Starting a Tiny Renovation

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home.  Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer:  Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions.  Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials. All opinions are their own.

Tiny bloggers here!  While Naomi blathers on about wedding flowers, and Sage continues to be defeated by the task of putting a floor in her kitchen, we’re excited to share some exciting progress in our home renovation journey!

When we last left off, we’d gotten briefly sidetracked making a $1 sheepskin stool every bit as chic and attractive as the ones being sold for many hundreds of dollars by places like Anthropologie:

You have to agree that neither looks at all like a bichon-frise learning to walk on stilts!  We just love it.

But it’s not all cotton candy and roses over here!  Today we’ve got some serious hard core renovation work to talk about. As you may remember from our house tour, we have a very narrow and cramped kitchen and then next to it a larger dining space:

As card-carrying (tiny)bloggers, we know that an open floor plan is the only acceptable layout.  We’re not even sure that bathrooms should have walls!  So we’ve known from Day 1 that this wall was coming down.

We were really intimidated given how long it’s taken Sage to do the same in her house (months of planning, a week of demolition, and now seemingly an eternity of follow up), but it turns out it’s not nearly as hard as she’s made it out to be!  Our wall was gone in about 10 minutes using nothing but a hammer and pliers.

Maybe it’s also easier for us to make quick progress because we’re full-time bloggers, but we have plenty of responsibilities (remember, we made that stool) so frankly we’re not sure why Sage is always using her day job as an excuse for her lack of kitchen progress.

Anyway, we’re so excited about how open the new space feels!

We’re not positive that this wasn’t a load-bearing wall.  However, we’re pretty light, so we can’t imagine it will be a problem.  I mean, if it didn’t fall down right away, we’re in the clear, right?

We’re also excited to start planning for our dream kitchen! Of course, we’ve been pinning like crazy and are working on some mood boards to help define and guide our design.  This has  actually been a pretty intense process!  We each made mood board mood boards (the mood boards that help define the style of your mood boards) and were kind of shocked that we were pretty far apart!  We’ve worked hard to find a common ground between shabby chic on one hand and farmhouse on the other.  It took a lot of long, searching conversations, but we really do think that our marriage is stronger for it.  It is so critical in a relationship to be able to talk about the important things.

However, while we finish these up we wanted to get your advice on the layout that we’re considering.  We want to put the kitchen on the outer two walls of the back left corner, with a wall for the fridge and cabinets on one wall and then the sink (hello gorgeous farmhouse sink, you will be mine!) under the window.

We’ll obviously have some open shelving.   Do you think one wall is enough, or should we do it all open?

Then we’ll do an island for the oven and range, and then plenty of room for the dining room table.

Hopefully we can also fit in plenty of storage since our house has zero closets, and of course we’ll need room for a bar cart.  What do you think?

We can’t wait to be back soon to share our mood boards for the space, as well as keeping you posted on our steady progress (spoiler alert: goodbye wallpaper!). In the meantime, we’re relieved that this house is still standing this project turned out to be so easy!