2012 will be wonderful!

Hello! Once again, I have not updated in quite a while! Things got very busy after Thanksgiving at home, work, and with every aspect of my life! I have some belated Christmas photos of the house, and a sneak peak at the finished kitchen! Countertops get installed Thursday, and DONE!

Lovely living room (chairs are a new addition!) with my Christmas wreath in the window and LingLing posing on the coffee table.

Can't believe Christmas is over already! But here are some pics of the house.

 Kitchen sneak peak!! Not done quite yet in this photo, but you get an idea on the progress! We found the lumber for the island in our barn in the backyard.

Will post finished kitchen photos soon!! :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today Michael and I are home and the goal was to get Thanksgiving preparations under control for tomorrow. I have already had a epic fail with a homemade cheeselog made out of goat cheese. (Never make this).

Looks good in the picture right? Wrong.

So anyway, a new game plan was planned. I will be making the following dishes and will be crossing my fingers the whole time I'm making them.

Crock pot meat balls (for my mom's get together later in the evening, we will be putting up the Christmas tree at her house tomorrow night :)

To make these you bascially throw all of the following in a crock pot and then cook on low for 7-8 hours:
1) Package of frozen meatballs
2) 1 bottle chili sauce
3) 1 small jar of grape jelly (werid I know)
Got the recipe off a food blog I found through pintrest.

Also on the list is these pumpkin goat cheese mini-pies.

These ones are a little more complicated, but I have high hopes. You can get the recipe from the food blog givemeflour

Also, I will be making a "cheesy squash bake", which is suprisingly healthy.

You can get the recipe from here.
AND last but not least, I will be attemping to make a cake from a recipe that will be adapted off of a cupcake blog. Its called the Ultimate Vanilla Cupcake. I made it with their strawberry frosting. I've made the cupcakes before will great reviews from Michael.

Looks pretty ultimate right?

A little off topic, but our kitchen is coming to a close! We still haven't painted anything, but our reclaimed wood island is in the works and I'm so excited. We actually found all the lumbar out in our old barn in the backyard. I can't wait.

Open Shelving

Ok, when I bought our house I had never thought or even considered a lot of the design elements that I'm obsessed with now. One of these elements is open shelving, especially in the kitchen. I knew when we finally got to our big kitchen project that this had to be incorporated somehow.

Freaking obsessed.

Anyway! Our open shelving wall is well on its way!

We did ours a little different with two smaller bottom shelves and then two long ones on top. That was we can add something decorative to the middle over top the stove or a little wall mounted pot rack or utensil rack. They are not painted yet (nor is anything else!) but omg I can't wait until they are painted and full of awesomeness!

Bianca Carrara

After weeks of searching, we bought our countertop today! I wanted to be sure about this purchase because its probably the biggest one we will make with our entire kitchen project as a whole. We saved a lot on the other things so we were going to splurge on the countertops. We really liked the quartz and granite styles, but I really was set on a white countertop, so we decided on quartz because it offered more white options.

Here is a picture of what it will look like, its called Bianca Carrara which is a Zodiaq brand quartz countertop. (I really want that sink too!)

I really liked how the speckled gray will go well with the gray tiled floor. yay!

We are currently working on the lighting and wiring, which is mostly done. I'm going to be putting an island int he middle with a chandelier overtop. Everyone I explain this to gives me a puzzled look, but I swear it will look right! Example:

BEAUTIFUL! I'm thinking of transfering our dining room light to the kitchen for this look and then getting a new dining room light.

Perfection. Although then the next problem is the dining room light.. ohhh welll.. guess that means I need to buy something else for it ;) Projects!

Will post more progress soon!

Alison

Long time no see

Well it has been almost a month since I made a post. We are in the middle of the kitchen project, which hopefully will be coming to an end before Thanksgiving (that's pushing it a little) but definitely before Christmas!

We figured out how to do this kitchen on a budget... like, major budget.

First, we had to figure out the kitchen layout, which involved moving the fridge and the stove around.

New stove location (featuring my new DOUBLE OVEN).

I will be adding open shelving to this wall over the oven as well, kind of like this (My kitchen will be all white too! Love Love Love)

New fridge location.

These changes made for a lot of extra space in the room. You can kind of see the begining of the custom crown molding going on top of the cabinets woo!

The next task was deciding what to do with our old, pretty much useless cabinets. We didn't want to go the brand new custom cabinets route because its pretty pricey (like, 10,000 pricey). We had considered just doing new cabinet doors for an update, but then the brilliant idea came to us: Buy unfinished stock cabinets at Home Depot, add a bunch of custom wood work to them, paint them an awesome color, and yay! Brand new cabinets for about $900. Pretty ridiculous right?

Here are some pretty awesome pictures I have been collecting on my pintrest.

Love those taupe metallic lights and the open shelving that matches. Beautiful!

I love this for a stairway wall, or an entry way like this one if its big enough (mines not).

I love these patterns and colors.

I'll be posting more pics and progress on the kitchen soon I hope! :) :)

Mercury and Burlap

So today I discovered some awesome finds! I was browsing TJMaxx and came across a large array of mercury glass vases and containers, my heart jumped with joy and then I started having a heart attack when I saw the price: $4.99? $7.99? HOLLA WHAT!? Let's just say I'm not usually a TJMaxx cart user but I was all about the cart today. I bought like 20 of these things. My house is going to be decked out with mercury glass, oh yeah.

Mantle awesomeness!

Also, my burlap curtains came in today for the living room. The combination of this mercury glass business and then my much anticipated etsy purchase arriving was just too much! Here is the pics of the curtains, lighting is not that good because it was night time. I'll post better ones in the daylight, but I just couldn't hold back!

Cute littel ruffle!

Beautiful! Can't wait until my VERY much anticipated pillows come in. More pics to come! Thanks for stopping by to enjoy my new additions!

Everything is coming together

Its weird to think that this time last year we had nothing but a matress and a tv in our house. Michael and I waited to move in with eachother until, well.. marriage! So we started out with a beautiful home but nothing to put in it! A lot has changed since then! The kitchen is well underway. My near heart attack inducing week of the floor being ripped out and demolition of the kitchen is complete. Now there is the start a new, amazing floor. We had a cabinet guy come today and measure the doors for replacement with new "shaker" style doors. (Praying the quote is mega low!) I'm just so happy that we are finally going to be done with construction on the house after the kitchen is done. Then all thats left is the fun stuff, buying and decorating!

Here are some updated pics of our home that is edging its way closer and closer to completion.

Antique tool box turned coffee table. This was a good find up in Cbus Short North.

Dining room into living room.

 Antique light. Also a good find in Marietta Front St.!

 I like the lighting here.

 NEW COUCH! I still don't have my accesories. But I just had to post. Also new coffee table. Love.

Here's the sweet curtains I'm waiting on. Got them for a steal on ( can you guess ? ) etsy.

I will be posting pics soon of the kitchen project more in its completion. Crossing my fingers its soon!

Thanks for looking :)

The many personalities of my kitchen

Well construction has begun on our kitchen.We are taking a little bit at a time, starting with ripping out the old, dirty lenoleum checkerd floor. My hope was that we could salvage the hardwood that I know was underneath the lenoleum. I was going to do a painted hardwood look with charcoal and white diamonds. Oh how lovely it would have looked, the painted gray and white with the planks of the floor still visible... until my dream was shattered. Apparently previous owners had similar ideas about changing the kitchen floor, the only problem is that they were all lenoleum lovers, they all did not have very good taste, and worst of all, the original layer was secured down with TAR to the beautiful original 1903 red pine wood floors. Knife.to.the.heart.

Floor #1: Back and White (more like brown now) Checks

Floor #2: GREEN and white (brown) checks

Floor #3: ??? white-brown brickish lenoleum

Finally, the original hardwood, too bad you can't see if for the tar covering it:

Well, now that my painted hardwood kitchen is out of the question, tile it is! I've decided on a charcoal gray slate tile. I thought it had a good combination of rustic and modern. Here is an example kitchen with similar flooring:

Kind of a matte, natural finish. Love the gray and white.

Our kitchen cabinet doors will be changed to a more updated farmhouse style beadboard front with a frame, like this:

And we will have an island with pendant lights above it, maybe these barn style lights in this wonderful kitchen (!!):

Or these?

Right now the project is stressing me out because I don't like things to be out of order. I want everything in its place. I guess it will be worth it in the end.
Soon I'll be posting my living room update. New couch is here!!! Will have to take pics, I'm kind of waiting on my other items to arrive from Etsy before posting. SOON!