Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

April 23, 2018 | By Naomi |

Taking the Leap and Starting a Kitchen Renovation

I’m terrified to write this post. I’ve been putting it off for a long time, focusing on achievable projects like hallway rugs and closet makeovers, but I can’t wait forever. It is time to do our kitchen renovation!

Where It’s Been

I can’t launch into any discussion of the future of our kitchen without reminding everyone how far it’s come. Here is what it looked like when we first bought the place:

Yes, very yellow. What isn’t pictured is the similarly very yellow wall scrunching in the space right next to where that picture was taken from.

We were doing several renovation improvements to the house before moving in, so we added on a few things to make the kitchen livable, like removing the walls to create an open floor plan, running our new bamboo floors into that space, and replacing the yellow counters. For the blow-by-blow, I wrote up a whole post on this “half makeover.”

We also installed a temporary backsplash using renters wallpaper (still one of our most popular posts!) – a move I really can’t recommend enough for anyone who wants to update a renters kitchen, wants an interim solution, or wants an easy update. It took an afternoon and has held up for nearly four years so far.

All this made a big difference and created a room where we’ve been happy to cook for the last several years.

However, as we’ve slowly worked on the rest of the house this has gone from one of the nicer rooms to one of the worst. A lot of the things that we didn’t take care of in that half makeover are bugging me more and more. It’s time to take them on!

Where It’s Going

We don’t have the 100% finalized plan for the kitchen (we’ll create that as we go) but we do have a good idea of what we want and an excellent idea of what we hate about the current set up.

The good news is that we like the layout of the kitchen.

The sink, fridge, and stove form a nice triangle, the dishwasher is near the sink, and the main counter workspace is right between the fridge and the stove. So we don’t have plans to change that, meaning that we can keep most of the current cabinets and save a ton of money.

However, we do want to get new appliances. We already replaced the dishwasher recently when the original one broke, but the stove and fridge, while working OK for now, need to go for ones that are more efficient and more attractive. The current fridge is probably my least favorite part of this current kitchen. It is big, beige, and the main thing you see when you look in that direction from either the living room or dining room.

It also juts out far past the cabinets. I know that is normal in some cases but I. hate. it.

Both will be replaced with stainless steel, and we’ll get a counter-depth fridge and frame it in so that it looks like it is the right size for the space.

As I mentioned, we’re saving a lot by keeping most of our cabinets, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to change a lot. The wood looks OK in some of these photos, but really it is chipping in a lot of places. And did I mention the handles installed right in the middle of the doors?

We’re not sure on the exact plan yet – painting, refacing, a combination – but trust me they will look very different.

And there will need to be fixes along the way, like our corner/lazy-susan cabinet which falls off of it’s hinge every other day.

We’re also going to have to demo some of them. The pantry wall will have to go if we’re going to fit in a wider and shallower fridge.

And that’s really OK, because this storage isn’t working at all. The cabinet is narrow and deep, impossible to keep organized and to get things out of.

I really want to take it down and replace it with something with sliding drawers so that we can access our food better. So the overall plan is to keep the main set of cabinets but then totally replace everything on this wall.

Aesthetically, we’re still figuring out all of the details (that is part of the fun, doing that as we go) but we do know some of what we want. Brad already vetoed my plan to paint our cabinets bright yellow, so we’ll be doing something a little more reasonable/timeless.

I’m thinking we’ll remove the cabinet right above the stove so we can put in a nice hood, and pick out some fun, statement tile to liven up a more neutral cabinet choice. We’ll also replace the bare-bulb light that is currently over the sink.

So that’s the plan! I can’t promise that this will go quickly or smoothly. If you know me at all, you can bet this will take a long time, with some starts and stops along the way.

Any Advice?

We’re still pretty early in this planning, so now is the time to share any words of wisdom you have on the renovation, or any ideas/suggestions based on our layout. I’m sure I’ll ask for thoughts along the way, but I’d love to hear any ideas you have now!

And wish me luck!

April 11, 2018 | By Naomi and Sage |

Disaster Confessional: The “I Can’t Believe It’s Been Years” Edition

It’s been a while since we did a disaster confessional on the blog. Granted, that’s probably because we’ve had the opportunity to confess plenty of disasters in the normal course of our projects, from mistakes made in discharge dying to plumbing to the horribly embarrassing state of disarray in a hallway closet. But we like these confessionals because they’re an opportunity to talk about some of the disasters in our homes ~~without needing to do the work to fix them right away~~ in hopes that it is comforting to all of you that our lives are a mess.

In the past, we’ve confessed our messy habits, our terrifying stairs, our projects that fell apart, and much more. Today, we’re making truly embarrassing confessions: the things in our houses that it is utterly unbelievable that we haven’t dealt with yet.

Most homeowners probably have these things, the projects or small issues that they intended to deal with and then never did until it is years later and you can’t believe you’ve been living this way for so long. However, most homeowners probably don’t put those things on the internet…

Naomi: “I have dingy old beige doors in the most visible parts of my house”

We’ve been slowly fixing up the main parts of our house, from the dining room to now even paying attention to livening up the hallway. What I ignore/carefully crop out of a lot of my images are the terrible old exterior doors that are still covered in the previous homeowners paint colors.

They’re terrible: dinged, dingy, and dull. And they’re in the most visible places, too: the middle of the living room, the space between the dining room and kitchen, and right at the end of the hall that you can see whenever you walk around the house.

The weird gray-beige is probably my least favorite color in the world, and is the color that the entire interior of the house used to be painted. We’ve slowly removed it from every other inch of the house, but somehow it remains here.

Why? I’ve always meant to paint them, but I keep putting it off because it doesn’t seem like a good use of time. These doors will be replaced as soon as we do our next renovation, when I plan to swap them out for nice wooden ones, so it never seems worth it to invest scarce time into a temporary need. But I’ve still been living with, hating, and cropping them out of photos for five years. There must be a better way!

Sage: “I have a room in my house painted like a watermelon with the musings of a teenager scrawled all over the walls”

If you’ve been reading awhile, you know that I have one room in my house — my “craft room” — that has yet to be painted. It’s understandable that it’s never reached the top of the to-do list because it is the least-used room in our house (I store craft supplies there and it’s a second guest room, but we don’t use it a ton), but it is also the room with the most absurd existing color palette. You better believe that when I saw it in the listing photos, I thought it was one of the first things I’d change:

And yet, somehow here it is, 3.5 years later:

Yes, the walls are lime green and hot pink. As if that weren’t bad enough, the seller let her teenage granddaughter write all over them.

I know it’s hard to read what it actually says, but if you can remember back to the kinds of silly notes you wrote your friends when you were a teen then you get the gist. Here’s a close up for you of just a small sampling:

It’s one of those things that I’ve gotten used to, but whenever someone comes over to the house for the first time and asks for a tour, when I get into the craft room I am reminded of just how ridiculous the whole thing is given how much work we’ve done on the rest of the house.

Like Naomi, a big part of the delay is that this setup was always planned to be somewhat temporary. We didn’t buy a four bedroom house for two people; our plan has always been that eventually we’d change the use of this room when we started a family, and I figured it made sense to wait on doing too much work on it until I knew what we’d use it for. I still stick by that (as recently as a few months ago, I thought this room might become our master bedroom — read all about that change in thinking), but in the meantime we’ve got quite a strange space on our hands.

It’s funny how as you renovate a house, the things that seemed like the least of your concerns at the outset start to stick out like a sore thumb the more you work on everything else. It’s good to keep that sense of perspective — these things only seem so out of place now because everything else has changed for the better. Still, sharing these pictures with our adoring audience is good motivation to get to work. If you have spaces like this in your home, please let us know so that we feel less alone — please and thank you!