We finished our kitchen renovation a few weeks ago and I’m finally ready to share an update and pictures. If you’d like to see the process, here’s a link to part one of our kitchen renovation and part two of our kitchen renovation. To finish up this stage of our renovation, we needed to:
Build and install open shelves to replace the bank of upper cabinets that were removed
Build and install shelves to replace an unused desk area directly behind the sink
Paint the ceiling…this little job was made necessary by an overzealous bottle of kombucha that exploded all over my kitchen.
Paint the wall behind the open shelves
I’m happy to report that we got every bit of this done and we are loving the result! Here’s the before:
And some after shots:
Overall, we’ve been so pleased with how our renovation turned out. I’m enjoying our quartz counters from Traders Market. They were very reasonably priced and are holding up well. The open shelves make me smile on the daily because I love seeing all my china on display. I also love the lower open shelving. That little space is a power house of storage. One basket holds bread, one basket holds crackers and chips, one basket holds onions and potatoes and one basket holds lunch box snacks. I love the convenience of having each one of those things close by when I’m cooking.
It’s worth noting that my man is a beast who gets it done. He spent hours upon hours working in the kitchen to make my plans come to fruition and I’m so thankful. He even wore a mask before the coronavirus hit! Isn’t he the trend-setter??? It’s been so nice to hear feedback from you all about our kitchen renovation. I can’t thank you enough for following along on our journey.
My husband and I recently set aside a day to give our girls’ room a makeover. Our twins have shared a room their whole lives and I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to keep their room organized. Before I jump into how I spruced up their room, I’ll share a few tips on how to tackle your kid’s room.
First things first: toy cycling….if I want my girls’ room to stay neat, I can’t let them keep all their toys out all the time. What this means for our girls is that they have a few big bins of toys that take turns being stored in the top of their closet, or some lesser used toys are stored in the garage or attic. Each bin holds a different category of toys. For example, they have a bin full of dolls and doll accessories, another bin for stuffed animals and another bin for crafts. At some point, the girls will ask to switch out their toys or I’ll notice that they’ve not played with the toys that are in their room. We’ll get the bins down and swap out their toys. This has saved me so much time over the years and it definitely helps my girls keep their room neater.
Another way I’ve kept their room from getting overwhelming is by periodically going through their rooms and getting rid of things that they aren’t using. Sometimes I involve them in this process, and sometimes I don’t. Of course, I don’t get rid of anything that is particularly special to them if I can help it. If you are familiar with the Marie Kondo method, this is what I used when we organized the girls room recently. We brought everything in their room other than clothing and furniture and organized it in our dining room (see below). This process took hours and I really felt like I deserved some type of medal by the time it was done. My hubs and I started out with the girls helping us, but we eventually sent them to go play in another room so that we could really organize all this random stuff.
The girls also have a shelves in their closet where the bulk of their toys are stored. These bins came from Target over 10 years ago and, while they’ve seen better days, they’re still going strong. Quick tip on how I keep my sanity where a kid’s room is concerned: I don’t spend a ton of money on my kid’s rooms. If I want to really invest in a space in my home, it’s usually a main living area or the master bedroom. My kids play in their rooms a lot, so I find it’s best to keep the spaces fairly utilitarian. In the bins below my girls have stored makeup, crafts, hair bows, shopkins and who even knows what else? Note the bookshelf in the right of this picture. I intentionally left a good part of the shelf empty. I know this space will eventually be filled with something, be it library books or art projects. Keeping space open in our kiddo’s rooms gives them space to breathe and gives us the freedom to not feel like the room is packed to the gills.
Lastly, I highly recommend being very choosy about kid’s clothes. A child’s room can be overrun by clothes in a hurry. My kiddos each have a smallish chest of drawers and I try to keep their clothing limited to what will fit in their chests and what will hang loosely in their closets.
As for decorating their room, I bought them new curtains and rearranged their furniture just a bit. Before we spruced up their room, I had a chest of drawers on each side of the room, but their long, narrow room felt crowded. I moved the two chests together and hung a photo ledge that my husband made years ago above the chests. I styled the ledge with artwork that was already in their room. Hanging the ledge above the chests unifies the two pieces to make them look like one unit. This also helps the room to feel more open and airy.
For their bedding, we’ve had good luck with these soft sheets from Amazon. I made their quilts for them a couple years ago and my sister knitted beautiful afghans at the foot of their beds. Again, I keep their bedding very simple. We have duvets and duvet covers that they use in the winter, but for now they are folded and in the closet.
We bought the majority of their bedroom furniture at a local furniture store that is now out of business. The girls’ desk was made by a cabinet-maker several years ago and we got their desk chairs at TJ Maxx.
Revamping my girls’ room has been such a fun process. I mostly used what I already had on hand, with the exception of buying new curtains. They are enjoying having a freshened-up space and they’ve each thanked my husband and I multiple times for helping them get better organized.
Below is the design board that I created for this space. I had such a good time pulling all of these elements together in a simple, kid-friendly, inexpensive way. If you need me to help design your kiddo’s room, shoot me a message and we’ll work together to create a space that you and your kiddo will love.
Hey y’all! We’re trucking along on our kitchen reno. You can read about part one of our renovation here. By way of review, this is what we’ve done so far:
Removed the backsplash (and the sheetrock that it was adhered to!)
Removed a large bank of cabinets that was sitting on the counter and using up too much of my counter space
Hired an electrician to replace all the plugs and bring them up to code
Hired an electrician to update all the can lights and add one new one
My hubs taking down cabinets that we plan to replace with open shelving.
I’m so happy to say that we can check several of the above things off our list! Over the last few weeks we’ve:
re-installed the sheetrock in order to replace the backsplash
ordered new quartz countertops and subway tile backsplash
ordered new sink and faucet
scheduled and oversaw installation of countertops, backsplash and sink
Buh-bye formica countertops!
Our countertop installers were scheduled to arrive around 8:30 the morning of the install. We woke up early and made sure that the kids had all eaten and gotten out of the kitchen in order to give the installers plenty of time to work. Five hours later, our install crew arrived. Help me, Rhonda. During that time, Justin removed all the countertops himself, which saved us a little money. This is not our first renovation, so we’re familiar with having to wait on installers and etc. Buuuuuut, I have to say, we’d both forgotten how stressful it is when someone is that late. To complicate things further, the install was scheduled for the same day as our oldest son’s very first homecoming dance. Not only were we trying to get him ready, we’d also invited some of his buddies over after the dance to hang at our house. We would not normally plan to host a group of teenagers on the same day as our countertop install, but that’s the way it worked out this time around and we all learned from it.
New countertops and backsplash make a HUGE difference!
The installers came back the next morning and finished up and we were so happy with the result. Since then, Justin has put the face-plates back on the outlets and re-installed the vent-hood over the stove.
You see those two little stools? My sister got us four of those as a wedding gift sixteen years ago and they’ve been in every place we’ve lived. Our kitchen did not have a bar previously, so we added a twelve inch overhang when we had the counters cut. This is our third house, and we had a bar in each of the kitchens in our previous two houses. It has been so lovely to have bar space again! The twins have pretty much taken over those two stools and sit there and chat with me as I wash dishes and prepare meals. I love having my kiddos close by when I’m cooking, but I don’t always love having them underfoot, so the bar provides the perfect compromise.
We’re planning to finish up our little renovation of the next week or two. We have just a few things left to do:
Build and install open shelves to replace the bank of upper cabinets that were removed
Build and install shelves to replace an unused desk area directly behind the sink
Paint the ceiling…this little job was made necessary by an overzealous bottle of kombucha that exploded all over my kitchen.
Paint the wall behind the open shelves.
It’s so fun having you all follow along with us and truly care about our project. I’ll keep you updated as we add the finishing touches to our kitchen!
We bought our girls this tallish, fairly long dresser when they were toddlers. As they’ve gotten older, they’ve needed more space, so we bought them two separate dressers and moved their old dresser to the garage with plans to sell it. We’d just moved when we bought their new dressers and I wasn’t quite sure how to configure all our rooms. I was in need of a piece of furniture for our sunroom to hold our TV, some dvds, remote controls and video games. After scouring the internet for inspiration, and coming across the photo below, I realized that the girls’ old dresser would be a perfect fit for our sunroom and it would barely cost me a dime. I changed out the drawer knobs from pink porcelain knobs to oil-rubbed bronze nobs and voila, I had the perfect dresser for our sunroom. Inspiration photo here from one of my fave Arkansas designers:
After using the dresser in the sunroom for a couple years, I realized that at least two of the drawers have been sitting empty for some time. I asked my hubs if he could convert the two empty drawers into one big drawer to use as a filing cabinet. Our current filing system consisted of two hard plastic file boxes that are on a shelf in a closet. As you can imagine, this filing system isn’t user friendly and our paper clutter has been piling up and driving me batty.
The two bottom drawers on each side of the dresser looked like this before my man converted one side of the drawers into a single drawer to hold files.
In order to convert the dresser drawers into one drawer, Justin removed the drawers from the dresser and then removed the screws that attached the drawer faces. He then built one large drawer box using half inch plywood and used pocket hole screws to assemble the drawer box. He bought heavy duty glides for the drawers and installed them onto the side of the drawer and the inside of the dresser. To hold the files, we bought this metal file frame at Office Depot. I went through my files while watching Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana on Netflix…the documentary was so good and it definitely made going through my files more fun. I used this article for reference.
Above is the file drawer with the frame in it and a few hanging file folders.
This little project has brought so much ease and organization into my home. Being able to get to my files quickly without having to squat down on the floor of a dark closet and dig through one of two file boxes is a game changer!
For reference, this dresser was originally a medium brown. I sanded it a little bit, primed it, painted it with one coat of flat paint by accident and then went back over it with one or two coats of semi-gloss latex paint in China White by Benjamin Moore. The finish has held up well for quite a while, in spite of my very imperfect paint job. 🙂
When we bought our house in 2016, I knew the kitchen needed more than a little bit of help! With shiny-orangey brown cabinets and a backsplash straight from 1984, we’d walked into the perfect setting for a renovation.
After adjusting to a new city and new schools for our kiddos, we finally got around to painting out cabinets in May of 2018. We used Sherwin Williams Extreme Bond Primer and ProClassic Paint. I chose to have Sherwin Williams color match China White by Benjamin Moore for the paint color. We painted and primed the cabinets by hand, but we used these brushes for the top coat. The finish is very smooth and looks good! My only regret is that we didn’t let the paint cure for more than a day or so, and the paint is pretty chipped in some places. Moving forward, I’ll let cabinets painted during a humid Arkansas summer cure for a few days before reinstalling them. We opted to keep the current brass hinges and replaced the cabinet pulls with these lovely little ladies from Amazon.
My hubs had a couple weeks off at the end of 2019, so we began tackling the rest of our kitchen renovation. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
Removed the backsplash (and the sheetrock that it was adhered to!)
Removed a large bank of cabinets that was sitting on the counter and using up too much of my counter space
Hired an electrician to replace all the plugs and bring them up to code
Hired an electrician to update all the can lights and add one new one
My hubby and oldest son removed the tile backsplash and the bank of cabinets above to make room for a bit more counter space and open shelving.
On the docket to finish our renovation:
Re-install the sheetrock so that the backsplash can be replaced
Order new countertops and backsplash
Order new sink and faucet
Schedule installation of countertops, backsplash and sink
Build and install open shelves to replace the bank of upper cabinets that were removed
Build and install shelves to replace an unused desk area directly behind the sink
Remove a randomly placed celing fan
Move the smoke detector just a smidge farther away from the stove so that I can cook dinner without being serenaded by the smoke alarm. 🙂
Paint the ceiling…this little job was made necessary by an overzealous bottle of kombucha that exploded all over my kitchen.
When it comes to DIY projects, we certainly don’t work at a fast pace. I’m enjoying the process that comes with updating our kitchen and I’m thankful to have you all follow along with me.
Holly Bertram Designs 