We’ve been busy!

Hi everyone! It’s been about a month since I’ve posted, but we’ve been busy with a lot of projects and the house is coming along nicely!

You may or may not remember that we were working on some end tables for Atlanta. We got those finished and are both delighted about how they turned out. Since they’re solid oak, they weigh a ton. I think they’re very pretty and look great with our new furniture in Atlanta. They weren’t a ton of work either! Here’s a little bit of the assembly process and a reminder of what our inspiration piece looked like.

Here is the final product!

Now back to our house in Big Canoe. Last we left it, we had replaced the old island. We’re still super happy with the new island and how functional it is. After wrapping that up, we wanted to add functionality to the rest of the kitchen as well.

To the right of the refrigerator, there was a floor to ceiling cabinet which we had been using to store our dishes in before finishing the island. Now that the dishes have been moved, we had a world of opportunity to update that cabinet. We’ve now made it into a coffee cabinet and have also moved our airfryer/toaster oven in there. We LOVE it! It’s so functional! We ran an extension cord from the outlet behind the refrigerator, so now everything plugs in and stays off the counter. Here’s the before and after.

Now over to the rest of the kitchen. We have made all new drawers, since the old ones were crap. And we have all of the doors and panels made and have replaced them. We’re adding a panel to the left of the refrigerator to hide the side of the fridge (a pet peeve of mine), but we haven’t yet put it up because we need some edge banding to finish it off and we didn’t have the right size. So we’ll do that next time we’re up there. Here’s a reminder of the before of the kitchen.

Here is the “after” photos. Obviously we still have to get the cabinets painted. The guys will start on that in a couple of weeks once they finish up a couple of other projects they’re working on. The cabinets will be white except for the island which will be a soft medium gray.

When Carlos (our contractor) saw our cabinet doors he was very complimentary and said he needed to do the same thing at his house! So I’ll take that as a “good job”! To be honest, Keith did the lions share of work here. I assisted with cutting the frame boards to length and doing a lot of sanding. But after the table saw incident of 2020, I no longer work a table saw!

One project I tackled on my own this weekend was a facelift to the fireplace. One of the things I truly disliked about this house was the stone on the fireplace. It SCREAMED 1990’s and was very orangey looking. Just a reminder of the before….

After doing a lot of research, I decided to do a limewash on the fireplace. I cleaned and scrubbed the fireplace with special stone cleaner and then got busy doing a LOT of taping and putting up plastic. The limewash is quite thin and messy (although easy cleanup), so I wanted to protect everything I could.

And then here’s the final result.

Am I in love with the fireplace now? No. But I like it a lot better now. It really weighed the room down before but now it’s a lot brighter and cleaner looking. It’s very easy to do touch up to it, so if we get the hearth dirty (which is likely to happen with ash), we can easily clean it up and add a little more.

Well, that’s a wrap folks! Next time I post, I’ll have pictures of the painted cabinets. We’ll also start working on a pantry cabinet which is in the room right next to the kitchen. The pantry has zero functionality right now so we’ll be making it a lot better. Then we’ll start to tackle some of the fun little design project we’ve got up our sleeves!

Happy Sunday!