The Long Journey to Counter Tops

Counter tops.  What to I have to say about counter tops?  You don't usually think too much about them. Well Kitchens need them. Ours NEEDED replacing. I think there are LOTS of ugly options. Pretty options are mucho mooolah. ($$$$$$)  

That's the short version. 

[If you don't like reading, scroll to the bottom to see the final picture]

(I made these large so you can see better.  The lighting is not good, sorry)

Please excuse the mess, it's a construction site after all. :)

The deal is: Our house is 50 years old.  The kitchen is 50 years old.  The original oven and range were barely working. They were that awesome (ly-hideous) extra special shade of burnt orange/brown. Oh yay.  So obviously, those had to go.  I wanted to keep them and paint them for nostalgia. Daniel wanted to use them as planters.  So we tried to sell them on Craigslist.   No takers. None. Zip. Nota. A whole lot of Nothing. So.....we "sold" them to a recycling place for about $20.  Ok, well now they are out of our carport. Hip, hip, HOOORAY.  The hubs is much less annoyed now. I feel like I have betrayed them, but it wasn't working out. You have to know when the relationship is over. Ya know?  

Yeah, so back to counter tops. Ours were a lovely beige laminate, not the cool kind with metal trim. Just plain pinky-beige.  They had to go. Oh, I said that already? Sorry. 

So we did "research."  I used pinterest.  I found this stuff. 

It had some pretty terrible reviews. I believe bad reviews are a direct consequence of people using the product incorrectly (usually) but I wasn't going to do a bunch of irreversible stuff to our counter tops to have it not work. NO, not going to happen. The hubs is NOT on board. He hated the idea. 

So, I got another idea (from pinterest, of course) 

I said to my self, "Self, this is a great idea! It will look so industrial cool and vintage-y at the same time."  This was my plan. Now to convince the hubby.  Well I did, kind of, but everyone else we mentioned it to said "poo poo."   I read lots of reviews on this too. Some said it worked amazingly.  Some said it cracked after a little while.  I finally found a lady (the Pioneer Woman, I believe) who put several different counter tops in her home.  Concrete being one of them. She said that it was nice, but that she couldn't cook easily on it. Now, I am no Pioneer Woman, but I did want a low maintenance counter top I  could easily cook on and it was clearly not going to be concrete. :-( 

So the hunt continues. 

Copper? 

Looks nice. Really expensive and stains easily.  (The hubby hates stains)

Stainless Steel would also have shown lots of scratches and fingerprints etc. I did not want to have to buff my counter tops every day. No.

I loved the look of the recycled glass (but, $$$$) Not for us. 

So we turned to the ever popular granite (after quickly ruling out marble $$$$)

We looked online,  at Home Depot, at a place near in Kennesaw, at a place way up in Alpharetta:

Expensive, and not exaclty what we wanted. (sorry for the horrible pic! eek!) 

There is purple in this one. A no-go with the Hubs.

This one was nice, but  I wasn't sold.  (Confession: I dislike decorating with black.)

This one had a lot of olive green tones. As I was looking to paint the walls baby blue, this was not going to work. 

There were a lot of ok options, but nothing I loved. Nothing I thought would fit in with the "image" I felt our kitchen would have. (Wow, how pretentious does that sound) I felt that the kitchen would not look "put-together" with these options.  Re-sale value is top in our minds (because even though at this point Daniel says we are never moving again, if we have three kids this house is going to get small fast, however, that time is still a ways off so no worries) so we wanted to pick something that looked nice and would keep looking nice for years to come. 

Ugh. Rock and a hard place.  Budget and Value. The great balancing act. 

So we went to Home Depot, (people there knew our names there for a while.) We were just looking at options when a very nice Orange Apron swept us off our feet.  He sat us down and sold us on (my favorite, but very expensive) Silestone. Woah. Bet you didn't see that coming. It was on sale. (my favorite word!) 15% plus if we opened a home depot credit card we could get it for an additional 10% off and have 24 months with no interest.  Usually I just say NO to all that credit card mumbo jumbo but when he worked out how much the monthly would be and the total.  I was drooling. We went home and thought about it. Asked for some wise counsel from parents and friends. 

Then we did it. We bought our counter tops. This was a big (huge!) purchase for us, but one we were excited and ready to make. 

 Here is my proud husband in our kitchen with our brand-new counters!! Yay! We chose Silestone in Merengo, it's a dark gray that I thought would look nice with the other colors I had in mind. The close up is not a super close up, but I'll post one of those when I post the "done" kitchen pictures.  

So that's it for now. 

Love,

Sarah

Are you Grounded?

This is a simple [read as: kinda boring] post but something that we didn't know when we moved into our 50 year old house.  We had to check to see if our outlets were grounded.  We used this little device our friend Jeff knew about and it's genius.  It couldn't be easier.  You plug it in and it has different lights that tell you if it's grounded or not.  The directions are on the top.  It's a very useful tool. 

So most of our outlets weren't grounded, which we figured, because they were so old and because they were almost all two prong.  So another of our first [and last] tasks was to change out outlets so we could safely plug things in.  

In the photo above the old outlet is on the right and the new outlet is on the left.  [You probably could have figured that one out? Yeah I know.] Anyways, my dad and Daniel ran this new outlet into our living room because the other ones in that room weren't grounded.  We needed to be able to (safely) plug things in like lights [no overhead lighting in the living room] so this was pretty important.  Don't ask me why they set it up the way they did.  [If you would like to know leave me a comment, I will find out for you!]  We plan on replacing the old outlet receptacle [the little box with wires going in that sits behind the switch plate; it holds the little circles where the prongs go in] because some of the other's are dry rotted and we want to avoid any serious dangers that may cause [like fire, or sparks].   

This is what one of the light switches looks like. Some of them have now been replaced, but we still have quite a few to go.  It's a tedious task, but not difficult.  I will try to get Daniel to write a post soon about how to actually replace these! 

This is right inside the door.  Switch plate removed.  There are actually 4 switches right next to each other and the third one controls the lights to the kitchen. So when we [we is usually Daniel and I and/or Jeff who is teaching us how to be handy] updated the lights in the kitchen, [more to come on that later] Jeff, switched out the receptacle.  Eventually all four will be shiny bright white and NEW! Hooray!! I can't wait for that day! You can really see how nasty the other switches are in comparison.  In one of my other posts I was trying to show how much grime was on the switches and now you can really see it! 

Well, that's all I have to say about that.

Love,

Sarah

"Clean it up Cinderella"

While no one was ordered around while cleaning the house, I am pretty sure that all of us, or rather, all of the females at one point felt like Cinderella.  No, not in the princess-y way, in the "I am so sick of cleaning someone else's mess" way.

When we bought our home it was pretty disgusting.  We didn't buy it because of what we saw, we bought it because of the potential we saw.

A little background about our house:  It was a reverse mortgage.  This means it was bank owned, but not because the previous owner couldn't pay, because they owned the house outright and asked to start getting money out of the house.  So basically, the bank paid her and when she moved on (we aren't sure if she died or went to a nursing home) the bank owned the house.  So like a foreclosure the house was managed by a group that was paid by the bank to cut the grass and make sure there weren't squatters, but they didn't really clean at all.

Ok, so we needed to do that before anything else could happen.

The first couple of days it was magical and wonderful.  Then we noticed how nasty everything was.  When you'd turn a light on your fingers would feel sticky and gross.  YUCK.  So, Cinderella got to work.  You can't see the tar on this light switch but, you'll just have to trust me.

I can't tell you how many hours and days we spent cleaning.  I forgot.  I blocked it out.  I don't want to know actual numbers.  I do know it was hard work.  For me, this was the most grueling part.  It was the part that we had to do before anything else upstairs could be done.  While this was hard work, we had amazing help from our families!  Both of our Moms scrubbed things down and made sure we weren't going to miss any spots.  Especially the windows.  It seemed like my Mother-in-love was endlessly cleaning windows.

Here they are working side by side, sorry for the dark photos, it was SO sunny out!

They got every window frame and the outside!  The frames were hosed off and wiped down. 

Even though we ripped out the carpet (eventually), I think we vacuumed it.  We left the windows open so that we could get air circulation.  At this point we hadn't turned the AC on yet.  It was August in GA and it was HOT and HUMID but we were only there for 4 or 5 hours a day so it seemed wasteful to cool the whole house. 

Daniel and Joseph helped clean too! (There were others who shall go un-pictured but who also helped us so very much!)

We washed the walls with a vinegar and water mixture or dish soap for tough grime, but more on that later.   Sorry this post is so boring but I am saving my major Soap Box to sit on next post.  It's a doozy.  This was a major process though.  It took a lot of time and effort.  It was good to get to know all the nooks and crannies of the house.  I think we would have cleaned any house we bought, but definitely not this intensely.  If you don't already know why we cleaned so much, you should know I am holding on to that secret, but next post I'll share it!  Stay tuned. ;-)

until next time,

Sarah

The Foster House--House Tour (before)

Ok guys, bear with me, this post has a LOT of pictures! 

The Foster house.  Our house.  <3

       

This "F" came from one of our dear friends, he said "Now
you have a big F in yard" :)

Our cute little front porch

Our ultra retro kitchen....yeehaw. 

The door from the kitchen to the carport.

Our bathroom.  The only room in the house to have prior renovations. 

We think that the shower area, which is HUGE, used to be a Cinderella tub. 

something like this was probably in that shower space.
 (picture from retrorenovations.com a great source for retro inspiration!)

Another angle of the shower

I was so stoked about the new house!!

Daniel's closet.  The Master has two closets this size. 

The closet I claimed had only shelves. yes, has is past tense. 

This is a wide angle of our room.  Two great big windows! 

This is the guest bath, dubbed the "blue bath", the original wood floors

blue blue blue!!!

view from the hallway

The guest room closet was painted green....

the "office"

the Hallway

The dining room after we removed the light fixture

The back deck that we have high hopes for....someday soon. :)

The living room, with it's big ole' window!
You can really see the smoke damage around the vent. YUCK!!!

SO,  I hope that gives you a good idea of what the house looked like before.   I am excited to share with you in the coming days and weeks what the house looks like now!!!

Love,

Sarah