While You Were Gone - A Story In Pictures - another transformation (of the more difficult variety)

Last weekend Josh and I headed to his parents house in Virginia to drop off the kids.  They were about to spend the week with their Meme and Poppie in order for Josh and I to have a couple of days away for our anniversary.

Luckily I am not a hard-to-please woman and we had the best stay cation EVER, and the only thing on the agenda (well, except that it WAS our anniversary so there were "other" things on the agenda as well;), was to re-do our kitchen floors that we had been given Christmas money to do.

I made a list of all the things I wanted to complete while the kids were away and started knocking the projects out as soon as we got home on Monday afternoon.

We found some beautiful wood flooring on clearance (thank you Heidi!), and with that price we still had plenty of money to cover the other smaller project we wanted to get done around the house and stay completely in budget.

We immediately began prepping the floors to lay down the wood flooring.  Three layers of old linoleum later we found the subfloor.  We had a couple of friends warn us of asbestos (after we were almost done ripping it all out) in the old linoleum backing and glue so we did a worrisome amount little bit of research and calling around before making the executive decision that it was NOT full of asbestos, but if it was, the damage was done and was now sealed into the subfloor after some advice from our contractor friends, aired out the house for 3 days straight and gave each other lung cancer for our 13th anniversary, ha!

This is looking into the kitchen from the dining room.  This is how the floors have been adjoined since we moved in.

The white tile was the top layer.  That yellow tile under our living room? That was the second layer in our kitchen.  We still aren't quite sure how far into our home that layer goes under the carpet,
but that's another project for another week day.

Josh temporarily lifted my ban from tools, yay!

ahem...moving on...

Our laundry "room" is in the kitchen so we tore out the cabinets above the washer and dryer and used the wood to make a new desk for the girls to share in their room.

These are some of our "laundry room" transformations over the years

and then we knocked all the cabinets out

Since Josh's time was limited with work and school I found several other projects to occupy my time:)

I found an old cookie sheet to make a magnet board for Jude.

I finished up the painting in the kids bathroom that I began several months ago and painted the cabinets in there as well.

I added a little romantic eye candy to our bedroom.

using an old door that has been in the shed since we moved in

Painted and revamped the boys room.  This is the only room in the house that we hadn't touched since moving in over 5 years ago.

Painted all the exterior doors.

And began the work of painting the cabinets in the kitchen, which will be finished on a day when I get complete movement and feeling back into my hands again.  Painting for 3 days straight really begins to limit mobility and function of my griping muscles, ha!

After all of that my body is now paying the price.  I love the finished products, but man was I exhausted after picking up the kids Saturday afternoon and calling in quits!

Here are some shots of the finished products of the kitchen.

(I really started off good with photos on my good camera and then got a bit lazy:)

And for your viewing pleasure, a little before and after:)

this was taken shortly after we moved in

then I had the bright idea of accenting some of the cabinets with dark brown
(what WAS I thinking?!)
and then adding the backsplash a year and a half ago.

This was taken yesterday.
I can't wait to get a fresh coat of white on the cabinet doors and finish the grey border in between them:)