf- it was his 1st time using power tools)


Here is our kitchen what it looks like today (it still needs molding around all the cabinets/floor, touch up paint on the walls and ceiling, new appliances, new bar stools (hopefully the kind that hang from the counters), new kitchen table and chairs, window fixtures, a new ceiling fan (the one we have now doesn't provide enough light for the dining room), and of course pictures and decorations). Enjoy!

Welcome to My World of Chaos

We're Back!! The last nine months of our lives have been ummm.... interesting. Moving completely out of our house, storing our all our belongings in a storage unit, living with Jolene's parents, experiencing 4 birthdays and numerous holidays in another person's home, carpooling our children back and forth between school and other activities, working overtime at our jobs (to help pay for this remodel), and working overtime (sometimes 18 hours a day) on our house, going WAY overbudget and taking longer than expected- we have finally moved back into our house (which is still quite a work in progress). Actually we have been in our house for about a month, but it's been too overwhelming and draining to even think about blogging about this whole experience.

Here are a few pictures of our house during this whole process (obviously this is not the whole house, and please remember nothing is finished yet).

This is the back of our house (before starting, during the construction, and the somewhat finished product). Once the inside of the house is finished, we will start to focus on redoing all the yard, landscaping, redoing the driveway/patio, and building a garage.


This is just the start of many more posts to come detailing our addition/remodel. Stay tuned.