Finishing Touches

Remember the progress we'd made on the house we've been working on? (See my previous post with before & during pictures.) Well, we've been working on the finishing touches! I thought you might enjoy seeing the finished results.

Here's the open concept view so you can see the breakfast bar:

And the pantry side of the kitchen with fridge & work desk:

And the wall side: stove, microwave, dishwasher...
Everything is brand new from the ceramic floors to the lighting.
The cabinets are Hickory.

And then looking back over the breakfast bar to the back of the house:

What do you think?

Progress!

Before and After pictures are so much fun to look at, don't you think?

Thought I'd share some "In Progress" pictures with you. The kitchen of our current investment property is quite different that other kitchens we've encountered. This one is located in the middle of the house with no exterior walls and thus no windows to the outside. It made this kitchen DARK- very dark and very gloomy!

This is the day we purchased the property... before trash removal and renovations began. You are looking into the door of the kitchen from a room off the back.

Dark, eh?

Here's a view from inside the kitchen looking back to where the previous picture was taken from:

The rest of this house is light and bright... lots of nice windows and natural light. This kitchen was just ODD.

On the other side of this kitchen (front side of the house) is a dining room. We needed to lighten up.... brighten up this room. The room needed to become a functioning part of this home instead of a cave inside a house.

Here's our progress from last week:

We opened up the wall and this half-wall will be a breakfast bar when we're finished. We added can lighting above this area too and we opened up a window pass-thru to the family room off the right of the picture above.
Much better, don't you think!

I LOVE progress!

I am a Misfit!

I'm pretty sure of it! And since posting that on my facebook account, several people have asked, "Why are you a misfit?".

Well.... I'm just not normal. My good-man-charlie-brown... my always-by-my-side... often reminds me that I'm just not like everyone else. More and more, I find myself in the minority of life... whether it be my thinking, my convictions, my likes & dislikes... I'm just not normal. And yet... I am still LOVED! ::insert huge grin::

So- we're working on our current real estate investment. When our team purchased this house, it had been disassembled... and disassembled in a fashion resembling that of She-with-once-skinned-knees' attempts to remove her training wheels by herself at two years old. Catch my drift?

The process of bringing this house back has been an involved process. And the time finally came when we were ready to run the plumbing (yes! The copper had all been removed underneath... I wasn't kidding! DISASSEMBLED!). A conversation, months ago, with a friend in a similar business, turned us on to a product- not really new- called PEX. The Lord had a hand in that conversation because just a few weeks later we acquired this house. PEX research was at the top of the list.

In true misfit fashion, I was completely intrigued with the idea of putting the plumbing back together and learning all there was to learn about running PEX. Years ago I was hooked on a puzzle game called "Pipe Dream". Maybe that's where this excitement over assembling PEX circuits for an entire house came from. I don't know. But I LOVED it! I think it was even FUN!


And it's not just the flexibility of the product but the COLOR CODING too! Blue lines for cold water.... Red lines for hot water... White lines for main lines. And OHHHHH... then there's the manifold where it all comes together! It's just the COOLEST!

See! Not normal!

I'm a misfit!

There's an island out there for people like me!

And SANTA comes ESPECIALLY for us! ROFL!!!!!! ;D

Projects & Procrasting Perfectionism

Here's a picture of my laundry room taken in March, just after Easter. We installed Pergo's wood laminate flooring through out the laundry, kitchen and dining rooms. (Carpet in a dining room is ALWAYS a bad idea)

Laying the flooring down was a fairly quick project taking us a day and a couple evenings to complete.

The thing about projects is that you always seem to be short on something and it's usually money or time.... OR... money and time. In this instant, it's time.

And then there's another condition that hinders progress- procrastinating perfectionism.

What? You've never heard of it? Oh! It's REAL! Trust me! It's a condition by which one procrastinates because one desires to do the job perfectly but knows that there's not enough time available to complete the perfect job. And so the procrastination begins... putting off the job until there's enough time to finish the job perfectly. Of course, there's NEVER enough time! And that's the fuel for the cycle.


Here's another view from the end of March.

It looks very nice now but the reality is... the project is NOT finished. The stairway is now painted but there's still wallpaper to be hung. There's still baseboard and quarter round to be installed. Eventually it will be complete (emphasis on EVENTUALLY!).


This is what it looks like today.

Oh! You can't see much, you say? Well... that's because housework has also fallen victim to procrastinating perfectionism!