The big kitchen reveal - Our $2300 entire kitchen renovation!

I am so, so excited to share with everyone our kitchen reveal!I have been posting for weeks about the little updates that we have been doing since we moved in, but we are now finally at the point where everything in the kitchen is finished (for the most part - there will always be little updates!)

I'll start with a few before and afters, as I love to see the difference! My favorite parts - the floors, and the white cabinets (previously cream and black..ugh!)

This is my favorite view in the whole room,  the view I get every time I walk into the kitchen from the main hallway. It's where I see the most of my floors, plus our beloved picnic dining table (passed down to me by my parents - my dad even had it shipped here from cross country from Edmonton!)
 

You also get a great view of the light fixture Joel made using reclaimed wood and mason jars.

 

Isn't that little ladder cute? My neighbor was throwing it out last week and I grabbed it! I want to find something to put on top of it, but can't decide what, yet.

Here's a better view of the floors. I still can't get over them! I'm so relieved that Joel loves them as much as he does, because I sort of dumped the idea of doing herringbone floors on him, and they ended up being a LOT of work.

Here's what we see when entering the kitchen from the living room. This is around where the picnic table is:

Here's the floating shelves that we made. They've held up really well so far, and are so much more convenient than closed shelves!

 And finally, one more shot of the sink area.  The apron front sink has been one of the best changes that we've made in the kitchen. It's huge and lovely and it cleans up so easily. 

I am so happy to be finished our kitchen. This was a long project. We worked for months on almost all aspects of our kitchen, including:

• building wood counters from doors ($100)
• installing an apron front sink ($250 on kijiji)
• changing our cabinet orientation (free!)
• painting the cabinets ($150)
• installing new hardware ($70)
• building floating shelves (sponsored by Lowe's)
• ripping up our ceramic floors (free, but annoying!)
• installing hexagonal backsplash (about $150 including tiles, grout, and tile nipper tool)
• installing herringbone hardwood floors part 1, part 2, part 3 coming soon! ($750 for the flooring from Seaway Cabinets and Flooring, plus another $400 or so in equipment rental, stain, verathane, and other random expenses, for a total of $1150)

and many other things that never even made the blog (painting all of the baseboards, painting the door frame, installing potlights, buying a new faucet, etc.), the expenses of which totaled about $400.

I'm really proud of us for doing this all for $2300. With the amount of things we want to do in our house, it just isn't reasonable for us to spend a lot of money on renos. Doing our kitchen so cheaply meant we had to work slowly, using what we had, or waiting for sales (or kijiji deals.) Things like buying flooring took us weeks, as we scoured for deals and worked out every possible way for them to be the least expensive possible. But in the end, the patience was so worth it!


And now, we are on to the next projects! Joel's busy working on a huge, beautiful new lighting project for our TV room. He came up with this one all by himself, and I am so excited to see it finished! I'll make sure to post pictures when he's done.

Have a great week!

DIY Herringbone hardwood floors series - PART 2

Sorry it's been so long since my last post - life is crazy over here! I seriously feel like every spare second of my life has been spent on these floors, and I have been having trouble fitting blog updates into the equation!

I'm really excited to share part 2 of my DIY herringbone hardwood floors series. In my last post, I went over buying, acclimating, and cutting your wood to make herringbone floors.

Before I continue, I think it's important that I outline the difference between a herringbone and chevron pattern. They seem fairly similar at a first glace, but they're actually quite different, and the installation techniques are likely pretty different as well.

This image from plentyofcolour.com perfectly illustrates the difference:



The first image represents a chevron pattern - all of the pieces meet together at a 45 degree angle.This means that all of your cuts need to be cut on an angle.

The second image represents herringbone. Your pieces meet each other on the sides, which means you do straight cuts everywhere, except where you meet the walls. Aesthetically, I'm just a much bigger fan of herringbone - it seems more old style Parisian to me. But chevron is lovely too.

Where to begin when installing herringbone

The first thing you need to do, after cutting your boards, is to determine the center line that your flooring will line up with. With herringbone, the center line isn't quite as obvious as with chevron, but once you get the hang of finding it, it's not hard.

We figured out the center of our kitchen, and marked it off using a chalk line.

(there's only one chalk line on the floor, the other line you see is the chalky string above!)

Next, Joel and his dad cut a triangle corner off of a piece of plywood. They used this triangle to make sure that the boards met consistently at a 90 degree angle. They began by screwing the triangle into the floor (lining it up with the chalk line in the center) so that it wouldn't budge when they pressed the boards up against it. They started about 6 inches away from the wall, because that wasn't a perfectly straight line, and they didn't want to even risk the floor going off a little bit.
 

The next thing to do was to nail in the boards! We didn't use glue at all, because our boards were long enough to nail into twice per board. This totally held them in firmly enough.

How to keep the boards straight?

One trick we found was to slide a spare piece beside the board you are nailing, pushing it in as you nail, so that the boards don't slip even a smidge out of place.

 The next step is really to just keep nailing boards in, checking with a "square" as often as possible that your boards are square (Joel swears to me that this thing is called a square.. it's an L shaped piece of metal that looks like a ruler.)

These parts of the installation go quite quickly - as long as you remain square, installing the straight line parts are fast. The difficult part comes when you get to the edges of the room - this is where you have to make weird cuts to fit everything in (I'll get to that in my next post!)

That's all for now! It's crazy looking back at these pictures. Our floors are now FINISHED and I am just so excited to share them with everyone. It was a crazy, insane amount of work, but I promise, it was so so worth it.

To see my first post about DIY herringbone floors, click here. 

DIY Herringbone hardwood floors series - PART 1

Last weekend, my husband and my father in law began working on our herringbone kitchen floors. They are far from done, but since the process is very complicated, I figured I would start trying to break it down now. I definitely don't presume to be any kind of expert on herringbone floors, but I had a lot of trouble finding step by step guides when we were starting out, so I thought I would try an fill this bizarre internet void with my own babbly version of how-to-herringbone.

The last time I blogged about our floors, we had just uncovered that half of our kitchen had previously been covered with ugly laminate flooring, which we now needed to recover.

Where do you buy wood for herringbone floors?

My answer to where to buy anything is always kijiji. I spent about two weeks watching kijiji for ads to pop up, either from people who were selling extra flooring, or from flooring stores running promotional sales. Since I had such a specific idea in mind (multicolor stained herringbone floors) my choices were a bit limited.

I finally decided to go with Seaway Cabinets and Flooring, a local (well, Prescott area) wholesaler that offers unfinished, rustic grade oak flooring for not very much money. For the 250 square feet I needed, they offered me two choices:

•  For $650 (plus tax) I could get my 250 square feet of flooring, with boards ranging from 14" to 7 feet long.
  
• For $1125 (plus tax) I could get the same floors, but they would be cut and ready for herringbone installation.

Having floors pre-prepped for herringbone installation is actually a lot more important than it sounds. If you start with uncut wood and cut it yourself, you lose the grooves that are generally used to secure hardwood floors to eachother. The prepped flooring comes with grooves added, so that the floors can be installed much easier.

So which choice did I go with?

Well, it's probably a sign of how devastatingly cheap I am, but I went with option one. Getting 250 square feet of flooring for under $750 was just too alluring for me.

 If you can afford it, and you can find a place that offers it, you should totally go with pre-cut and pre-prepped wood. We added a lot of extra work for ourselves because we did it ourselves (which at the end of the day we're really fine with, but if you can afford to have someone cut it perfectly for you, work it!) 

How do you know how much flooring to buy?

If you are going to be cutting them yourself, it's a good idea to get about 25% to 30% more than what you need. Our kitchen measured at 190 square feet, and with 250 square feet of material, we will probably have a bit leftover, but not much. 

Acclimating your wood

We let our floors acclimate for a week, by keeping the wood in the same room that we were going to be using them. I can't think of anything more torturous than waiting to install floors when your floors look as hideous as ours did, but everyone and their dog recommends letting the wood acclimate for a significant period of time, and for a process that is as nit-picky as herringbone floors, I'd say it's worth the trouble.

Cutting your wood

Once your wood has acclimated, you need to figure out how long your herringbone pieces will be. The ONLY thing you need to know when deciding on your length is that the length of your herringbone pieces need to be a multiple of the width of your boards.

Confused? 

So were we. In fact, it took me hours to actually mentally figure out what that meant. By the time I got it to make sense, Joel had gone to bed and I had to wait until the next morning to explain it to him. 

Basically:

 

 Here's why:

So really, you just need to figure out a length that looks appealing (for us, our length is the width of five boards) and work with it so that it it's a multiple of your board length. Deciding on our floor length really felt like a milestone in this process - it meant we were ready to start cutting and laying floor!

Check back in a couple of days for part 2 of my herringbone hardwood floors series!

The view from my living room couch

Our floors are here! They have been "acclimating" for the past few days. I use quotations because I don't know what they're actually doing. All I know is that hardwood acclimation has to do with moisture levels, and if you don't let them acclimate for at least 2 days or 3 days or 90 days depending on what website you check, your floors will explode and your husband will never let you get hardwood again. So right now, we're waiting.

As I mentioned here, we have big ol' plans for this hardwood. We are going to be laying it in a herringbone pattern, and just about everyone has made sure to tell us that it would be easier to lay them straight. I argue that it would have been even easier to not rip out our perfectly fine ceramic tile in the first place. But we did that, so here we are.

Just in case the process of laying herringbone flooring didn't seem daunting enough, we've also decided to stain the floors in three different colors. We'll be doing a light, medium and dark stain, mixed up throughout the flooring. My goal is for it to look like this:

but since we have no experience with laying flooring of any kind, let alone complicated patterned hardwood, I'm open to the idea that this all may not work.

We'll be starting the whole process on Friday, and I will definitely keep everyone updated!

If you've found yourself here and are interested in just my house/diy projects (and not my student art work) you can check out my new blog-in-progress over at http://itsourcraftedhome.blogspot.com

Kitchen floors - the beginning of the saga

So we've been VERY busy these past few days.

It's a silly story. We were moving along so well in our kitchen. We had almost everything finished (with the exception of finishing details). We knew we wanted to replace our floors, but were holding off until the Summer to get it done. We were able to live with our ceramic tile - it wasn't pretty, but it wasn't offensive either.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, while sitting at my desk at work, I had a brainstorm. What if there's HARDWOOD under our kitchen tile?!  It could be possible, right?

So I rushed home and checked underneath the heating vent. This is what I saw:

I just about lost my mind. Hardwood!! Hidden under our tile flooring!! This was a must investigate. Even though I hadn't wanted to change our floors right then, I couldn't resist the hardwood. I told Joel, and he reluctantly agreed that we could check it out soon.

A couple of days later, I came home and found this:

 It seemed that Joel couldn't resist the lure of the hardwood either.

Since we hadn't planned on ripping out the floors, Joel just used a hammer and a pry bar that first day. It took forever for him to get the tile off but seeing the progress kept our little hearts going.

My job was to find the screws in the subflooring and remove them. Each time we removed the plywood and found hardwood, I wanted to squeal.

 Some patches were unstained. We started to piece together that there had been a wall closing off this part of our kitchen, and that there was some kind of china cabinet or something here.

 We weren't concerned thought - we were happy to stain them again. You can see where the wall used to be below.

By the next day, Joel had a much better system going - he borrowed a hammer drill and was able to knock the tiles out so much faster. It was wonderful.

We removed all of the tile and subflooring in our eating area, and were just amazed by the beautiful hardwood we found underneath.

But it was around this time that things turned... questionable.

For this to make sense, I'll start with a diagram. Keep in mind I made this in about 2 minutes, and it's not even remotely to scale!

What was the problem? Well, we found a spot where the hardwood abruptly stopped, and instead of any flooring, we found what used to be a wall.

All of a sudden, it occurred to me what was going on - our kitchen had likely been two separate rooms at one point, a small kitchen, and a formal dining room.

I freaked. It was SO likely that only the dining room would be covered in hardwood. Who knew what we would find once we moved over the threshold and reached the old kitchen?

We eagerly cut away the tile, making a space big enough to remove a piece of plywood.

 And at that, it was time for the moment of truth... removing the plywood that lay over the old dining room and the old kitchen. And we found...

Awful, awful laminate tile.

I was so disappointed. On one side, we're looking at this:

 And on the other side... this. (Don't mind the mess - we were in the midst of floor removal here so our kitchen table was in the dining room and our kitchen was upsidedown.)

Our dog even came to show her dismay.

So, what now?

We have a few options:

• Live with the floors as they are
• Recover the tile with hardwood and try our best to match it
• Go with something completely new

After lots of talking about it, we've come to the conclusion that we will do something completely new. I had fallen in love with hardwood floors in the kitchen, so we aren't going to stray too far from that. But we will be doing something...different. Something that's going to involve an incredible amount of effort and cutting... but that will hopefully be AMAZING!!

More to come as we get started! 

Hexagonal tile makes me smile.

Did you see what I did there? I rhymed.

This post is lonnnng overdue. About two weeks ago, we finally installed our kitchen backsplash. 

I won't get into the nitty gritty of it, because installing a backsplash is fairly straightforward (especially if you buy your backsplash in sheets.)  We bought our hexagonal tiles from amazon, which I was a bit worried about doing, but they arrived in great condition!

It took us about 4 hours to install the tile. Joel used a tile nipper to cut the tile to fit around outlets, windows, etc.

Here's the tile up close - I love the little hexagons!

We did the grout about a week later, which was another fairly simple job, taking about an hour and a half. It made a huge difference in the look, but unfortunately, I don't have pictures post grout. Why can't I just go take some now? Well, we started ripping up the floors (not really planned - more about that when I make the floor post!) and now our kitchen is a huge, very dusty mess.

Here's our kitchen list:

• rebuild the cabinets under and beside the sink
• paint all cabinets 
• change out all hardware
• install shelves where the open cabinets are
• remove old backsplash 
• install hexagonal backsplash
• paint walls
• remove old floor 
• install new floor
• remove the panel in front of sink window
• new tiles in greenhouse window
• some kind of window covering for the greenhouse window
• put up some beautiful artwork

To view the rest of our house posts, click here. 

Aged wood floating shelves - DIY with instructions!

I could not be more excited to share our most recent kitchen project with everyone! For this project, we had the amazing opportunity to team up with Ottawa's new Lowe's location on Hunt Club. For the longest time, I've been so excited about Lowe's coming to Canada. We frequently go shopping across the border, and it's always been one of our favorite stops (Joel loves their selection of electrical tools, and I just love anything to do with renos and decorating.) I couldn't have been happier when I heard that we were not only getting another location in our city, but that it was about 3 minutes away from our house!

Lowe's was kind enough to agree to team up with us as we built our aged wood floating shelves, and we are just so happy with the results!

In our house, we do a lot of projects using old wood (such as our counters and our pallet wall.) For these shelves, we wanted to find a way to make new wood look old, so that it would keep in the tradition of the other projects we've done in our house. We found an idea for shelves here, and drew up some plans so that they would fit our home.

We made our big trip to Lowe's on Valentine's Day, which is actually pretty appropriate for us. I had to drag Joel away from the power tools so that we could choose our supplies for our shelves.

Here are the plans we came up with for our shelves, which hopefully some of you can use:

Buy list:

•  Four 2 x 4 x 8 feet
• Two 2 x 1 x 8 feet
•  Plexiglass (enough to make three pieces that are 9” x 38”)
•  12 hex bolts (5/8 diameter) and washers

Cut list (if take this with you to Lowe’s and they can do the cuts for you!)

• Six 2 x 4 x 41” (these are the front and back of your shelves)
• Six 2 x 4 x 9”  (these are the sides of your shelves)
• Fifteen 2 x 1 x 9” (five support slats per shelf)
• Plexiglass – three 9” x 38”

We did our cuts at home, but we could have just as easily had them cut for us at Lowe's. I think Joel is just so happy to have a garage to work in that he looks for any excuse to get his tools out!

 After you've made the cuts, you can start to assemble your shelves.

 Joel always uses a drill to pre-drill the holes, which lessens the chance that the wood will split. Then, he uses an impact to screw in the screws (for this project, he used 2 1/2 inch screws in black.)

 While Joel worked on this, I started to spray the hex bolts and washers in a flat black. I love Rust-Oleum's Universal spray paint in Flat Black. I've used it for several projects, and just love the flat, matte finish it gives.
 A good tip for spraying all around screws quickly is to lightly screw them into a piece of cardboard - that way they stand up, so you can get all sides in one spray.

After the box is assembled, the next step is to cut the Plexiglass. Some of the Lowe's locations in our city are able to cut Plexiglass in store, but Joel and I were curious to try doing it ourselves with a plastic cutting tool. We knew our exact measurement needed, but decided to use the assembled box to trace out our cuts anyway, just in case. We drew light lines onto the plexiglass using pencil, then used a T-Square to make sure that our cuts were crisp.

It was nice to have two people on this - I held down the T-Square while Joel cut with the plastic cutter. Don't you love how we did this whole project in our living room? It's just too cold here to work in the garage.

Once you've gone over your cut line several times, the Plexiglass should just snap apart.

Now you're going to put the Plexiglass under the box, and start to insert the support slats. If you do this upside down on a flat surface, it will naturally leave that small amount your Plexiglass needs to sit on top of.

Place one slat flush with the side wood, then space out your slats 9.5" from each other (I can tell that I took this picture before all of the slats were perfectly spaced!) Use a brad nailer with 2" nails to attach your slats.

 

Then, flip your shelf over, and sit your lovely cut of Plexiglass on top.

While Joel worked on finishing building the shelves, I started to paint our shelf wall. It had previously looked like this, so it definitely needed some paint!

Once the shelves are all made, it is time for the fun part - making the wood look aged! This is a lot simpler than you'd think. First you need to find a bunch of different kinds of metals:

Then take your hammer and bang the heck out of your wood. Different mediums give different results. In some spots I just used the hammer and hit random patterns:

 Here you can see where I hammered the screws, the end of the key, and the flat part of the screwdriver. I also hit the corners of my wood, to give them a more rounded look.

It looks silly while you're doing it, but the stain sort of finds its way into the dings, and gives a nice, natural, darker-than-the-rest-of-the-wood look. (I'll also say that it was almost impossible to get good photos of this process, as it was midnight and the lighting was just terrible.)

My next step to making my wood look aged was in the staining. I started by applying my stain, Minwax in Dark Walnut, all over my wood, leaving it on for a good 15 minutes. After removing it, I went over just the edges, leaving it on another 10 or so minutes, to give the illusion of an unevenly stained piece of wood (the middle piece is finished, and the top and bottom still have stain on them.)

The last piece of the puzzle was adding on our matte black hex bolts. We bought short bolts, as we were just adding them on for aesthetics, not to actually hold the wood together.

Since ours were just for looks, Joel pre-drilled holes close enough to our screws that the washers would cover them. To install the hex bolts, use a 9/16ths socket.

At this point, the construction is done! Now, onto the installation.

Joel really wanted to do under cabinet lights, and when he saw these ones for $35 at Lowe's, he was pretty set on having them for our shelves. These lights are extremely easy to install, especially if you are going to keep them on a plug (as they're intended to be used.) Joel's an electrician, so he decided to rig them up to a switch so that we could switch them on and off when we want to use them. He installed three lights on the bottom shelf, under three of the support slats.

To install the shelves, we just measured our area, and decided what was a reasonable amount of space to have for dishes in between shelves (a bit over 11"). We made sure the shelves were level, then I would hold while Joel screwed them into the studs.

Love those beauty lights!

Then, it was just a matter of getting the rest of the shelves up:

And finally... the beautiful, aged looking floating Plexiglass shelves were finished!

I love how the dishes look like they're floating from underneath. Is it wrong that I want to sit under my shelves and stare at them all night?

Here you can see some of the details from where I aged the wood:

We are so happy with our shelves, and SO thankful to the Lowe's on Hunt Club for teaming up with us for this project!

Here's what we have left to do in our kitchen:

• rebuild the cabinets under and beside the sink
• paint all cabinets (eek!)
• change out all hardware
• install shelves where the open cabinets are
• remove old backsplash 
• install hexagonal backsplash
• paint walls
• remove old floor and install new floor
• remove the panel in front of sink window
• new tiles in greenhouse window
• some kind of window covering for the greenhouse window
• put up some beautiful artwork

 We're definitely getting there! Next step - backsplash!