What’s Cookin’?

Greetings!

It’s been a while! Iris and I are currently home for the week (boo to you covid!) and although we have lots of school work to do amongst the two of us, I decided to devote some time to update ye olde blog. Specifically, the kitchen and mudroom remodel.

Once the pandemic began and we were all at home quarantining my contractor/dad began work on our kitchen and mudroom. This is what both looked like when we moved in:

The mudroom used to be a breezeway between the kitchen/living room and the garage. We had these jalousie windows (totally had to google how to spell that) that lined the wall to the west which kept that room pretty chilly. We pretty much used the mudroom as a place to store all of our junk for two years. I would look out from our sliding glass doors at all the junk and my anxiety level would skyrocket (messes freak me out).

Then bam! Pandemic! Quarantine! That means its time to destroy! My dad wasn’t allowed to work (not essential), and that meant his spent his time tearing our house apart with Eric. I lent a hand in between teaching online and my office hours with my students- I spent a lot of time telling them to ignore the power tool sounds.

It took us a couple of months to get everything remodeled, drywalled, and reassembled. We also had a lot of attic work to do (apparently our roof wasn’t really attached to our house, meh- no big deal right?).

Then before we knew it it was time to pick out tile! I was leaning towards picking out a basic grey tile. Grey is easy to decorate with. However, grey is also kind of boring and I really wanted something fun and bold. That’s when these two tiles caught my eye:

I picked these two out to take home, and I had a feeling that they would get vetoed real quick, but to my surprise- Eric liked them, and my dad (the main designer of our kitchen) really liked the triangle striped one. Awesome!

Unfortunately, these tiles were WAY more expensive than our original quote and we really didn’t want to spend 7 grand on tile alone. We ended up going with a different tile pattern that I don’t have photographed (my bad) that ended up being around 1 grand. And that definitely fell within our budget.

By this point, our tile was delivered around the beginning of August and tiling began. I have learned so much from these experiences but what I have been the most surprised about is that not every room is square, nor every floor level. My dad spent about a week trying to figure out how to start our floor. He decided the easiest place to begin to set up both the kitchen and the mudroom was the step.

I am so happy this tile worked out. It is definitely different, but I am glad I took a chance and picked it!

Throughout the next several months we added cabinet doors, countertops, shelves, and then we moved to the mudroom to add a bench and closets.

After everything was installed in the mudroom, we added some trim. At this point, we still have painting to do. All three doors in the mudroom need to be painted still and I am not sure if I like the blue on our door that goes to the garage.

Now that our mudroom/kitchen remodel is almost done- lets look at some before and afters shall we?

So much better! I can’t believe how different this space is. Again, still some more things to do that we eventually want to add but I will include a few more finished pictures for you to peruse.

Ta-da! There a ton more projects to update on here…. I will get to it someday I suppose.