Ideas

After six months of searching, we finally bought a home in Wilmington!  It is a charming home with good bones and the right floor plan for our family.  With three kids and Brett working from home, finding the right floor plan proved to be a real challenge.  We needed 11 rooms, and not many homes had that, but this one did.  And all in the right places.  Kids needed to be upstairs, office needed to be far away from the (loud) living, playing and cooking spaces.  Kitchen needed to be at the back of the house with a view of the back yard.  Backyard needed to be large and well-positioned.  Lots of things we wanted to get right!  And we did!  And under budget!  This house was actually the least expensive house we looked at – and we probably saw 25 homes over a six month period.  And we bought the cheapest one!  And liked it better than some homes priced $200,000 MORE.  That’s a lesson for you home buyers out there – look high and LOW when you are shopping.  You never know.  So, keeping our home purchase way under our budget means that we can remodel it and get it pretty much exactly the way we want it (in theory, at least).  The fun begins tomorrow.

I have so many ideas for this place that I don’t even know where to start.  Ok, yes I do.  The kitchen.  The most important room in the house needs to be done right and from day one.  I have no desire to live through a kitchen remodel, so we are hanging out with my parents for another month (thanks, mom!) while the kitchen is redone.  We are bribing my parents as best we can to allow us to continue to dismantle their once quiet, clean and peaceful home.

On the to-do list for this month are: 

1.       Complete kitchen renovation.

2.      Painting all the walls white.  Yes, white.  Yes, all of them.  I get lots of strange looks when I tell people we are painting the whole house white.  Maybe that’s because our last house was like a box of Crayolas?  We’re trying something new.  I’m inspired by European homes, Swedish design, coastal cottages, all embracing white walls. Not cream, white.  And, no, I am strangely not worried about it looking like a hospital.  We’ll see!

3.       New carpet.

4.       New hardwoods.

5.       Countless other basic updates like installing fire alarms to meet modern code, reworking closets, installing lights, new water heater, replacing a few doors, etc.

Right now the kitchen looks like this:

A well-built kitchen in 1989, but ready for an update. Good size, nice bay window.

 

And I envision something a little more like this:

White shaker cabinets? Check! Farmhouse sink? Check! Marble countertops? Check! $6,000 Viking Range...nope!  Sorry, couldn't swing that one!

 

Or like this:

http://www.houzz.com/photos/1354881/Classical-Kitchen-traditional-rendering-new-york

(Notice the nice bench under the bay window?  We'll be copying that!)

While we don’t have unlimited funds like the person creating my inspiration kitchens probably did, we are going to emulate it on a budget, friends!  We have already ordered the cabinets and appliances and countertops and barstools, so we are on the way.  We are changing the layout and moving some walls, the end result in my mind will be a completely transformed space.  I hope I am right. 

Demo starts tomorrow.  We are having a large dumpster delivered in our front yard.  I’m sure the neighbors will be thrilled about that!  Nothing like making a great first impression with a nasty dumpster!  Good thing we have no HOA to hassle us.

I’ll update soon.  The house will be in a seriously different state in a few days and I hope not to freak out when walls start coming down.