Simple remodels.

I wish when we bought our house I would have documented some of the upgrades we did. I have some before and after pictures but no during the process pictures.  Our house is a 70’s style rambler. Fantastic bones to it, but still very 70’s looking. When I say orange plush carpet and you think back to That 70’s show… well the production designers for that show are even jealous of my carpet, ok!

 The kitchen was very dark and even had that indoor/outdoor carpet in it. I googled and searched Pinterest until I became slightly obsessed with how to update the kitchen. We just put down a hefty down payment so there was no way we could afford a kitchen remodel. Again the bones were good; the décor was just… awkward. Thankfully I found a cheap and easy way to redo the kitchen cabinets.  Do I remember the exact directions to do so… nope, but really it was just removing the cabinet doors, cleaning them with a degreaser, priming them, and then painting. We threw on some pretty knobs handles and it is a brand new kitchen! Here is the before:

 

Sorry for the distance in the picture, I was trying to capture the whole thing, but you can see how dark it is right?

And the after:

 

Much brighter! I believe the name of the paint we used was Country Classic, from Home Depot.

            Next was the flooring in the kitchen, it had to go… pronto! Thankfully some good friends of our had a couple boxes of flooring left over from when they bought their house, so we got that super cheap! The husband and one of his friends started at 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday, ripped up all of the carpet,

 and started laying down the new laminate flooring.

 They had the whole thing done by 3:00 that afternoon.

 It isn’t a lot of square footage to cover, but there were a butt load (I’m pretty sure it has been awhile since I last referenced the butt or things that the butt does so I needed to hit my quota) of cuts to make. It came out really nice! Unfortunately for my husband I am now expecting that great handiwork on the rest of the house! Bye-bye orange squishy carpet! You saw a bit of it in the before kitchen photo… yeah it is a beut!

            The other room of the house that needed immediate attention was the main bathroom. You can tell the previous owner tried to update it from 70’s to the 80’s… bless their hearts. There was calla lily wall paper and matching calla lily boarder and a black tub to help match, gold accents and that horrible awful dark wood!

 I prayed that the wallpaper would come down easily because I didn’t want to paint over it and it look junky. Thankfully it was put up in the early to mid-80’s… you know way before I was born *wink wink*… and it came down really easy. We decided on the same color that we painted the cabinets on the kitchen on most of the walls and an accent of blue on one wall.

 

 Because of the dark brown décor accents that we had bought the dark brown “awful” cabinets didn’t seem too bad. The wonderful and surprising gem in this house happened to be the fantastic original light fixtures throughout. Before even seeing the bathroom and it’s fixtures we had picked out brand new bathroom décor. When we moved in and saw that it went perfectly with it I’m pretty sure I heard a chorus of “ahhh ahhh ahhhhhhh” from angels! Hey it happens!

            Some of the other upgrades happen to be things we owned that I updated because if you have a big new house, you want to showcase your super cool stuff right?!?!?! Unfortunately that will be for another day because I am currently re-doing something fun and will include those other goodies on that tutorial!

Oh and P.S… if you happen to be in the area and don’t believe me about the fantastic 70’s squishy carpet, stop in and I will let you marvel at its wonder!

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